The prophetic insight of The Left Hand of Darkness lies in its exploration of what came to be called gender issues. As Ursula Le Guin herself has said, in 1969 the feminist movement was only beginning, and even gender bias in language—she uses “he” throughout for the hermaphroditic Gethenians—had not been investigated. The real difference between men and women, however, was an elemental question for Le Guin and other feminist thinkers of that time. Her “thought experiment” of having a hapless Terran male adrift in a world with no gender markers was inspired.

Ai’s discomfort at having no clues to guide his relationships is fascinating and instructive. He suffers far greater unease that he would have if confronted with a conventionally alien life-form. The book captures the common human process of perceiving a new acquaintance: The sexual shell often disappears and, over time, the inner, sexless personality emerges. To confront the personality without the matrix of gender, as Ai does, can be frightening. Ai’s accommodation to this new perspective is truly humane: To Ai, Estraven becomes familiar yet alien, reassuring yet finally mysterious, like another human. Le Guin thus makes her point about gender differences.

The novel involves far more than gender twisting. The two societies of Karhide and Orgoreyn are wonderfully conceived, evocative of familiar societies while retaining their distinct alien identity. Karhide is medieval and monarchical, a traditional society still youthful in the stiff, independent rectitude of its citizens, a country vaguely reminiscent of Eastern Europe. In perfect contrast is Orgoreyn. Its people have chosen the completely different route of overorganization into bureaucratic apparatus, and the initially benign appearance of the society turns out to be a cover for secret police and prison camps. The two societies inevitably suggest the contrast of the disorderly individualism and frontier ethic of the United States in juxtaposition with the collectivism and group consciousness of the former Soviet Union, with its Potemkin villages and gulags in the snow.

Religions also are contrasted. Handdara, the faith practiced in Karhide, is an Eastern type of religion stressing a yin and yang opposition: “Light is the left hand of darkness/ and darkness the right hand of light.” Yomesh, found mainly in Orgoreyn, is more in the Western tradition of a revealed faith based on a prophet, with truth capable of being distinguished from illusion. The contrast in the two religions parallels the sexual and political contrasts in the book, with the suggestion that experience of both viewpoints is necessary for a full and humane understanding.

If science fiction is to be judged not only for the validity and interest of its ideas but also for the integrity and believability of the fictional worlds it creates, The Left Hand of Darkness succeeds brilliantly on every count. In its exploration of gender and of the never-resolved differences of East and West, the novel is an excellent primer for the problems that bedevil Earth, yet Gethen is as complete a world as one could wish for, detailed and utterly convincing. Le Guin shows the value of seeing through the eyes of the Other as well as the enormous difficulty in perceiving what is complementary in the initially alien.