Mass-market Monday | Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin. Ace Books, first edition (1969). Cover art by Leo & Diane Dillon. 286 pages.

I read all of Le Guin’s Hainish novels eight years ago, and wrote this about The Left Hand of Darkness:

—The Left Hand of Darkness is amazing. Perfect in its strange imperfections and crammed with fables and myths and misunderstandings, it is the apotheosis of Le Guin’s synthesis of adventure with philosophy. Darkness is about shadows and weight. About pulling weight—literally, figuratively. It’s also the story of an ice planet. (A stranger comes to the ice planet!). It’s a political thriller. It’s a sexual thriller. But the impression that lingers strongest: The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the better literary evocations of friendship (its precarious awful strange wonderful tenuous strength) that I’ve ever read.