Recommendations
Books Like The Left Hand of Darkness
A human envoy on a world where no one is permanently male or female — and what that reveals about what gender is
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness follows Genly Ai, an envoy from the interstellar confederation called the Ekumen, sent alone to the planet Gethen (Winter) to invite it to join. The Gethenians are human, but they spend most of their time in a sexually neuter state and enter periods of sexual activity (kemmer) in which they can be either male or female — not one or the other, and not determined in advance. The novel is structured partly as Genly's reports to the Ekumen, partly through Gethenian mythology and folktales, and partly through the journal of Estraven, a Gethenian politician who helps Genly when no one else will. It won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. If the premise of a world organized around a different sexual biology, Le Guin's measured prose, and the political drama of a world on the edge of civil war gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
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The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin's own most directly political novel — a physicist from a utopian anarchist moon visits the capitalist planet that exiled his people and must decide what to do with a discovery both sides want. Set in the same Hainish Cycle universe as The Left Hand of Darkness but completely standalone.
- 2Buy
A Memory Called Empire
by Arkady Martine
The most directly Le Guin-influenced recent science fiction novel — Martine's ambassador to a galactic empire navigates a court that considers her station peripheral, in prose that has Le Guin's same precision and the same interest in what empires cost the cultures they absorb. Martine has cited Le Guin as the most important influence on her work.
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Parable of the Sower
by Octavia Butler
A Black teenage girl in a near-future California that has collapsed, founding a new religion and leading a community of survivors — Butler has Le Guin's same willingness to use speculative fiction to examine real social structures, and the same sense that the most important speculative question is not 'what if?' but 'what would people actually do?'
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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
A woman in a theocratic future where fertile women are reduced to their reproductive function — Atwood and Le Guin are the two great literary feminist speculative fiction writers of the 20th century, and both are most interested in using speculative premises to ask what gender and power actually are.
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Kindred
by Octavia Butler
A Black woman in contemporary Los Angeles is pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland, where she discovers she is connected to a white slaveholder — Butler's most accessible and most widely taught novel has Le Guin's same sense of speculative fiction as a tool for examining historical and contemporary social structures from a different angle.
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Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
A pandemic that destroys modern civilization, and the artists who carry culture forward in the aftermath — Mandel has Le Guin's same literary register and the same interest in what human beings actually need to survive, as opposed to what the institutional structures around them say they need.
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Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
A man who lives in a labyrinthine house that is a world, who has been told a story about himself that isn't true — Clarke has Le Guin's same measured prose and the same sense of a narrator whose understanding of their own situation is incomplete in ways the reader can see before they can.
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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
by Becky Chambers
A diverse crew of species navigating a galaxy together — Chambers is the inheritor of Le Guin's tradition of speculative fiction as a tool for examining what diversity and cooperation would actually look like, and the Wayfarers series is the warmest contemporary expression of the ideas Le Guin developed in the Hainish Cycle.
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