The Left Hand of Darkness

Paperback, 366 pages

English language

Published Sept. 16, 2010 by Ace Books.

ISBN:
978-0-441-47812-5
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OCLC Number:
53345521
Goodreads:
118028

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5 stars (2 reviews)

On the planet Winter, there is no gender. The Gethenians can become male or female during each mating cycle, and this is something that humans find incomprehensible.

The Ekumen of Known Worlds has sent an ethnologist to study the Gethenians on their forbidding, ice-bound world. At first he finds his subjects difficult and off-putting, with their elaborate social systems and alien minds. But in the course of a long journey across the ice, he reaches an understanding with one of the Gethenians — it might even be a kind of love

43 editions

Excellent Books from A Different Time

4 stars

This book is a collection of five novels and four short stories, as well as an essay and introductions to each of those novels, set in Le Guin's Hainish universe. Each novel contains all the information about the universe necessary to understand that novel, though taken together they reveal a more complex picture than any one alone. The gist is that millions of years ago, the people of a planet called Hain or Davenant seeded various worlds with human colonists. (Though most of these worlds had no previous inhabitants, it is mentioned in one story that hominid life arose independantly on Earth; humans, however, are descended from Hainish settlers.) This serves as a vehicle for exploring humanity in various contexts and situations which otherwise do not exist in real life, as the League of All Worlds - or the Ekumen, in the later novels - started by Hain seeks to …