Oh boy, Left Hand of Darkness is a good book. And I always tell people to not skip the introduction, because it is brilliant. “Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.”
I get the feeling Ursula Le Guin could have been a pretty successful realist “literary” writer if she’d chosen to. I am grateful that she chose genre instead.
I love that first chapter where the main character meets a politician and says something like "I'd seen his type before, was confident I'd see it again, and would probably see it in hell". I must have reread that line 10x.
I get the feeling Ursula Le Guin could have been a pretty successful realist “literary” writer if she’d chosen to. I am grateful that she chose genre instead.