Vintage Science-Fiction Month Book Review: “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)

This is a classic novel about an envoy to a planet known as Winter, a world as cold as the name suggests and populated by ambisexual humanoids. Naturally, this results in quite a culture shock for the envoy, Genly Ai, who has to deal with understanding their alien nature as well as the intricate political machinations that take place between the various nations of the planet. His primary guide to understanding this is a politician named Estraven. (Hilariously, auto-correct wants to change this to “estrogen.”)

The first half of the book is lyrical, mystical, and well-nigh incomprehensible, at least to me. I had trouble keeping track of who was who, what was what, and generally following what was going on. Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it. Actually, I enjoyed it quite a lot, in the way one can enjoy a beautiful piece of music.

But then in the second half, things started to coalesce. Estraven, in particular, becomes a phenomenally well-developed character who starts dispensing pearls of wisdom like this:

“To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here ‘all roads lead to Mishnory.’ To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road…

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

What an absolutely killer insight! It’s the sort of gem that makes me so glad I read the book, and make it a perfect entry for Vintage Science-Fiction Month. This is why we observe it every January; it’s an opportunity to look up classic books like this and find what it was that made the foundational works of the genre so striking to generations of readers.

Estraven and Genly are eventually forced to work together to make a nightmarish 80 day trek across a frozen wasteland. (I highly recommend reading this book on a snowy winter night if possible.)

These scenes, while maybe a little repetitive, were still very effective. The two characters, having nothing else to do, learn a lot about each other and themselves. By the end of the journey, I absolutely loved Estraven, who is really one of the most fully-realized ‘alien’ characters I can recall. Which makes the way the story ends all the more powerful.

The book is remarkable for the way it depicts a truly alien world. I only know of a few modern authors–A.C. Flory and Lorinda Taylor, to name names–who have attempted anything like this. And no wonder, because it’s very hard to do, but done well, it makes for a remarkable, dream-like experience to read. They say the value of reading is that it lets you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Well, in this case, it’s more like 800 miles in an androgynous alien’s skis. And that, my friends, is what science-fiction is all about.