Reviews

• A true master piece

  Wonderful, thought provoking, philosophical and deeply moving.

• Cover print a bit faulty

  There's a slight error from the cover print.

• たいへん難しい文体である

  マスマーケット: 320ページ 出版社: Ace; Reprint版 (1987/3/15) ISBN-10: 0441478123 のレビュー まず、たいへん読みにくい、英語が難しい作品である。 最初の壁が、どう読めばいいのか判らない固有名詞。ヘブライ語かケルト語のような語感である。さらに、作品世界独特の用語、ガジェットが溢れている。月日の名前も作者が創造したものだ。もっとも、これはSF物として標準でしょうが。 異世界の構造をだいたい把握した後、今度は話者が変わり、地球人Ai の語りとGethenianのEstravenの語りが交互に綴られる。そして、舞台もKarhide（幕末の日本か、清朝を思わせる）からOrgoreynという国（ソ連をモデルにしているようだ）にかわる。この二つの国の体制、風習を頭に入れるのがたいへんだ。 そして、最後の三分の一からクライマックスへ。幻想的風景描写と二人の人間の心理描写が続く。手に汗握る描写、二人の感情の綾をみごとに描いた部分、と言いたいが、すごく英語が難しいよ。 ラストの衝撃も、正直言うと、わたしは「ええ？」と思い、前の部分を読み返したほど。うーむ。これだったのか。 ともかく、傑出した作品なので、わたしが細かくレビューするまでもないし、作品に対する批評・批判も出ているので、ここでは書かない。 しかし、発表後45年たった作品に対してちょっとアンフェアかもしれないが、「ああ、やっぱりアメリカ人が書いた小説だなあ」と思う部分が多々あった。たとえば、地球人がAiがいともたやすく異世界の言語を二種類もしゃべること。二つの国の描写が現実の国のイメージに寄りかかっており、ソ連や幕末日本（に対するアメリカ人のイメージ）を知らないと了解できない部分があることなど。 一番の問題点は、The Ekumen of Known World に加入することが、なんの疑問もなく良いことであると見なされていることだ。この点はわたしの読み落としで、どこかにEkumenの存在自体に疑義を呈する部分があったのかな？

• Excellent

  The best of Le Guin's science fiction works and required reading for thinking about gender. Don't trust the narrator from outside the planet!

• A timeless masterpiece

  This won a slew of awards and deserves even more. It is an amazingly vivid story about one man's quest to bring a very isolated world into the galactic fold. It sounds and seems simple, but every time I read this (I've read it 3 times now) I notice new twists. This is a dense book- you won't buz through it in a day, but it is very rewarding. If you want to read the best science fiction book ever written (in my opinion), then read this. You'll love it.

• 切なくて胸が締めつけられるようでした。

  ＳＦなので、作者の造語か、普通の単語だけれど辞書に載っていないのか見分けるのが難しくて、手こずりながら読みました。 終末では、癒しがたい喪失感と悲しさに、切なくて胸が締めつけられるようでした。 （自分でも読み切れているのかどうか自信が無いのですが、）性別や人種その他もろもろの要素を越えたところで、「愛」について考えさせられました。 なぜ冬に閉じ込められたような惑星が舞台なのか最初は不思議でしたが、冬でなければならなかったことは、後でよく分かりました。 フィクションなのにとても説得力があり、作者の筆力の素晴らしさを感じました。

• Un grand classique de SF

  Une amie m'a recommandé ce livre, et je ne regrette pas l'achat. Super bien écrit, personnages et univers très intéressants, et une intrigue bien menée... il y a une petite touche Star Trek (TOS/TNG) si vous aimez ça aussi. 10/10

• The second best science fiction book of all time

  Ursula Le Guin is the boss of science fiction. This and Dispossessed are my most prized science fiction books of all time. She is the master and all else pale. A good book has a great story line that is built as you read and uses the Greek heroic forms, but a great book teaches us things and leaves us a different person because of our experience of reading. The Left hand of Darkness is not a new book and others have written in a similar vein - see Glory Seasons from David Brin so if you have read them LHOD doesn't have the same impact but when it first came out it was startling. I have been reading the LHOD for over 20 years and go back to it every few years. It does take a while to build so you have to get to page 80 before things become clear - there is a lot of world building to get through... It is not relevant to offer a synopsis as the machinations are relatively unimportant - a bit like James Cameron's Avatar Pretend blue guy meets real blue woman and after a few bad patches becomes good friend - it is the alien people in an alien world that asks you to suspend your assumptions and learn a new way of dealing with the world. This is a book that gets you to explore who you are. It is a story write not so much with words but emotions, values and beliefs. Yes it is a work of mastery.

• Drop dead gorgeous

  I have been meaning to write about this book but its profoundness incapacitates me for words. This is my first of the author and although I struggled with the language initially but that is what makes the fine tapestry of this work of genius. The world building is simply phenomenal. Gethen is an Ice Age world rippled with its own complexities. Gethenians are androgynous people for most part of their life cycles and this is how author explores the question of what constitutes our personhood if the gender is stripped off. Le Guin has built this world with its unique fabrics of anthropology, spirituality, geography, politics and cultures. A Terran Native, an emissary from the Ekumen, called Genly Ai , is trying to build an alliance between Gethen and Ekumen. This alliance is for an inter-planetary trade of material and knowledge, for the greater good of the mankind. He has spent two years on this strange planet and gets embroiled in the Gethenian fabric as he pursues his objective. Gethen is a divided world in itself. The nations have their own political motives and issues to grapple with. Karhide, ruled by a Regent, believes in presence more than progressiveness. Orgota, on the other hand, which looks promising as a commensal, has its own deviance to tackle with. We get a glimpse of this divided Gethenian world through these two countries. In the midst of all this, a man stands with a towering passion for the betterment of mankind and that's Estravan. He is the only person that understands Genly's objective and is selflessly invested in it for it builds a prospect for the mankind at large. For Genly, Estravan becomes the person , he initially trusts the least. It takes him a lot of time to undo himself. Le Guin has brilliantly captured this shared humanity between Genly and Estravan, both an exile in their own ways, invested for the greater good of the world. The chapters on their escape from the Orgota farm, as they make their ways through the treacherous terrains of glacier, volcano weather and the upheavals of a shared humanity have been richly narrated. She has illustrated the legends and the myths that design the cultural fabric of Gethen, shape the Gethenian's personhood. In the same measure, she has marvellously built upon the spiritual cultures of Handarrata and Yomeshta in a way that they meet the body politic. The book reinscribes patriotism and poses pertinent questions as to how a landmass bound within a boundary defines one's love for it and how beyond that boundary, it becomes unlove and if at all, the love for a certain shape of a landmass is well intended. This book requires a meticulous cinematic adaptation but whoever takes up this job, I hope they are in-depth enough with its multifacetedness.

• Wonderful. A scifi masterpiece.

  Ursula K LeGuin is one of the greatest among the likes of Philip K Dick, Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asymov... I remember seeing the film Avatar and how much it reminded me of "The Word for World is Forest", another touching work from LeGuin. With "The Left Hand of Darkness" LeGuin opens our hearts and minds about pressing themes like gender, love, loyalty. Great works stay with us much longer after the last page. This one will stay with me forever.

• Fascinating story, groundbreaking work, recommended for anyone

  Book Info: Genre: Science Fiction Reading Level: Adult Recommended for: Anyone, especially those interested in gender roles. Please Note: I picked up a used copy of this after reading Nataliya's review on Goodreads. A opinions are my own. Synopsis: Genly Ai is an emissary from the human galaxy to Winter, a lost, stray world. His mission is to bring the planet back into the fold of an evolving galactic civilization, but to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own culture and prejudices and those that he encounters. On a planet where people are of no gender - or both - this is a broad gulf indeed. The inventiveness and delicacy with which Le Guin portrays her alien world are not only unusual and inspiring, they are fundamental to almost all decent science fiction that has been written since. In fact, reading Le Guin again may cause the eye to narrow somewhat disapprovingly at the younger generation: what new ground are they breaking that is not already explored here with greater skill and acumen? It cannot be said, however, that this is a rollicking good story. Le Guin takes a lot of time to explore her characters, the world of her creation, and the philosophical themes that arise. My Thoughts: This book is part of a series by Le Guin called the Hainish Cycle; these books can be read interdependently of one another. In the introduction to this book, the author says, "Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future... a prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist... the outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer... somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life... Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic." Her point is that she is telling a story, not extrapolating into the future - and she tells a story very well. Genly Ai is a fascinating character; he's so incredibly biased, but tries to maintain a presence among the people on Winter without letting them know how he really feels; watching him grow and change through the course of the book was a wonderful experience. On the other hand, I'm also fascinated by the King of Karhide who, upon learning there were thousands of other civilizations out there, instead of considering that his people were the odd ones, rather claims that they were the only normal ones and all those thousands of civilizations were full of aberrations and perverts. It's a fascinating study on how people consider themselves and only themselves to be the norm. I do wish some form of gender-neutral terminology had been created for this book. Having Genly call everyone "he" even if he considers some of them feminine is distracting. However, this is not, I am fairly certain, something that was really even considered when this book was written (1969) and it was probably quite a shocking and groundbreaking idea at the time. "Consider: Anyone can turn his hand to anything... The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) `tied down to childbearing,' implies that no one is quite so thoroughly `tied down' here as women elsewhere are likely to be... burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally, everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else." A fascinating thought, and one that is dealt with in only an ancillary way throughout the course of the book, as are all other ideas being expressed by this text. Definitely an interesting book, a great story, wonderful world-building. I'm very happy that I was introduced to this book and took the chance to grab a copy when I had a gift certificate. I think this is an important book that should be study in gender-study classes at the university level; I think it is a book most everyone should read and spend some time thinking about.

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