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The left hand of darkness
2004
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Fiction/Biography Profile
Awards
1969 - Nebula Award for Best Novel winner
1970 - Hugo Award for Best Novel winner
1995 - James Tiptree, Jr. Retrospective Award winner
1970 - Australian Science Fiction Achievement (Ditmar) Award for Best International Long Fiction nominee
1975 - Locus Poll Award for Best All-Time Novel (3rd place)
1987 - Locus Poll Award for Best All-Time SF Novel (2nd place)
1998 - Locus Poll Award for All-Time Best SF Novel Before 1990 (3rd place)
Characters
Genly Ai (Male), Ambassador, Federation agent
Genre
Science fiction
Literary
Classic
Fiction
Topics
Gender roles
Hermaphrodites
Androgyny
Colonization
Setting
Gethen/Winter (Planet)
Time Period
Trade Reviews
Publishers Weekly Review
In this ruminative collection, Gopnik offers five essays on winter-exploring it as season and idea, elemental force and cultural influence. The New Yorker staff writer and author of Paris to the Moon composed these pieces for the 50th anniversary of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Massey Lectures. He acknowledges that "chapters are meant to sound vocal" and rough edges have been left in place. Readers will find pleasures of the serendipitous variety, including introductions to Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley, the underground architect Vincent Ponte, and the engineers who helped developed central heating. Gopnik's round-the-world tour of "romantic winter" covers more than 200 years in art, music, poetry, literature, and theology. In "Radical Winter," he describes the absurd courage of the men who raced for glory at the North and South Poles; in "Recreational Winter," he untangles the motley origins of ice hockey. Though the prose moves slowly at times, Gopnik leavens dense material with humor, and makes unwieldy concepts accessible through modern-day comparisons (consider Dickens the Francis Ford Coppola of his day). In the end, the lectures serve as Gopnik's equivalent to a Playmate's "turn-ons and turn-offs." That being the case, we'd call him a worthy Mr. December. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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