The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in 1969, part of her loosely connected Hainish Cycle. It follows Genly Ai, a human envoy from the interstellar confederation known as the Ekumen, sent alone to the planet Gethen, nicknamed Winter for its harsh, ice-age climate, to persuade its nations to join the confederation. Gethen's inhabitants are ambisexual, remaining sexually neutral for most of each month and entering a brief fertile period called kemmer during which an individual may develop temporarily as either male or female depending on circumstance and partner, a biology that has produced a society with essentially no fixed gender roles and, Le Guin's novel suggests, correspondingly little of the war and rigid gender hierarchy found in human history, though the two rival nations of Karhide and Orgoreyn are nonetheless caught up in their own intense political rivalry and intrigue. Genly's mission becomes bound up with Estraven, a disgraced former prime minister of Karhide whose ambiguous loyalties Genly initially distrusts, and the novel's climax follows the two of them on an extraordinary eighty-day trek together across Gethen's polar ice sheet, fleeing Orgoreyn, during which their initial mutual suspicion develops into a profound bond that survives Estraven's eventual death. Widely regarded as a landmark of feminist and anthropological science fiction for its exploration of gender through an alien biology, the novel won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel and remains one of the most studied and influential works in the genre.