The Left Hand of Darkness is a 1969 science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is part of the Hainish Cycle, a series of books by Le Guin set in the fictional Hainish universe, which she inaugurated in 1966. It is considered by some to be one of the first major works of feminist science fiction.
Left Hand won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as the year's "best novel" according to convention participants and science fiction writers respectively. In 1987, Locus: The magazine of the science fiction & fantasy field ranked it number two among "All-Time Best SF Novels", based on a poll of subscribers. That same year, Harold Bloom edited a critical anthology about the book and said in the introduction that "Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time".
Read more about The Left Hand Of Darkness: Setting and Premise, Reception, Introduction, Background, Adaptations, Translations
Famous quotes containing the words left and/or hand:
“Woman was originally the inventor, the manufacturer, the provider. She has allowed one office after another gradually to slip from her hand, until she retains, with loose grasp, only the so-called housekeeping.... Having thus given up one by one the occupations which required knowledge of materials and processes, and skill in using them ... she rightly feels that what’s left is mere deadening drudgery.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)