Paperback, 366 pages
English language
Published Sept. 16, 2010 by Ace Books.
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
I found the book a litlte hard to follow at times but altogether an interesting story.
Dies war mein erstes Buch von Ursula Le Guin und ich gestehe, ich bin etwas "underwhelmed". Das hat mehrere Gründe.
Das Buch hatte ja viele Preise eingeheimst, u.a. den renommierten Hugo Award. Leider entsprach das Buch inhaltlich überhaupt nicht dem Klappentext.
Worum es geht: Ein Gesandter der Ökumene (ein interplanetarischer Zusammenschluss humanoider Gesellschaften) kommt auf den extrem kalten Planeten Gethen, wo die Einheimischen alle androgyn sind und nur weibliche oder männliche Geschlechtsmerkmale ausbilden und sich fortpflanzen können, wenn sie in der "Kemmer" sind, das passiert etwa alle 28 Tage, aber nicht bei allen gleichzeitig.
Das ist aber gar nicht Kern der Handlung und wurde mir zu wenig beschrieben. Ich erwartete keine ausschweifenden Sexszenen, aber wenigstens eine genaue Darstellung, inwiefern sich Körper, Geist und Verhalten in der Kemmer verändern. Das wurde aber alles nur angedeutet.
Irritierend fand ich auch, dass die Menschen alle als "er ", "Herr Soundso", "der König" usw. …
Dies war mein erstes Buch von Ursula Le Guin und ich gestehe, ich bin etwas "underwhelmed". Das hat mehrere Gründe.
Das Buch hatte ja viele Preise eingeheimst, u.a. den renommierten Hugo Award. Leider entsprach das Buch inhaltlich überhaupt nicht dem Klappentext.
Worum es geht: Ein Gesandter der Ökumene (ein interplanetarischer Zusammenschluss humanoider Gesellschaften) kommt auf den extrem kalten Planeten Gethen, wo die Einheimischen alle androgyn sind und nur weibliche oder männliche Geschlechtsmerkmale ausbilden und sich fortpflanzen können, wenn sie in der "Kemmer" sind, das passiert etwa alle 28 Tage, aber nicht bei allen gleichzeitig.
Das ist aber gar nicht Kern der Handlung und wurde mir zu wenig beschrieben. Ich erwartete keine ausschweifenden Sexszenen, aber wenigstens eine genaue Darstellung, inwiefern sich Körper, Geist und Verhalten in der Kemmer verändern. Das wurde aber alles nur angedeutet.
Irritierend fand ich auch, dass die Menschen alle als "er ", "Herr Soundso", "der König" usw. bezeichnet wurden. Das trägt dem Phänomen der Nonbinarität überhaupt nicht Rechnung erschwerte mir eine geistige Vorstellung der Gethenianer vor meinem inneren Auge.
Ansonsten erlebt unser Protagonist einige teilweise lebensbedrohliche Abenteuer, weil er zwischen die Intrigen und Machtspielchen der Einheimischen gerät. Die Handlung ist sehr komplex und hat mich teilweise überfordert, ebenso die örtlichen Begrifflichkeiten.
Das Buch ist aber nicht schlecht und vielleicht ist das alles ein Problem der Übersetzung. Das Buch wurde kürzlich in einer neuen deutschen Übersetzung herausgegeben und vielleicht ist die ja besser gelungen, müsste man sich mal angucken.
I have mixed feelings about this book. I think it was the best of the three Hainish novels I've read so far, and I can appreciate the fact that the theme of a gender-changing alien race was somewhat revolutionary at the time.
However, I have to admit that I had to push through this book. I've read another review that likened it to homework, and that sums it up quite well for me, too. Maybe my expectations were too high and I have read it at the wrong point in time, just like in school when you have to read something that you cannot appreciate at the moment, but strikes you as profound at a different time.
So yeah, this novel leaves me a bit stumped about what to say. I liked it well enough to not stop reading, but have to admit that it could have been half as …
I have mixed feelings about this book. I think it was the best of the three Hainish novels I've read so far, and I can appreciate the fact that the theme of a gender-changing alien race was somewhat revolutionary at the time.
However, I have to admit that I had to push through this book. I've read another review that likened it to homework, and that sums it up quite well for me, too. Maybe my expectations were too high and I have read it at the wrong point in time, just like in school when you have to read something that you cannot appreciate at the moment, but strikes you as profound at a different time.
So yeah, this novel leaves me a bit stumped about what to say. I liked it well enough to not stop reading, but have to admit that it could have been half as long. The journey over the ice was the most exciting part.
Content warning General spoilers
Oh my god. OH MY GOD. I need to re-read this so I'll update this review when I do in a few months, but damn, Estraven's death caused me so much pain.
I am not the biggest reader of fiction, but this book had me fully engaged. It's the first book that's made me feel emotionally attached to characters in a long time. I picked this book up off of my sisters' bookshelf, and it's inspired me to read more of Le Guin's work.
It has some interesting explorations on first contact but despite having a potentially interesting world, an exhausting amount of time is taken up by Ai being confused about Gethen sex & gender yet never passing beyond a surface level conversation on the topic. While it was groundbreaking for 1969, I can’t help but feel its exploration of gender and feminism to be a little half-arsed in today’s context. Nothing specifically bad, but I don’t see how it can be so elementary when so much of the book is occupied by it, to the detriment of character development and the broader world building.
This is more socially-driven than plot or character. What would a society be like if people were not male or female but a sort of neuter except during each period when they became sexually active for a few days during which they became male or female at random? There are other significant differences to the way our "Western" societies work, it is up to the reader to imaging whether these were causally related to the different sexual biology.
In spite of that there are a lot of insights into our political issues, too.
I stopped reading it.
Happy to have finally read something by Le Guin. I enjoyed the pseudo-epistolary structure and concept of a fully gender fluid civilization, but the book's age really shows through in the limits of how far this queerness can go (all relationships "become" heterosexual, for instance, because reproduction I guess).
I think I'm missing some important context for when this was written, as it has both a lot of vaguely anti-communist sentiment and also seems to be pulling from Catholic mission trips to East Asian countries, but I can't quite pinpoint a through line. A bubbling pot of challenging political ideas that are not so much unexplored as they are too large for a 300-page scifi novel. Very curious to check out some of Le Guin's later work, but this seems as good a place as any of, like me, you've been meaning to check her out.
I found this book a bit difficult to follow, perhaps that's because I listened to the audiobook, but loved it nonetheless.
Absolutely loved the world, the story told, the characters, the politics, and the cultural dives.
Three stars because I just found that it was so difficult of a delivery, that it took me way too long to read. I think it's because the first half of the book was so lacking in activity, and heavily focused on abstract descriptions of things by the main narrator. Even the last half of the book which could be seen as action packed (crazy journey over glaciers), felt slow to read.
I can see why this is a well-regarded book. Its strengths, like many classic science fiction novels, is in the setting, in the way alien ideas are presented in a way that reflects modern life today. This is a story of making an alien culture feel more human than our own. I was left wondering if a society like theirs could somehow improve upon the ills of our own world or if it would only make things worse. While I didn't care much for the slow plot and the cast of characters, I was impressed by the philosophical implications of their society and I'm sure it's the sort of thing I will think of for years to come.
See my full review at my blog: strakul.blogspot.com/2018/04/book-review-left-hand-of-darkness-by.html
How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills, rivers, and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plow land in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession. . . . Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, …
How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills, rivers, and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plow land in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession. . . . Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.
Really 3.5 stars for me. This novel is typical Le Guin: amazingly realistic world-building, huge concepts successfully telescoped into fewer than 200 pages, characters that one genuinely cares about...and lengthy passage that are extremely dull (in this case, the seemingly endless journey across the ice). Overall, though, I really enjoyed this and suspect it will stay with me for quite some time.
I love the way Ursula LeGuin builds alternate worlds. She makes them differ from ours in meaningful ways, she changes things we take for granted and explores the consequences of the differences well. I want to read more of her sci-fi work.
The Left Hand of Darkness was a great book, all in all. It tells the story of an envoy of an interplanetary cultural and economic league, called the Ekumen, to the planet called Winter (or Gethen, by the locals), whose inhabitants, though humanoid, don't have a set sex: they go in heat once a month, and then their body temporarily chooses a sex practically arbitrarily. The same person could perform as male one month, and then get pregnant the next. The planet is also much colder than Earth, and thus practically in perpetual winter.
Genly Ai, the envoy, is caught in a very intricate web of intrigue and …
I love the way Ursula LeGuin builds alternate worlds. She makes them differ from ours in meaningful ways, she changes things we take for granted and explores the consequences of the differences well. I want to read more of her sci-fi work.
The Left Hand of Darkness was a great book, all in all. It tells the story of an envoy of an interplanetary cultural and economic league, called the Ekumen, to the planet called Winter (or Gethen, by the locals), whose inhabitants, though humanoid, don't have a set sex: they go in heat once a month, and then their body temporarily chooses a sex practically arbitrarily. The same person could perform as male one month, and then get pregnant the next. The planet is also much colder than Earth, and thus practically in perpetual winter.
Genly Ai, the envoy, is caught in a very intricate web of intrigue and politics, trying to get the rulers he encounters to accept the Ekumen and join it.
LeGuin uses language deftly, mixing English with made up words in precisely the right amounts - for example, she uses "native" Gethenian words for concepts that don't easily translate to English, as they are alien to us, and very central to Gethenian culture.
As I mentioned above, the world building was also great. LeGuin manages to describe more than one Gethenian culture, and manages to separate them from each other, and also make them reasonable and unique.
Finally, I loved how the book tries to explore gender by positing this hypothetical humanoid race and trying to make sense of the different societal structures that could arise from it. My only gripe with this element is that the narrator often comments on the natives using pretty dated and somewhat sexist ideas about the sexes. I guess this can be explained away by an unreliable narrator, or by the fact that the book was first published in 1969. In any case, even though a bit off putting for a book that has such a revolutionary take on gender, this flaw is sparse and I could overlook it.
TXU: PS3562.E42 L4 1980
