Ursula K. Le Guin - Hainish Cycle #04 - The Left Hand of Darkness.epub

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".
This novel takes place many centuries in the future - no date is given, though the year 4870 has been suggested. An envoy, Genly Ai, is on a planet called Winter ("Gethen" in the language of its own people) to convince the citizens to join the Ekumen. Winter is, as its name indicates, a planet that is always cold, and its citizens are “ambisexual,” spending the majority of time as asexual “potentials.” They only adopt gendered attributes once-monthly, during a period of sexual receptivenesss and high fertility, called kemmer, in which individuals can assume male or female attributes, depending on context and relationships. These conditions have affected the development of civilizations on Winter, such that the planet has never known war.