Rating: 
Summary: Another World
Review: Le Guin has created book that takes the reader to another world using imagery to paint a vivid portrait in the mind of the reader. A race without gender, such as the one that Le Guin shows us, has infinite possibilities and infinite flaws. A world blanketed by a never-ending winter that is hostile even to its inhabitants. An envoy sent to offer alliance and to be patient for acceptance.
The main character, Ai, is this envoy. He is faced with an almost impossible task, he has to first convince a genderless race to accept him a male, and he then has to persuade them to accept his proposal for alliance. Ai spends his first year overcoming such prejudices and delays, and is faced with more years containing the same tediousness. He then meets Estraven, a native willing to look past the handicap of Ai's gender. Together they must succeed with Ai's mission, and they must learn to love each other, much as we must look past prejudices.
Rating: 
Summary: A Marvelous science fiction
Review: For a 10th grade reading assignment, a partner and I had to read Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and it was by far one of the most original and thought provocative science fiction novels I have ever read. The story narrates the experiences of Ai, a human male, who was cast upon a genderless planet of Gethen (Winter), to unite their plants with a galactic alliance called the "League of Planets". The things that I loved most about this book were the marvelous character, and the hidden themes and traits behind them. For example, the protagonist Ai name discloses his three roles in the narrative: as I, the narrator who sees all from his own restricted point of view; as Eye, the witness who learns to see into people and events; and as Ai, a cry of pain. The progress of the character is his expedition from I to Eye and at last to Ai, his concluding cr y of pain as he comes full circle to the discovery of self and depth of soul. This is one of the many brilliant themes Le Guin uses in the book. In all, the story was incredibly smart and really makes you think about things socially different, especially on the idea of gender classification. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the idea of sexual identity and classification, or anyone really who is interested in science fiction.
Rating: 
Summary: great philosophical work
Review: LeGuin is a fabulous writer, but this book disappointed me in the plot development. The characters and philosophy carried the entire story; it wouldn't make a great movie. Some say that LeGuin fails in creating an androgynous race, but I disagree. I felt that the characterizations were the novel's strong points. It is definitely a thinking book, and often requires a double-reading of a few passages to fully comprehend. Very deep and profound, but a bit slow, IMO.Word Ninja
Rating:
Summary: Lord of The Rings eat your heart out.
Review: The Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand Of Darkness, is rightfully among the all-time science fiction greats. This book does so many things so well, it's hard to find a place to start. Ms. Le Guin has incorporated themes of betrayal, equality, mythology, culture, and acceptance and tightly packed them into a magic school bus of a story. The Left Hand Of Darkness is not your typical science fiction work. Ursula Le Guin utilizes a relatively uneventful, impersonal plot as a vehicle for her astonishing story telling. Ms. Le Guin tells this story using a pattern in which she alternates from the two main characters' point of view as they embark on a journey across a harsh land. The book begins in a somewhat ominous tone and uses several sub-themes to distract from what is really happening. Ms. Le Guin establishes many of the fundamental issues and themes within the first few pages of the book and this helps to take away a little of the confusion in the first chapter. Ms. Le Guin kindly gives us a little background as to where and when the action is taking place, but she then quickly drops us into the story running. The story begins as our central character attends a parade in a large city that is beautifully described and bares a faint resemblance to cities in The Lord Of The Rings. The first 4 chapters alternate between myth and story, but this unique, interesting aspect actually only adds to the complexity of it all. Although the story is somewhat hard to follow throughout the first few chapters, it gets evolves into more simple, heart warming tale of two friends in an unfriendly land. The main character in this story, an Alien Envoy from Ekumen (an earth-like planet in a galaxy far far away), is on a mission to convince Gethen (the planet he's visiting) to join a union of planets. He always seems to know just a little bit more about this strange culture and language than we do. While some might see this as frustrating, it actually just fuels our curiosity, and by the end of the book, Genly Ai (the envoy) and the reader know the same amount of information about this strange culture. The distant planet Mr. Ai is visiting, Gethen (affectionately known as Winter), is an ice cube of a planet that suffers from the present ice age that seems more like perpetual winter. Ms. Le Guin decided that the people of Gethen would be ambisexual in an experiment to see what a utopia where men and women would literally be equal would really be like. This plays a major part in the book along with other issues surrounding a stranger entering a strange culture. This Gem of a book is a must read, even for non-science fiction readers.
Rating:
Summary: Earthsea and Beyond
Review: Add this book to the Earthsea Trilogy and the oft-anthologized The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, and you can make a case that Ms LeGuin is one of the top ten sci-fi writers of al time, males and females included.
Rating:
Summary: Did I Miss Something in This Cool Book?
Review: If you know me, you know that I love this book. God Bless my English Professor Preston L. Allen (Author of Hoochie) for recommending it to me when I was going through my science fiction phase. The whole idea is pretty cool, with the bi-sex creatures, the cold planet, and the two cultures on it that might be symbolic of the two super powers of our world who were at the time in the middle of a "cold" war. I am not going to go over the aspects of the book that so many other reviewers have already covered--I agree with them all, it is a great book. What I want to do is point out something I caught the last time a read the book: the hero is black, is he not? Did I read the book right? Doesn't he say, somewhere near the end, that on his home planet (earth) he would be considered "dark"? Ursula K. LeGuin is so cool.
Rating:
Summary: A few problems
Review: Ursula K. Le Guin is a talented author, there's no doubt about that. But I found her generally most-praised book, /The Left Hand of Darkness/, to be flawed in basically two ways, which I'll summarize here: - Le Guin attempts to take the reader on a tour of her entire planet in just one book. This basically means the narrator is forever running over to some other country and quickly learning about how that country works. Since she is so talented with background information, much character and plot development is lost; the multiple-story approach she takes in the /Earthsea/ series works better.
- In this anniversary edition, Le Guin plays with using the female pronoun and an invented gender-neutral pronoun in an afterword, as opposed to the masculine pronoun ("he", "him", "his"), which she uses to refer to the genderless Gethenians throughout the book. If only there was an edition where the gender-neutral pronoun was used throughout the story! Despite the fact that it's often used to refer to either gender, the masculine pronoun gives the entire book the overtone of a world filled with men only. This is especially confusing when the narrator falls in love with one of Gethen's inhabitants! I don't know how this book's fans coped with that, but I barely could. This is a wonderful idea for a book and a well-developed story, but these two factors caused me to take a dislike of it. Don't buy this book on impulse; I recommend you take a quick read beforehand (maybe using this fine website's "Look Inside" feature) and see if either of these elements bother you.
Rating: 
Summary: It took me two or three months to slog my way through it!
Review: I hate to spoil the love-feast that prevails here, but reading this book was one of the most painful literary experiences I have ever endured. The prose is stilted (or to put it more generously, dated), the characters elicited no personal interest on the part of this reader (as opposed, to pick an example that most of you will recognise, to that of Bean in Ender's Shadow), and the plot (and it pains me to dignify the story-line with that word) practically non-existent. Numerous reviewers will tell you that this is science fiction for the thinking man; not for the light-hearted. Proceed at your own risk!
Rating:
Summary: Great Stuff ala Julian May
Review: There is not a lot to be said about Left Hand of Darkness that has not been said at least once by the 97 others to review it. So, I am not going to say how much I enjoyed the book, how provocative the idea of a hermaphroditic society is, how evocative the landscapes are, and how moving the bond that developed between the two main characters. Rather, I am going to let those fans of Julian May who have not read Left Hand of Darkness know that here is the model for everything we love and adore about May. Like May, LeGuin is adept at changing view-points (a rare feat; most writers who try to give multiple first-person perspectives, or interrupt the narrative with asides, fail miserably). Like May, LeGuin has phenomenously captured the male character. Nobody can read May's Rampart trilogy without being astounded that a woman wrote it. The same is true of Left Hand of Darkness; perhaps even more so because reflections on sexuality are a critical element of the story. And, like May, LeGuin creates a world so effortlessly convincing that one almost believes it's right next door. It's the apparent lack of effort that stands out here; LeGuin is able to accomplish in a couple hundred pages what it takes other writers (see Wingrove or Jordan) half a dozen books to achieve. About halfway through I became convinced that May and LeGuin must be the same person . . . . I do not give out five star ratings lightly. Only one other fiction review has ever received a five-star rating from me, and that's one from Julian May. I wrestled long and hard over whether to accord Left Hand of Darkness the Ultimate Rating. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the only complaint I had about the book was that it was over too quickly. Surely that, as much as anything else, merits five stars.
Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece of Modern Fiction
Review: IT is so sad that everyone I know thinks of Ursula Le Guin as just an SF writer, if they have heard of her at all. Especially when she is probably one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. A literary classic is, by definition, a work that has pushed the boundries and created a new demension in literary understanding. LeGuin more than suceeds here by daring to lay before us themes that are alluded to in the sixties(but not excepted as open topics of conversation until much later), and weaving them into a convincing and powerful story. I once heard that this book was one of the top five bestsellers of all time on college campuses. I doesn't surprise me in the slightest, but I haven't met an English Lit Prof who admitted to reading it yet!
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