Three of Le Guin's novels that follow the same cycle as this one—Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions—have been collected into one volume by Nelson Doubleday Inc., called Three Hainish Novels.

Besides this novel, the book by Le Guin that is most often examined in literature and political science classes is The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, published in 1974.

Orson Scott Card's classic 1985 science fiction novel Ender 's Game also uses the ansible as a tool for interplanetary communication, but it examines the effects of travel and communication on war, not diplomacy.

One of the greatest science fiction novels is Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), which has led to a series of interrelated novels about a richly-imagined world.

Doris Lessing is generally linked to Le Guin because they were among the first women to gain popular attention for their science fiction writing. Not all of Lessing's work is sci-fi: some is fantasy, and some is straight literary fiction. A sampling of Lessing's work can be gained from The Doris Lessing Reader, published in 1988.

Most of Le Guin's introductions to her novels are as thought-provoking as the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. Many of them, along with some original essays on the craft of science fiction, are collected in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, published in 1989 by HarperCollins.