Author: Ursula LeGuin
Release: 1969
Medium: Book
Note: While Left Hand is technically part of the author's Hainish Cycle series, it's plot is unrelated to the other books and it could be considered a stand-alone.
Full Marks. It's not as horny as some entries on the list, the tone is more dignified, but you're not left feeling like the topic wasn't thoroughly explored.
How dare you. It is the plot.
It is a level of weird that makes weak people flee, but the author elevates it so much I feel wrong calling it 'weird.'
Full marks, all categories.
I am going to struggle to talk normally about The Left Hand of Darkness.
It is not a book I like, it's one of my favorite books. Top five. It's also in the list of 'top five books that made me cry real tears.' It's a prize-bearing work of science fiction literature (yeah, I'm putting 'literature' on there), a prime work from an absolute cream-of-the-crop spec fic author, and it was queerer than you before you were born.
Plot Summary. An ambassador, Genly Ai, is sent to an alien planet (Gethen) as an ambassador. He is a human like we recognize here on earth; he's from "Terra", so a person with their brain on knows he's a stand-in for a regular ol' human. The Gethenians are also people as we know them, but they come with one difference that Genly struggles to understand and accept beneath his cool politician's veneer: they are "ambisexual."
The people of Geth live in a state of genderlessness--or do they live in a state between genders? Genly can't decide how he thinks about it--except during periods which are essentially heat cycles called "kemmer". While in kemmer, they become either female or male, and which one a person becomes is not fixed. In example, perhaps you transformed into a male last time for someone who was female at the time, but it's not impossible you'll switch roles next time.
The deuteragonist is Estraven (this is a character who effects me so strongly that I cannot even say their name without a petulant whine), a Gethenian politician. They...
Ugh. Detour. As an aside, Le Guin uses 'he' as the pronoun for all Gethenians in their gender-neutral state, because, in the 1960s, 'he' was the gender-neutral pronoun. People honestly heard it differently. After the publishing of the book Le Guin often waffled on her choice to use 'he' throughout the book, famously saying, "I am vexed and bedeviled by the matter of pronouns", the best sentence I have ever heard. There is evidence she felt later on she might have used 'they' instead, but, in the book, it is 'he'. Nonetheless I will use 'they' for Estraven, and it is because it brings me joy to do so.
Estraven is a person of culture. They are well-spoken and well-read, intelligent, circumspect, prudent, and, at least in my dreams, devastatingly handsome with a silky, sensual, trans-woman-like voice with that delicious low timber in their tone. They are observant and politically savvy, dedicated to a Gethenian social concept called shifgrethor, which the narrative translates alternately as "prestige", "social status", "place", "authority", a critically important social system of honor, class, and morality among Gethenians that Genly (knowingly) struggles to operate inside. Estraven is good at it. Their shifgrethor is immaculate.
The Left Hand of Darkness is about two things, and those two things are one thing. It is about a clash of culture and a clash of gender. Genly, whose own author describes him as a casual misogynist, would have to let his understanding of humanity and society unravel to fully understand Gethen and its people. they are, despite being so clearly human, so irreconcilably different from him in his head by reason of their genderlessness that he fails to understand and properly interact with them over and over. His inability to navigate shifgrethor and his unwillingness to truly understand their state of gender neutrality are metaphors for each other; Gethen and, eventually, Estraven are a towering monolith to him, a realization he is about to have, and when he has that realization it will crash onto him and crush him. His previous understanding of personhood, humanity, society, and gender will all be replaced, and he spends the bulk of the book struggling against the inevitable ego death that is his reliance on strictly dual sexuality being ripped away from him.
I pitch Left Hand to people by saying, "Do you want to read a book that made me understand gender less?"
I don't want to tell you much else about this book. I said this was one of the best books I have ever read. It deserves its place on this list and it is a queen among peasants here; the book is saturated in 'abnormal' sexuality and takes every possible opportunity to elevate that beyond that the protagonist and narrator can even understand. He is a swine amongst pearls that the reader can see and he cannot.
At the moment I am stuck for what I want to say in conclusion. Here's one thing: Le Guin has, in all her writing, a knack for making her fictional places seem real, and this book is some of her finest work. There are, included, several short chapters that are reproductions of the myths, legends, and histories of the two countries the narrative spends the most time in. The book is worth it just for those; they are also the sections that most directly discuss the title of the book, which alludes to concepts firmly embedded in the history and culture of Gethenian people, too deep for the protagonist Genly to ever access. He becomes swamped in even the simplest aspects of their culture; the whole book patiently, laughingly waits for him to break free from binary, but that’s as far as he gets before he runs out of time.
Because the protagonist is too dumb to even perceive it, it's up to the reader to decode the title; good luck.