I imagine youâre gonna have a lot of Le Guin on this ask! This is her sci-fi classic. It is a truly brilliant book, and I absolutely adored it, even as someone who tends to prefer grounded sci-fi. It manages to contain such lush writing alongside astute political and anthropological understanding. Some sentences in it literally took my breath away. The world building is astounding, and the use of gender was entirely groundbreaking.
"Then you could read The Word for World is Forest, The Left Hand of Darkness, [and] The Dispossessed, in any order. In Dispossessed, the ansible gets invented; but theyâre using it in Left Hand, which was written fifteen years earlier. Please do not try to explain this to me. I will not understand...The story suite Four Ways to Forgiveness is part of that universe, and so is the novel The Telling. But I have to warn you that the planet Werel in Four Ways is not the planet Werel in Planet of Exile. In between novels, I forget planets. Sorry...The Eye of the Heron may or may not be set in the Hainish universe; it really doesnât matter." She has so much swag.
