The Left Hand of Darkness - spoiler review

I didn’t like The Left Hand of Darkness. I wish I did. I badly wanted to. But when I compare the fascinating sci-fi concepts and the cool setting (pun intended) to the plot, the plot doesn’t live up to the potential. I expected Le Guin to blow me away with a riveting story, but instead I got political intrigue and a dull and lengthy escape across a glacier.

Here’s the premise: In the far future there is a collection of planets that form an alliance called The Hundred Worlds. A man names Genly travels from one of these worlds to a cold, ice-covered planet named Winter that isn’t part of the alliance. His job is to convince the inhabitants of Winter to join The Hundred Worlds, but the inhabitants are very skeptical and old fashioned. They’ve never had a visitor come from space before, and they don’t even really believe that Genly came from space at all… except that Genly, unlike everyone else on Winter, is male, a person who always displays the physical characteristics of a man. This blows the Winter peoples’ minds because on Winter there are no genders. Everyone is ambisexual, and once a month each person enters a period called “kemmer” in which they begin to take on the characteristics of one or the other gender and become sexually active. This period only lasts a few days, and then the person is back to being neither female nor male.

Cool, right? Interesting premise, unique and ripe for a fascinating story. But instead I could tell you the entire story without ever bringing up the fact that Winter’s inhabitants are androgynous. It has pretty much no bearing on the story, and that’s disappointing, because it makes the whole ambisexual thing seem like nothing but the cherry on top of the milkshake, except the cherry is very small and probably not even edible. The one thing I did find interesting while reading LHoD is that I kept catching myself imaging the characters all as men (because Genly does that), so I’d keep trying to imagine everyone as ambisexual. It was interesting to me how difficult that was for me. Other than that, I wasn’t interested in the content of the plot whatsoever.

Let me know what you thought of LHoD! I know tons of people love it, and I’d especially love to read comments from the Love It side.