Ursula K Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness

It is strange that I have all kinds of dark and delicious feelings about The Left Hand of Darkness given that I was pretty bored throughout the first half of it. It seemed there was too much politicking and too little alien ambisexuality. At 50% I realised all of a sudden that Genly Ai and Estraven were about to embark on a monstrously cold and long journey and fall in love. My heart screamed.

In case you were wondering: no, the two did not have actual alien-on-alien sex. For they had become one over the journey - yet the physical act of love would have made them alien to each other again. I thought this was incredibly profound and romantic. Maybe I am a 15-year-old at heart. If it's any consolation they did do some telepathy.

The world of Left Hand is amazing. Gethenians are humanoid, most likely a strain of genetically modified human beings sent to populate an inhospitable ice planet, but they differ in one major way: they have no gender. Everyone is a "man", sexually neutral, except once a month, when they go into heat. During this brief span of a few days their sexual organs grow or shrink depending on who they partner with. And they partner with abandon during that time.

After those few days, everything goes back to normal. And it's so shocking, this normality. There is no repressed sex drive, no guilt, no battle-of-the-sexes shit going on in the background. Because Gethenians can turn out either male or female during sex, anyone can get pregnant - there isn't a segment of the population demarcated as childbearers. Perhaps more importantly no one is born into domestic chains simply by virtue of their genitals.

But Gethen is not utopia; evil still exists, mainly in the form of politics. That's how the alien envoy Genly gets captured and sent to a gulag.

It has been some time since a book left me wanting more. 

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I spent all of 2017 reading Robin Hobb's 16-book Realm of the Elderlings saga, and there hasn't been a year like that since. I have binged on authors and book series since - but haven't come across anything that made me feel like I had grown up, died, and been reborn in that world. 

But after The Left Hand of Darkness my itch for a long, absorbing binge-read is back. I think I'll start with the rest of Ursula K Le Guin's books: the Earthsea books, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, Always Coming Home.