The Left Hand of Darkness is about a lot of things. But, unlike many science fiction writers, Le Guin doesn't lay it all out for you in comic-book-style exposition. Like a serious mainstream author, she tells you some things, hints at more, and leaves still more for you to discover on your own.

This is because she is not "creating a new world" as SF writers are often said to do, specifying each aspect of it from futuristic technological devices to the social system. The background structure—the Hainish federation of planets with its emissaries visiting prospective members—is already in place from previous stories in the series (of which Left Hand is the jewel) and is not really very important here. It just provides a way for a human character like ourselves to be brought into contact with people who have turned out differently on a different world. Le Guin does not "create" a world as much as she explores the consequences of subtle differences in worlds and what they tell us about ourselves.

The difference about the people, the Getheren, on the visited world is that they are male and female for only a few days of each hormonal cycle. Between these bouts of being "in kemmer" (or in heat, as we might think of it), they are neither one sex nor the other. More interestingly, they can become either male or female while in kemmer, depending on the current sex of their partner. Anyone could become female, for example, if one's partner becomes male, and therefore anyone could bear children.

This of course colours their entire outlook, their social structure, their technological development, their philosophical views, all without them being aware that matters could have turned out any differently—just as our male-female bipolarity has affected our entire history and culture without us being particularly aware of it.

I don't mean to give the impression though that The Left Hand of Darkness is entirely a meditation on such matters. It would not have become so popular if it were. All this heavy stuff is presented or hinted at in the course of an exciting plot concerning the emissary's attempts to convince the main nations on Getheren that he is genuinely from another planet and that joining the league of worlds would be beneficial. He has to fight hostile leaders, seek allies and flee for his life at various times.

He ends up in a surprising alliance with one particular character. Their final heroic journey together across the frozen wastes of the planet—an Earthling and a Getheren, a male and an androgynous being, sharing an intimate closeness in struggle against the elements and their own natures for over two months—is the magnificent showpiece of this novel. One forgets the sci-fi story and lives with the two through all their hopes and despairs just as one would in a great story of against-all-odds endeavour on our own planet.

Great writing—by turns thrilling, unsettling, provoking and uplifting.

— Eric