The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
I first tried to read this in my early twenties and bounced off it. I found it slow. I found the invented vocabulary annoying. I was, in hindsight, twenty-two and stupid. Reading it now, a decade and change later, it feels like a different book entirely, which is maybe the point of any book worth returning to.
what it's actually about
A human envoy is sent to a planet whose inhabitants have no fixed gender. He spends most of the book failing to understand a society whose most basic assumption, that people are not permanently one thing or another, makes his own reflexes visible in a way he cannot really process. The book is ostensibly first-contact sci-fi. It is really about friendship, exile, and the specific loneliness of thinking you're being reasonable when you are the strangest person in the room.
why it's still good
- Le Guin's prose has a stillness to it. Sentences land and then just... sit there. Almost no other sci-fi writer does this.
- The long journey across the ice, in the last third, is one of the great sustained passages in the genre. I read it in a coffee shop and had to go outside for a minute.
- The invented culture is thought through at every level. Myths, proverbs, weather, tax law. It never feels like set dressing.
where it shows its age
Le Guin later wrote, quite honestly, that using "he" as the default pronoun for the ambisexual Gethenians was a mistake she regretted. She was right. It flattens the very thing the book is trying to make you feel. On my re-read I mentally substituted "they" and the book got better. That's a fine thing to do.
Read this in winter. Read this slowly. Do not read this on a phone.