About the author
Ursula K. Le Guin was an American novelist, poet, essayist, translator, and critic whose career lasted nearly sixty years. Her science fiction and fantasy use invented societies to test assumptions about gender, ownership, authority, language, and what counts as a stranger.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin makes political understanding inseparable from language, climate, custom, and the limits of the envoy's assumptions. The crossing of the ice becomes a test of trust after diplomacy has exhausted its formal tools.
Where to start
Start with The Left Hand of Darkness. An envoy to the icebound world of Gethen must learn how to read a society without fixed gender.
