🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟(5/5) . A world wrapped in eternal winter. A race of humans who are neither male nor female but which can change at a moments’ notice. Trust and betrayal, pride and politics, the turning of a great wheel—The Left Hand of Darkness reads like a deepspace folk tale, an origin story whispered by mystics of the time when Winter overcame its own bitterness and learned to reach beyond the stars. I have never read anything quite like it. . I find myself turning the last page of this book fifty years after its initial publication, yet I feel refreshed. The world of Science Fiction has become cluttered with cliche and tangled in trope since 1969, but The Left Hand of Darkness is clearly among the progenitors of the genre. It is something like the experience of having seen a picture of a famous painting or landmark many times, and finally finding yourself in the presence of the real thing. Suddenly that which you had enjoyed and become familiar with in representation is more tangible, wrapped in the mystique of its own influence while existing close enough to touch. Where in other works of science fiction I have found the laborious construction of a world and an alien race a chore to familiarize myself with, Ursula K. LeGuin has created an immersive world too wide to take in, such that the experience of reading The Left Hand of Darkness is like coming upon a new culture, experiencing the shock of unfamiliarity, of otherness, and the slow assimilation into acceptance of the strangeness of a new place. Not your typical political space-thriller, this book presents a vision terrifying, grotesque, exhilarating, and deeply sensitive to the sense of what it is to be alive, to come to fear and travel through it. Through her characters, Ursula brings us to the brink of death and back from it with quite the tale to tell. And throughout, when her characters crack and show their inner thoughts and feelings, her deep insight and compassion to life shines through. . #TheLeftHandOfDarkness #UrsulaKLeGuin #HainishCycle #ScienceFiction #Fiction #NonBinary #bookrecommendation #readinglist2019 #booksireadin2019 #_bookshelf2019_ https://www.instagram.com/p/B2VLo_rphaB/?igshid=sq4potilmxk3
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