Monday, February 15, 2010

Left Hand of Darkness - Le Guin

The time is far into the future and mankind has spread so far into the stars that the farthest reaches have been lost and a movement is out to reconnect them. A diplomat lands on a distant planet known as Winter to invite them into a group called the Ekumen and enjoy cultural exchange. The residents of Winter have diverged from normal humanity in one specific way, they are no longer men and women. Only once a month do they develop gender, being both men and women at times in their lives.
Winter is a very cold planet and the only habitable area is a zone fairly near the equator. The growing seasons are necessarily short and constant cold is a way of life. The diplomat must work his way through obscured political machinations as he works to convince the people of Winter to accept that he is what he says he is.
This book was something of a ground-breaker in sci-fi for it's treatment of gender. It was popular (may still be) in gender studies courses. But the impact is quite a bit less some 40 years later. In part because we don't see gender as destiny in nearly the same way that it was in 1970.
Much more interesting to me was the treatment of Winter (keep in mind that I read this last fall before I was sick of the season). I found the wilderness portions of the book much more compelling than the politics. This was a good book and well worth reading but its impact is greatly diminished.

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