The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin, an American writer, published the science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969. Its reception established her standing as a major science fiction author, and it is set in the Hainish Cycle, a set of novels and stories she began with a 1964 short story. It was the fourth of the Hainish novels in writing order.

Genly Ai comes from Terra and is posted to the planet Gethen as the first mobile envoy, offering its nations a place in the Ekumen, a loose confederation of worlds. He travels on a starship that waits in orbit with his companions in stasis, and like other envoys he can mindspeak, a quasi-telepathic form of speech that Gethenians are capable of without being aware of it.

He is a lone human among people who spend most of each month neither male nor female, and who find his fixed sex as strange as he finds their cycle. That is the first thing he has to unlearn before anyone will trust him. His best route to the king runs through a politician named Estraven, whom he distrusts for reasons he later has to revisit, and the novel includes Gethenian myths and reports alongside the narrative.

When their position collapses they cross the Gobrin Ice together, two people with no shared assumptions and one tent. Le Guin wrote the novel as an exploration of a society rather than a puzzle about one, and it is a standalone book within the wider Hainish sequence.