Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful
Review: One of the most compelling science fiction books I've ever read, The Left Hand of Darkness is a complex novel containing several layers. Its main plot is relatively straightforward, the protagonist, Genly Ai, on a mission to bring a remote planet into the Federation of Planets. Beneath this main story line, there is a yet another even richer and more intriguing tale earthling Ai confronting a race of people with a psychological and physiological make-up entirely different from his own.The book opens in the main street of Erhenrang, a large city in the nation of Karhide on the planet Gethen or Winter. As the name implies, the planet puts the reader in mind of a Scandinavian landscape and climate of snow and ice. Genly Ai is the representative of the Stabiles of the Ekumen, the Federation of Planets including Earth. He is seeking to bring Gethen into their Federation. There on the street, he describes a parade in progress. The Left Hand of Darkness won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best science fiction novel of the year. After you have read it there will be little doubt as to why it was chosen. For the reader accustomed to well defined roles for men and women, this story will confound your sense of sexual orientation and leave you asking why we are the way were are, which, after all is what a great piece of fiction should do.
Rating:
Summary: A novel worth patience and effort
Review: Some of the best novels in any genre, but particularly in SF, conjure emotions and thought out of stories that may not in themselves appear remarkable. These books don't do it for everyone. You have to make a commitment, and let go any prejudices about what stories 'should' do, and what SF 'should be. You have to be patient. This is one of those books. It is about mood, culture and even climate more than it is about plot or action. It seeps into you slowly. It infects you and warps your perception of the world around you. Those of you who want things straight, simple and clear cut will probably hate this book. People who see the grey areas, the bits in between, will probably learn to love it.
Rating: 
Summary: I don't know what else to add...
Review: Strange for me to think of this book as science-fiction. For me, science fiction was all about Buck Rogers and ray guns. Ursula LeGuin has changed my perceptions entirely. While the book's concept of gender may disturb some, I found the ideas insightful and the writing brilliant. LeGuin's characters suffer and live with real emotions that can only come out during a sudden storm.
Rating:
Summary: "The king was pregnant."
Review: "My landlady, a voluble man." "The king was pregnant." These are just some of the shocking and brilliant sentences in Ursula K. Le Guin's masterpiece. This book will always be considered her masterpiece, not only for its innovativeness (it changed the genre forever), but for its musical and otherworldly prose, and for the deeper meanings that it holds. She takes the genre to a whole new level, seeing what would happen if certain things were different, twisting and shaping things to see what would be the outcome, if, for example, there were no such things as gender. Always, Le Guin's work is influenced by her father, Alfred Kroeber, who was and still is a highly regarded anthropologist. The character of Genly Ai fills the role of anthropologist in a strange society he's not used to. Genly Ai is from a different world, and for him to come to Gethen and become involved with the non-gender people there is an experiment in science, culture, questions of gender,and aggression/domination. The society of Gethen has never had a war...there are no dominant halves, submissive halves according to gender. Everyone is supposedly equal. Le Guin is not afraid to shock the reader, and to show a third side of the coin that we've never seen before. This book will challenge you culturally, and challenge all your norms and concepts. This is an all-around brilliant novel, one that is worthy to take its place forever among the most honored books.
Rating: 
Summary: Pathetic
Review: Considering this book won both a Hugo and a Nebula, it's hard to believe how bad it really is. You could make a case for this being the worst novel to ever win these two awards. The award selection committee must have been on drugs when they chose this one. The novel is dull, boring, unimaginative, and goes nowhere, at least nowhere interesting. The author should have gone into anthropology like her great father. Maybe she would have been better at it, because the culture she has created in this book is uninteresting, unbelieveable, and sounds like the more dismal parts of New Jersey anyway. A good candidate for the first sci-fi book burning, since it's not even worth the paper it's printed on, and maybe it would keep someone warmer than the people in this frozen world. Give this frigid story the cold shoulder.
Rating:
Summary: I even forgot how much I disliked it the first time.
Review: About a quarter of the way into this book I started thinking this is interesting and also very familiar. About three quarters of the way through I realized I had once again been drawn into this book too far to put it down not out of interest but because I had put too much work into it. I read it six years ago and was disappointed with it then... as I am now. The repackaging (it has a new cover now) is far more attractive than the story. It was just too drawn out and obviously not very memorable. I hope they don't re-release this in 2006!
Rating:
Summary: Very Weak
Review: This book won both a Hugo and a Nebula award, an amazing feat for the time (and still is). I'm usually pretty much in agreement with the choices on these things, but in this case I have to disagree. It's been some years since I've made a point of reading all the Hugo and Nebula-award winners, but up till that time I'd read every story and book that had won either of them, and in my opinion this is the weakest book ever to win either of these prestigious awards. The book isn't bad, but it certainly isn't in the class with your typical Nebula or Hugo winner. There are Le Guin stories that I liked much better. It's okay for general reading, but if you're looking for something truly Nebula or Hugo worthy, look elsewhere. An odd piece of personal trivia here--I was a biology and psychology major in college back in the mid 70's at San Francisco State University, and I had a young psychological statistics prof by the name of Ted Kroeber. One time he was talking to someone in class, and I happened to hear him say his sister recently got married to some Frenchman by the name of Le Guin and moved to Oregon. Some of you may know that Alfred Kroeber was America's first great, and possibly greatest, anthropologist. So Le Guin is another of Kroeber's children. I'd known that Ted was his son but I didn't know his sister was the emminent woman Sci-Fi writer until then. Sorry about dissing his sister's book, 'cause Ted was actually a pretty cool statistics prof. Just goes to show you it's a small world.
Rating:
Summary: One of The Best
Review: Simply The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the best science fiction books I have ever read. If you ask is any book exists equal to this book I admit "Dune" is good also. But I think Le Guin is best writer in the field. Her Earthsea triology in Fantasy field and her other books like "The Dispossessed" are just good. Her books are not to reading, they are for to thinking and that is what I love them.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Story and a Question of Human Sexuality
Review: Left Hand of Darkness is one of those books that draws you in and makes you forget it is only a story, a work of the author's imagination. But, as the Gethens say, Truth is a Matter of the Imagination, and in fact, Le Guin's imagination reveals a lot of truths about us.
Le Guin declares this book to be a thought-experiment, meaning that it is an exploration of an issue conducted by setting it in a story and letting it run: in this case, to find out what effect sexuality has on our social relations. On one level this experiment fails, because Le Guin herself points out another, more plausible, reason for their social organization and lack of war: the climate. As Genly Ai tells us, the marginal people, the ones struggling to survive, cannot afford to mobilize for war. In fact, this same situation occurs on Earth amongst those that Ai calls "the marginal peoples." In their interpersonal relations, their emotions and their expression, however, Le Guin makes a convincing case for the influence of sexual roles.
But it's also fun to read. This is a fascinating book to read, and the tale is sensually and subtly crafted. The characters are real and complex, and besides the other-worldly setting, there is nothing to disrupt the reader's suspension of disbelief. The ultimate test for a novel, however, is whether, after reading it, we look at our world in a different light. Left Hand of Darkness passes with flying colors.
Rating:
Summary: Truth is a Matter of the Imagination
Review: When we are finally done reading a novel, especially a good one, we may find that we are a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met new people, crossed different streets, or visited strange lands. But it's hard to say just what we learned, or how we changed because real art, not that specious imitation so prevalent these days, deals with what can not be fully expressed in words. And so, I who usually have no trouble finding the words, stand rather speechless after reading this great classic of science fiction literature, the winner of the Hugo and Nebular awards, that taught me, rather by demonstration of feelings than by telling, that the truth is a matter of the imagination. When you have finished reading this work, I therefore predict, you will be permanently changed, that you will have a new insight into the nature of culture, love, exact and vivid myth and saga, and that you will have acquired a new vocabulary which will now include kemmering, kadik-germ, and gicky-michy. Nowhere else have I recently experience this tremendously fruitful power of answering well that question that most writers ask as they approach the extended narrative that is the novel: What if?
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