Comment by Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Guardian's website: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
One of my favorite novels is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K Le Guin. For more than 40 years I've been recommending this book to …
Comment by Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Guardian's website: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
One of my favorite novels is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K Le Guin. For more than 40 years I've been recommending this book to people who want to try science fiction for the first time, and it still serves very well for that. One of the things I like about it is how clearly it demonstrates that science fiction can have not only the usual virtues and pleasures of the novel, but also the startling and transformative power of the thought experiment.
In this case, the thought experiment is quickly revealed: "The king was pregnant," the book tells us early on, and after that we learn more and more about this planet named Winter, stuck in an ice age, where the humans are most of the time neither male nor female, but with the potential to become either. The man from Earth investigating this situation has a lot to learn, and so do we; and we learn it in the course of a thrilling adventure story, including a great "crossing of the ice". Le Guin's language is clear and clean, and has within it both the anthropological mindset of her father Alfred Kroeber, and the poetry of stories as magical things that her mother Theodora Kroeber found in native American tales. This worldly wisdom applied to the romance of other planets, and to human nature at its deepest, is Le Guin's particular gift to us, and something science fiction will always be proud of. Try it and see – you will never think about people in quite the same way again.
256 pages
English language
Published Sept. 16, 1992 by Orbit.
Paperback, 352 pages
Published by RAYO VERDE EDITORIAL, S.L..
Paperback, 304 pages
Turkish language
Published by Ayrıntı Yayınları.
hardcover, 304 pages
Spanish language
Published Jan. 1, 1901 by MINOTAURO, Minotauro.
Audiobook
English language
Published Jan. 20, 2017 by Recorded Books, Inc..
audio cassette
English language
Published by Random House Audio.
paperback, 336 pages
Published Aug. 25, 2020 by Minotauro, MINOTAURO.
Paperback, 256 pages
Published July 3, 1997 by Virago Press Ltd.
286 pages
English language
Published July 30, 1969 by Macdonald & Co.
E-book
German language
Published July 29, 2014 by Heyne.
English language
Published Oct. 15, 1984 by Penguin Putnam~mass.
312 pages
French language
Published April 16, 2021 by Éditions Robert Laffont.
213 pages
English language
Published Sept. 17, 1980 by Harper & Row.
Paperback
Published by Heyne Verlag.
345 pages
English language
Published July 30, 1994 by Walker.
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