Hainish novels & stories

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Język English

Opublikowane 9 lipca 2017

ISBN:
978-1-59853-538-9
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(5 opinii)

Comment by Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Guardian's website: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969)

One of my favorite novels is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K Le Guin. For more than 40 years I've been recommending this book to people who want to try science fiction for the first time, and it still serves very well for that. One of the things I like about it is how clearly it demonstrates that science fiction can have not only the usual virtues and pleasures of the novel, but also the startling and transformative power of the thought experiment.

In this case, the thought experiment is quickly revealed: "The king was pregnant," the book tells us early on, and after that we learn more and more about this planet named Winter, stuck in an ice age, where the humans are most of the …

44 edycje

Truly one for the 'everyone must read' list

After an unassuming and somewhat slow start, Le Guin's story and prose builds to a crescendo that includes what must be among the most beautiful portrayals of platonic love in literature.

Thought-provoking and unpredictable from start to finish, The Left Hand of Darkness seems as fresh and relevant today as it did when it was published. The only aspect that seems dated at all is Le Guin's periodic descriptions of masculine and feminine behaviours, pigeonholing that would've gone unremarked in the 70s but which jars today.

Excellent Books from A Different Time

This book is a collection of five novels and four short stories, as well as an essay and introductions to each of those novels, set in Le Guin's Hainish universe. Each novel contains all the information about the universe necessary to understand that novel, though taken together they reveal a more complex picture than any one alone. The gist is that millions of years ago, the people of a planet called Hain or Davenant seeded various worlds with human colonists. (Though most of these worlds had no previous inhabitants, it is mentioned in one story that hominid life arose independantly on Earth; humans, however, are descended from Hainish settlers.) This serves as a vehicle for exploring humanity in various contexts and situations which otherwise do not exist in real life, as the League of All Worlds - or the Ekumen, in the later novels - started by Hain seeks to …

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