Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness
Painted after Ralph McQuarrie
- 35 plates
- Ralph McQuarrie
The book
An envoy from a galactic federation arrives alone on a world in an ice age to invite it to join. Gethen's people are ambisexual — neither man nor woman except for a few days each month, when either may become either. The book is the slow, mostly failed attempt of two people from incompatible assumptions to trust one another, and ends with a long walk across a glacier.
Why Ralph McQuarrie
The temptation with Le Guin is to illustrate the argument. McQuarrie cannot; he paints weather, distance and small figures in large country, and that is what the book is physically made of — a winter world crossed on foot.
He is also weakest exactly where this book is strongest, in the interior and the conversational, and the cycle leans into the journey rather than pretending otherwise.
What to look for
Every Gethenian is androgynous, stated on every plate. This is Le Guin's entire argument and the model will quietly assign a gender unless told not to. No spacecraft anywhere either: Gethen has none, and a stray hull in the corner would undo the isolation the book depends on.
