I still need to read that one. The Left Hand of Darkness has been my favorite so far.

"We ask the hospitality of the Domain."

Noise, buzz, confusion, alarm, welcome.

"We came over the Gobrin Ice."

More noise, more voices, questions; they crowded in on us.

"Will you look to my friend?"

I thought I had said it, but Estraven had.

-- [The Left Hand of Darkness], Ursula K. Le Guin

I thought "The Left Hand of Darkness" was great. It had a sense of realism and presence that I normally find most fiction lacking.

I'm huge fan of Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea, which I've read and re-read many times, but when I picked up The Left Hand of Darkness I couldn't get in to it because I found it really boring.

"The Amber Chronicles" by Roger Zelazny (It's actually a series of 10 novels, but they can be bought together in one massive book. It's the most original and creatively exciting thing I've ever read.)

"The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin

I'm working my way through the novels that were joint winners of the Hugo and nebula awards. Every book has been fantastic, although The Left Hand of Darkness was the high note of the books I hadn't read before.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_joint_winners_of_the_...

Can second both Ann Leckie (her new book "The Raven Tower" is also a great page-turner) and N.K. Jemisin (who did totally blow my mind with her Broken Earth Trilogy).

Ursula K. Le Guin also appears down below; The Left Hand of Darkness was a profound read.

Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll read “Strangers”. I liked “Dispossessed” and “The Left Hand of Darkness”, specially the later. I have to ask - which “icy word” you mean?... :)

RIP Ursula. I just finished The Left Hand of Darkness and am in the middle of the Earthsea series and it's absolutely fantastic. Love her writing.

> The Dispossessed is one of my favorite books; different strokes, and all that.

Interesting. Did you like The Left Hand Of Darkness as well? How do you feel they compare?

I will check out Lavinia - thanks for the reco.

The best book ever! I don't know how many times I read it.
My other favourite is The Left Hand of Darkness.

If you haven't read any Ursula K. LeGuin yet, she is amazing. Start with either The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or The Wizard of Earthsea, depending on whether you are most interested in gender, societal systems, or wizards, respectively.

I almost always skip the intro of books like this. I didn't skip this one. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are two of my favorite books of all time.

The Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorite scifi books...I've been meaning to read The Dispossessed but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Hate brando sando? O.o

I also read Dune this year and loved it and gave up on Dune Messiah. Will power through if things get better.

I really enjoyed Asimov's Foundation Series and Le Guin's Hainish books (specifically Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness) this year, check them out of if you haven't yet.

I guess such recent works as Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World, among others. Who knew that sci-fi could be something else than alien invasions and scantily clad women in pulp covers?

I love The Left Hand of Darkness. That said, I'm not really a big fan of her Earthsea books.

I wanted to like "The Left Hand of Darkness" but found that Le Guin didn't make that much of a great premise and the storytelling seemed a little weak. I don't think this is her best work by far.

Reading this review I realize maybe I didn't read it closely enough or maybe I'm not invested enough in the topic.

Off the top of my head: reread "The Left Hand Of Darkness", "The Mythical Man-Month", and the end of "A Mote In God's Eye"; read "A Night In The Lonesome October".

All worth reading, the last probably the least enduring.

Likewise. Frankly I didn't enjoy The Left Hand of Darkness when I read it, but I think about The Dispossessed all the time.

The left hand of darkness, by Ursula Le Guin.

I found it by working my way through the list of joint nebula and hugo award winners (which is a really fun project, because all of them are amazing books). It is my favorite sci-fi book. It changes the way you look at gender, especially if you haven't questioned the concept much before.

I'm not sure this one is actually directly connected. I can visualize things in my head, but I rarely do that when reading fiction books, despite enjoying them immensely, and far more than movies. If you asked me to, say, sketch any of the characters from the last book I read for pleasure ("The Left Hand of Darkness", for umpteenth time at that), I wouldn't be able to do so; it's all abstract.

Whereas I just this week finished ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ after my partner put it aside temporarily, so thought "why not?" as I was in between books, so entered into it with zero expectation and.. loved it.

Some truly wonderful writing — actually beautiful in points — and grand ideas and vision. Heart too, which is often missing in sci-fi.

Contrast that with the very-oft promoted and recommended “The Three Body Problem” which makes many an appearance in HN, which I started the other night which is — bluntly — awfully written. It has some wonderful ideas, which is what has kept me from putting it down, but I've been cringing at how poor the dialogue and exposition often is. It's borderline amateur. imho, obv.

If you like Atwood's worlds, you'll probably like Le Guin's. If you simply deride their encouragement as 'SJW', you're probably pushing your own agenda.

If I'd rate my current collection of best SF I've read:

- Deepness in the Sky: super mustache twirling, one of the worst.

- Fire upon the Deep: I consider the blight to be twirling. Why treat lower civ that way? AFAIK, for mustache twirling.

- Iain M Banks: lotsa mustache twirling. Surface details and Player of Games in particular. My view of the culture AI is that they are constantly sarcastically toying with humans, and are thus secretly twirling.

- Fifth Season (Jemisin): no twirling. One of the most balanced novel on that front, every faction has believable reason to act the way they do.

- Book of the New Sun: no twirling, but OMG, stop what you're doing a good read these books! The tone and story was just perfect for me. Sure, it looks like a weird cross of SF and fantasy, but there is no fantasy at all in the novel in reality. Book of New Urth is, in comparison, just merely very good.

- Ancillary Justice (Lecki): some small twirling, but justified since it's an empire: absolute power corrupt. The twirling is commensurate with having a empress as head of state. She even becomes mostly sympathetic later.

- Left hand of Darkness: not only no twirling, but the power struggle is extremely believable. Great illustration of an interesting alien civilisation. Great for both world-building and character building. Another of those stop everything and just read it now novel.

- Roadside Picnic: no twirling. The conflicts and abuse of power are all believable.

- Collapsing Empire (Scalzi): lot of mustache twirling. Not DotS level, but not that far off. Plus, there is a plot point in the first novel that made me quit reading for a week. Incomprehensible because it was all of unbelievable (given the multiple characters behaviour before), idiotic and had zero impact on the rest of the book... so why write it. (Page 260 in my paperback version, for the record)

I have only read The Left Hand of Darkness of these five, just last year, and it is definitely one of my favourite books of all time.

The way it examines what a genderless society might look like and the differences is incredibly intelligent, yet is just the setting - there's a thoroughly interesting plot over the top.

And the feminist bent (among other things) makes it feel incredibly modern - I remember being impressed it was written in 1969.

Howard's End, EM Forster, is one, along with all of Forster.

Arcadia, a play by Tom Stoppard, is fantastic. Good for many re-reads (and re-watches).

Ursula Le Guin (maybe The Left Hand of Darkness is my favorite?) might be the best sci-fi/fantasy ever written, as much as I love Lois McMaster Bujold (three worlds to choose from, each offering many more or less independent novels and novellas), who is also great.

A few more:

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey.

My Antonia, Willa Cather.

Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut.

A highly related introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html

Of her works, I have only read "The Left Hand of Darkness". The writing is great, the worldbuilding is interesting, but there's one thing which stops me from finding it entertaining - the lack of a protagonist, in the sense of a main character driving the plot. This is a deliberate choice, as Genly's job is to act as an observer. Things happen to him, and he reacts, but the only time he really acts decisively is during the ice-crossing sequence, which I thought was by far the best part of the novel. This passive main character is a big part of what makes the novel unique and interesting, but it also means I don't strongly care about what happens to any of the characters. The novel reads more like an academic work of anthropology than an exciting story.

I'm pretty sure, having seen some interviews with Ursula K. LeGuin, that something as transgressive towards our society's assumptions about gender as The Left Hand of Darkness would not have been written or published today, and certainly not by her or anyone who had the same influences and social circles as she did.

It's interesting seeing how many of my touchstone books turn up in other people's lists. Here are some I didn't see yet:

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. My favorite Le Guin (the Dispossessed is pretty good too). Shockingly original when it was published in 1969; the portrait of the society and culture on Gethen still feels unique. A slow burn at the beginning, but builds to a dramatic conclusion.

Patrick O'Brian, Aubrey-Maturin series. Probably the best historical fiction ever written. Rich tapestry of life during the Napoleonic Wars. Set in the Royal Navy during the Age of Sail, but that description doesn't do it justice; O'Brian's great inspiration was Jane Austen, and the focus is on characters and people, particularly the brilliantly contrasting personalities of the two main characters.

Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate. Like Tolstoy's War and Peace, but set in Russia during WWII. Explores the dark heart of the 20th century (the Battle of Stalingrad, concentration camps, the gulag) through the eyes of a wide cast of characters from different walks of life. Grossman wrote about Stalingrad from firsthand experience as a war journalist, and is able to uncover moments of hope and human kindness amid horrifying world-historical events.

Books others have already mentioned:

* Tolstoy, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
* Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (interesting how several people mention this one; I used to think it was my own private discovery).
* Neal Stephenson, especially Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle

And the obligatory Tolkien and Douglas Adams that I read and re-read as a teenager.

The comparison between The Three Body Problem series and some of Le Guin's books is interesting because the two authors have such wildly different strengths and weaknesses. I love them both but, purely in terms of writing, there is absolutely no comparison. Le Guin is one of the all time greats .

Just to be clear, I liked the 3BP series a lot. The books are generally paced well and there's just about the right amount of world building. However, the long expository monologues break up the flow. It's a shame because it's a great story and he tells it well. Those who have read the books will recognize his over reliance on on a particularly lazy storytelling device to introduce ideas which I can best summarize as follows: "here is this idea and this is why it's important and here's all the nuances to it so then this next idea came about and this is why it's important." That's bad writing. Making the characters academics so that Liu Cixuin can dress up his ideas as "theories" in this way is wholly unconvincing and, as you said, amateurish.

By contrast, Le Guin is masterful at weaving her ideas into the narrative of the story. Ideas are not introduced as standalone concepts and then referenced by the story. Instead, they are woven into the fabric of the story itself. This makes the ideas more compelling and keeps the narrative brisk and interesting. On the other hand, Le Guin often spends far too much time world building. The Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorite books, but the first half of the book plods on rather painfully. The second half feels like a reward for slogging through the first half.

Not sure if you've read The Dispossessed but I think it's better than TLHOD. It still has a bit too much world building in the first half but it's a tighter and more compactly told tale. Her most tightly told tale is probably The Lathe of Heaven. That book was incredible and I think it showcases her literary skill better than some of her more famous books. Definitely check it out some time if you liked her other work.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea what we primarily like stories that take place in familiar (moral) universes. For a lot of pop-fiction that's surely true but generally works we think of as being of merit challenge the reader.

A lot of Borges stories come to mind. Stanislaw Lem's work like Solaris, on moral issues surely Nabokov's Lolita or Ada or Ardor. The Master and Margarita in the Soviet Union, Le Guin's the Left Hand of Darkness with takes on sexuality way ahead of their time and so on. If I go through my list of favourite books there's a lot of those.

The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness both by Ursula K Le Guin

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep."
-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

I read The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed at the beginning of the year, just before she passed away. This summer I the first four books of the Earthsea series and will probably read The Other Wind and Tales soon. I've really enjoyed both universes--with Earthsea I keep wishing someone would make a game with this kind of magic system. The Lathe of Heaven is such a wonderful title, I'm looking forward to reading that as well.

I read her translation of Tao Te Ching while waiting in 2 hours of traffic for a ferry and it was wonderful and really informs the rest of her works.

I'm currently reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, on the history of U.S. water policy in the West. Frustratingly dry.

Also re-reading On the Road but unlike 16 years ago I'm reading the 'Original Scroll Edition' this time: no chapters, paragraph breaks, invented character names, censors, etc. The book you read in high school is, in fact, the novelization of the original, which Kerouac wrote in twenty days. I've kept my beat-up paperback copy of the 'novel' nearby and I've preferred the scroll edition for the most part.

On the nightstand:
- Annals of the Former World by John McPhee 300 pages into it, but I got a bit tired of the redundancy inherent in combining multiple books into one.
- The Vulgar Tongue by Jonathon Green. 40 pages in. I've been looking for a copy of the dictionary.
- The Path to the Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino.

Also Ursula le Guin: I tend to re-read The Left Hand of Darkness every couple years (always in winter).

I hate this kind of anti-woke reactionary stuff.

... but for aspiring writers, there is a problem. On the one hand, writers should write what they know. They shouldn't try to assume they know some minority's lived experiences.

On the other hand, literature should be inclusive. That means including minorities, and not just as peripheral characters. We don't need more My Magical Gay Friend stories.

I haven't heard a good discussion on how to reconcile this contradiction. The only avenue that leaves is for straight white people to stop writing, and, y'know: No.

The outrage does seem selective. I mean, one of the seminal classics of science-fiction literature on the subject of gender - and a very popular book among feminist readers - is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin. And I've never heard anyone complain that she wrote a black protagonist, despite not having black experiences. But on the other hand, The Left Hand of Darkness isn't much about the black experience. It's more of a travelogue of a genderless society.

So maybe that's the distinction?

American Dirt isn't just about a Mexican, it's a story of the Mexican-American immigration experience. And maybe it's right that stories like that should be written by people who're closer to them?

The Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969. TFA's illustration is from a novel published in 1975. I can remember reading some scifi short story in which one of the main characters was trans basically as soon as I could read without vocalizing... so about 1982, '83? and that was something off a clearance pile at a used bookstore... This stuff has been around a long time. It wasn't always so blatantly political, though. The LessWrong folks are right about this one. [0]

In the past, whenever someone got pissed off enough to make a stink about some challenging detail of scifi, most fans just laughed at them. We should do that still. It's fine to criticize the less evolved assumptions embedded in old "space opera"-type stuff (or, really, more recent stuff like The Windup Girl, yeesh...), and it's fine to have tastes that don't perfectly mesh with such progressive authors as e.g. Miéville, so long as we don't take our own feelings too seriously.

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i...

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Sure, some sci-fi writers were openly disdainful about sci-fi as prophecy. Ursula Le Guin's famous "prediction is... not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying" foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness springs to mind. But some of them took their technology more seriously than others, and sometimes authors finding it easier to imagine a world a couple of decades away with space battles than one with ubiquitous mobile communication devices says things about their thought processes and the world they lived in beyond them simply needing characters to be uncontactable for the next event to happen.

And also, sometimes they were far more right about the details they threw in to be vaguely believable and less on the money about what they really cared about, like HG Wells' plot device for a world in which war was impossible which is believed to have been what inspired Szilard to create an actual atomic bomb (whilst the thrust of the book failed to convince enough of the right people of the merits of a World State). And Solution Unsatisfactory is uncannily closer still...

Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Dostoyevsky, Ursula Le Guin, David Foster Wallace (I could truly go on forever, but I think these authors are phenomenal, with themes and meta-themes different from one another).

I think if you watch an interview with DFW you will realize just how much he has thought of just about every facet of modern, entertainment-centric western society - all coming together in Infinite Jest which is the most depressing book I've ever read (he later committed suicide, so it might have been the most depressing contemporary book ever written either). Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness models an entire planetary civilization with no fixed sex (written in 1969, mind you), which I found very eye-opening. Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (as well as Crime and Punishment) are extraordinarily psychological and philosophical - ethics, free will, and God are centric. Both Steinbeck and Vonnegut have multiple books I'd recommend, but East of Eden by Steinbeck is an all-time favorite tackling good and evil (honestly Nietzsche in novel); Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut (just a notch above Heller's Catch-22) is the embodiment of darkness and absurdity. Take an anti-war sentiment and an author willing to tiptoe to the border of sanity and insanity and the result is SH5. It is truly brilliant, and as someone who is fortunate enough to not have ever been impacted greatly by wartime, it is equally eye-opening.

Honorable mention (a book I have read more recently) goes to Tom Wolfe with The Bonfire of the Vanities. This book combines the legal system (police and prosecutors), personal greed and ambition (Wall Street bond salesman), racism (Media biases), and class structures and privilege in a hard hitting social critique on 80s New York City. Everything between its covers is key to understanding how the world actually works.

This turned out to be a lot longer than I anticipated. Hopefully it is helpful!

Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It starts off with separate storylines touching on all the great sci-fi clichés - time travel, FTL travel, computer nets, out-of-control AIs, lost civilisations, humanity scindered into two estranged parts, mysterious monsters, strange maladies, it has everything. Except, at first, this pastiche just feels disjointed. But then, near the end, all of this wierd stuff, that you never really understand, gets pulled together into one, cohesive whole.

Hyperion is basically just a brilliant story, very enjoyable to read.

That said, if I was to criticise Hyperion, it would be that it doesn't fulfill very well one of the important functions of science fiction - the examination of the impact of technology on society.

Which leads to my second recommendation - The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin in general is excellent for examining in depth the effects that small changes in technology may have on human society - it follows naturally I guess from the fact that her father was an anthropologist...

"But the highest praise I can give The Left Hand of Darkness is that Le Guin captures the texture of life. This book is full of little moments, bits of sensation and emotion, that show what it feels like to be alive, day after day."

Well put; this was one of the things I enjoyed most about the book as well. I began reading fully expecting to be immersed in the Gethenians' world and their foreign culture, just as Mr. Ai did at the start of his journey. By the end though I realized Le Guin had used these "aliens" to show Mr. Ai and the reader what it truly meant to be human.

The fact that some others here feel that LHoD was not Le Guin's best work makes me excited to read her other books!

Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Getting More - Stuart Diamond. I still think this is the best book on the art of negotiation.

Getting Things Done - David Allen. If you have adult ADHD like me, and you haven't read this, it's the first system that's really worked for productivity for me.

Man's Search for Meaning - Victor Frankl.

Living Buddha, Living Christ - Thich Nhat Hanh.

Cosmos - Carl Sagan.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin.

The One who Walks Away from Omelas - U.K. LeGuin.

Wild Seed - Octavia Butler.

The Heike Monogatari - (tr. Helen Craig McCullough) “The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall. The proud do not endure, like a passing dream on a night in spring; the mighty fall at last, to be no more than dust before the wind.” If you need a comparison. this is the Japanese historical equivalent of Game of Thrones combined with a bit of MacBeth. The rise and fall of two shogunate families, and an analysis of the tragic flaws of character that brought their fall about.

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo.

Small Gods - Terry Pratchett.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad.

The Guide - R. K. Narayan.

Evidence - Mary Oliver.

All of Us - The Collected Poetry of Raymond Carver.

Silence - Shusaku Endo.

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Murakami Haruki. This and the next four are odd choices, perhaps, since it's a surrealist book, but IMO books that force your imagination to work hard do as much for creativity and fresh ideas as any of the more popular methods.

The Well-Built City (The Physiognomy / Memoranda / The Beyond) Jeffery Ford - Surrealist novellas best described as about the protagonist living and achieving agency within the constructs, dreams, and nightmares of a "Great Man's" mind.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson.

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon.

Dhalgren - Samuel L. "Chip" Delany.

"Worlds of Exile and Illusion" (Hainish cycle collection) and "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K Le Quin

"Singularity Sky" by Charles Stross

"The Player of Games" by Iain M Banks

[Speaking as someone who takes a lot of random book recommendations from side discussions on this site…]

If, like me, you're aware of how prolific¹ she was but have yet to dip in, where would you start?

Edit: Thanks! Looks like The Left Hand Of Darkness wins so far.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin_bibliograp...

There's a lot in The Left Hand of Darkness, but the thing I got out of it is there are some things that can't be learned by being told the answer. I could tell you what the left hand of darkness is right now, but if you didn't read the book, you'd be none the wiser. Some things can only be taught through experiencing it yourself, or through the proxy of storytelling.

Storytelling is the greatest tool we have for passing down wisdom to the next generation. Ursula LeGuin, we celebrate what you have taught us and will continue to teach us, and we mourn your passing.

> I am someone who has been often disappointed by vaunted authors of the past (Vonnegut, Clarke, etc.), because their work suffers from the "it's not novel (anymore)" feeling one often has when watching old movies.

Clarke and others established the mainstream of modern scifi: spaceships, advanced technology, robots etc. I do 100% agree that most of this genre has been done better later, and especially Clarke suffers from this.

Le Guin's scifi is ...different. Her emphasis is not on technobabble or flashy new gadgets. Her style is ...anthropologic. Technology and space travel are there, but in the background. And this line and tradition of scifi has received much less modern attention, compared to the mainstream.

So while Clarke has been surpassed many times in his chosen style, I don't think anyone has surpassed Le Guin in her style. Not that I am aware of anyone even having tried, really.

Just grab one of Le Guin's books (The Left Hand of Darkness is the most famous) and see if you like her style. I think it's still unique.

In the last couple years I've been trying to branch out to read more scifi written by women. I tend to be picky in what I read anyway and often give up looking for things and just read old comics books so trying to find works by women has been tough. Add to that the fact that there are so many self-published multi-book series on Amazon now that it is really difficult to decide.
There were a few scifi books by women that I read and didn't like but here are some I did like:

I've read a few Ursula K. Le Guin books and they were decent. All I knew about Left Hand of Darkeness was the stuff about sex and the midevil-ish setting surprised me.

I read a couple entries in The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells and I might go back to read more.

I really liked Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. The two sequels were good but less thought provoking than the first one. I think there is another story in the same universe that I haven't read yet.

> I would definitely recommend reading The Left Hand Of Darkness, I think it stands out among her best.

I slogged through "The Left Hand of Darkness". I was bored most of the time. And the whole gender thing felt very hamfisted and very at odds with real biology (reproduction generally tends to shut down when organisms are under extreme stress and need to conserve energy).

However, I do recognize that I am reading it in a different time from when it was written.

I read The Left Hand of Darkness last year. I found the names and place names quite tricky too, but it helped reinforce the alieness of the setting. Ursula's writing is so earnest and immersive. Rigorous world building coupled with veritably human characters made for a wholly engaging and pleasurable read.

I've read a ton of speculative fiction over the years (I'm in my mid 50's) but had never gotten around to reading anything by Ursula Le Guin. One day whilst catching up on some anarchist reading I found The Dispossessed listed in a "top x books for anarchists" or some such thing. And it seemed like no better time than at that moment to dip into the Le Guin's work.

I decided I'd start reading her scifi novels in near chronological order and began with The Left Hand of Darkness which I found devastatingly good. This is the one mentioned in the interview where Genly Ai the observer is embedded on a planet where the humanoid species are in the main genderless and only become male or female during a period of "kemmer" to reproduce. I can't do it justice here but I couldn't put the book down.

Next up were the three previous novels; Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions. These are contained in a handy single volume published under the S.F. Masterworks imprint. All of these are also excellent novels, if a little short.

I've just started The Dispossessed and thus far it's holding my attention.

I think if you've never considered reading Le Guin's scifi then I can definitely recommend from the limited sampling I gotten through so far. Some folks might be put off by how old these novels are, but Le Guin cleverly shy's away from using technology as a plot driver (perhaps with the exception of the "ansible") so they don't feel dated. Her writing and story telling is as fresh today as it probably was back in the 60's and 70's.

Also, and I almost forgot, Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" which is quite disturbing and thought provoking.

I love some of Le Guin's works, although I found that some are much better than others. I would definitely recommend reading The Left Hand Of Darkness, I think it stands out among her best.

The follow-up, The Dispossessed, I thought was much weaker and less interesting and in fact I couldn't even finish it, which was odd given how much I loved Darkness. But in general she's a more intelligent, perceptive, engaging and literary writer than many of her (usually male) science fiction counterparts, whose work is often barely readable (flimsy characters, lousy dialogue) or is reminiscent of what you'd expect if you asked a teenage boy to write the plot to a science fiction action movie (e.g. much of Neal Stephenson's work).

I read The Telling quite recently and enjoyed it as well. The Earthsea fantasy series is also excellent.

I read The Wizard of Earthsea in the 3rd grade. Literally. I would have it at my desk and try to read it by holding it under my desk.

Ursula Le Guin's is daughter of Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. Alfred Kroeber is a preeminent figure in the history of American anthropology and archeology, along with his PhD adviser Franz Boas. The influence of anthropology on Le Guin's writing and thought are easily seen in the Left Hand of Darkness, one of my favorite sci-fi novels.

If you're into social issues, Ursula Le Guin wrote several novels that combine sci-fi with social and political philosophy in a package that feels somewhat non-fiction-y. My favorite are The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Meanwhile, a more recent novel of hers, Lavinia, is a fascinating reinterpretation of ancient Roman epic fantasy.

Margaret Atwood is another author who doesn't get mentioned a lot around here but whose works of SF(she prefers "speculative fiction" to "sci-fi") I've enjoyed a lot. Her MaddAddam trilogy is weird but entertaining. You'll probably either love it or hate it. Many of her other works focus on issues of sex and gender in various past and future settings, some fictional, some historical.

Of course, I as well as a lot of other commenters in this thread are assuming that you'll be into sci-fi and fantasy, because that's what most computer geeks like. But even if you aren't a sci-fi fan, Le Guin and Atwood aren't typical sci-fi, so you might find them interesting anyhow.

I would have to add "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

A thing I usually bring up:

Le Guin's parents were anthropologists. Her mother wrote two books about Ishi, last of the Yahi tribe. One novelized accounting of his life and another non-fiction accounting of his entering into the world of the US in the 1910s and the work Ursula Le Guin's father did with him.

When viewed from this anthropologist lens, Left Hand of Darkness and other books are fascinating. She makes a world, a history, a people, and she occupies it. Then she explores that world with the characters. LHoD does this in a very literal sense (with a foreign character learning along with us, the readers). I think that's one of the things that I most enjoyed while reading her books.

Depends what you mean by 'hard'.

Anything by Greg Egan is probably going to be the hardest sci-fi you've ever read. Dude wrote a book where he considered the ramifications of a universe built on a positive-definite Riemannian metric, and another one where the universe has 2 time dimensions.

Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg explores what life might look like if it evolved on a neutron star.

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and Children of Ruin explore the evolution of other earth species if they were given a kick towards sapience.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is half space adventure (not very hard) and half an exploration of a lifeform which only achieves sapience in small groups. A Deepness in the Sky is generally harder and explores a lot of things, including the power of focused human attention, the difficulty of galactic scale civilization, and alien life evolved in a star system where the star periodically dims.

Steven Baxter and Clarke collaborated on The Light of Other Days, which explores the technical and sociological consequences of a device which allows you to see the past.

With a broad interpretation of 'hard' I can highly recommend Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, which have soft science but hard humanity.

Similarly The Long Earth series, a collaboration between Pratchett and Baxter, where it seems Baxter handles the sociological and technological consequences of the science while Pratchett handles the characters and philosophy.

Asimov's I, Robot is an exploration of what happens when you try to constrain intelligence with rules.

Asimov's Foundation Trilogy gets a lot of hype, but it isn't very hard and I also found it utterly mediocre. Instead I recommend The God's Themselves, which is so good it's like Asimov was channeling a much better writer to get his ideas down. It explores the limited interaction of our universe with one that has slightly different physical properties.

Also perhaps stretching the definition of 'hard', but I want to recommend it because it's relatively unknown, is Leonard Richardson's Constellation Games, in which an incredibly advanced multi-species anarchic alien civilization makes first contact with humanity, and the protagonist really just wants to play their video games. It's actually harder sci-fi than it sounds.

If you like Foundation, you might like the Ringworld series by Larry Niven. Ringworld is a classic.

Robert Heinlein's books are great. Some come to mine are The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers (much better than the movies), Stranger in a Strange Land, Double Stars, and The Puppet Masters.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is amazing. The Earthsea series are fun read if you want to get beyond SciFi.

>If you're into left-wing politics, Ursula Le Guin wrote several novels that combine sci-fi with left-wing preachiness in a package that feels extremely overbearing. My favorite are The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Meanwhile, a more recent novel of hers, Lavinia, is an SJWish mockery of ancient Roman epic fantasy.

>Margaret Atwood is another author who doesn't get mentioned a lot around here but whose works of SF(she prefers "speculative fiction" to "sci-fi") I've enjoyed a lot. Her MaddAddam trilogy is weird and preachy. You'll probably hate it. Her other works focus on SJW ranting about issues of sex and gender in various past and future settings, some fictional, some historical.

>Of course, I as well as a lot of other commenters in this thread are assuming that you'll be into ham-handed left-wing message fiction, because that's what we like.

>Le Guin and Atwood are typical ur-SJWs, so you might find them pretentious and tendentious.

FTFY.

The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are my two favorite works of hers, and I've read both a few times over the years.

But that's not what I used to say. I used to say that The Dispossessed was my favorite, and that the Left Hand of Darkness is overrated.

My opinion has flipped over the years. I now give Left Hand the edge, and I think that it's because the books are about such different topics.

The Dispossessed is all about matters I was concerned with when I was a younger man: the relationship of one's work with the world, and the ethics of the larger systems we operate in. It's a lot like other sci-fi books: a treatment of an idea, where the characterization (although strong for the genre) is secondary.

But The Left Hand of Darkness is, at its heart, about the relationship between Genly Ai and Estraven. The core sequence of the novel, the trek across the ice sheet, is beautiful and memorable as a depiction of a setting, but also as an exploration of human intimacy, with the device of Gethenian sexuality used as a kind of scalpel to shed light on how male and female shades our relations.

I used to think that the big ideas were what mattered. But the older I get, the more I appreciate that the big ideas are just extensions of what happens between individuals. The Dispossessed uses this technique as well, of course, but the intimacy of Left Hand just hits harder for me these days.

Wow, not well done.

Author glosses over Watchmen, Stranger in a Strange Land, Neuromancer, The Stand, Snowcrash, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Left Hand of Darkness, and several others that actually had some very interesting things to say on gender roles and treatment of minorities.

Author also ignores entirely the actual depiction of homosexuality and gender roles in The Forever War, and the various ways the protagonist treats (and is treated by!) them.

Author was clearly looking to be offended, and in their zeal ignored both things that countered their position (not surprising) and things that would've substantiated it!

Lucifer's Hammer, for example, can be read to literally depict African Americans and urban youths as savage cannibals. It's a good story otherwise, but there is certainly some facepalming in there.

"And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie

"The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin

"This Is How You Lose The Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar

"Priestdaddy" by Patricia Lockwood

"Black Leopard, Red Wolf" by Marlon James

"Consider Phlebas," and maybe the rest of The Culture series of novels, by Iain Banks

Her most well known sci-fi novels are probably the Left Hand of Darkness, Winter, and The Dispossessed. They are well summarized in the obituary. If you prefer fantasy, she wrote The Wizards of Earthsea series as well.

Le Guinn explores social and political questions overlooked by those who came before, and has had a profound impact on those who came after. The recent Hugo winner Ancillary Justice was heavily inspired by Winter, for instance.

I read “The Lathe of Heaven” when I was younger. I remember being fascinated by it, as only a young person can be.

I hadn’t really thought to look at her other books since then (which is probably about 35 years). I’ll definintely be reading “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed” due to the comments on here. Thanks HN!
And thank you U.K. LeGuin for introducing me to a world of ideas and possibilities.

If you're referring to Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness," I would propose that the Hainish universe's Ekumen and Star Trek's Federation share a similar flavor. Moreover, both bodies of work engage in speculative anthropology, although Le Guin's treatment has, in my opinion, considerably greater philosophical depth. This is not necessarily to dispute your contention, but just to point out that they share thematic elements beyond just the science fiction umbrella.

Winter? That's not a novel of hers... do you mean the short story Winter's King?

Anyhow, the Left Hand of Darkness and the Dispossessed are great books. I actually didn't get into the Wizard of Earthsea for some reason, but this was probably a problem with my teenage brain; I need to go back and give it another chance. I'm also very partial to her short stories, with The Birthday of the World containing several of my favourites.

The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are seminal works. As you've gathered from this thread, The Dispossessed can be understood as a critique of capitalism. It is not uncritical of the alternatives. Likewise, the Left Hand of Darkness can be understood as a feminist critique of patriarchy, but it isn't uncritical of feminist ideology. On a deeper level, both novels are nuanced ruminations on society and human nature.

Good science fiction is almost always about the present, not the future. As Ursula Le Guin put in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness[1] "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. (...)Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying."

[1]Full text here: http://somethingcompletelydifferent.wordpress.com/2011/02/15...

I'm assuming the title supposed to be a reference to The Left Hand of Darkness [0], a book that also deals with equality and comparisons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness

Edit: Ah, the reference is explicit inside the linked PDF, but I'll leave this up for anybody else is ctrl-f-ing to satisfy the same curiosity.

- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

- Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts

- The Tao Te Ching

- The Gateless Gate (Koun Yamada translation/editing)

- The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) by Neal Stephenson

- The Invisibles by Grant Morrison

- Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, The Bed of Procrustes) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

- Iron John by Robert Bly

- Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

- The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman

- Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

- 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

- Pharmakon by Dale Pendell

- The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss

- Greek Mythology by Edith Hamilton

- The Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual by Gary Gygax et al

- Introduction to Algorithms by Charles E. Leiserson, Clifford Stein, Ronald Rivest, and Thomas H. Cormen