Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand Of Darkness

In 1969, Ursula K. Le Guin penned the novel known as Left Hand of Darkness. Not only is the novel an excellent example of science fiction, it also provides a fairly revolutionarily view on gender relations for the time. While the science-fiction novel utilizes its pages as a platform for a treatise on gender relations and traditional power structures, it also comments on the structure of power and violence itself by framing the alien culture as at first completely counter to our own but at the a deeper level sharing many similar traits with each other underneath the surface.
Due to the fact that science-fiction mirrors reality, and that this work does so by showing a culture that on its surface is a polar opposite to ours, aspects of the counterculture

Its main trait is to be “not predictive, [but] descriptive,” showing society in a light that hopes to make its audience contemplate things from a different point of view (Le Guin xiv). Science fiction does its best to portray societal issues and possible solutions to them within the premise and societal conventions set up within the novel. The genre is important to the 1960s, as it was able to take the various countercultures and emphasize the problems they address and their hopes for the future. The genre also challenges current societal structures and norms of the time, as “the soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling” (Le Guin 1). Science fiction novels will also emphasize patterns the authors find worrisome within modern society, in this case, stereotypes of gender and power structures, as well as to a lesser extent various social ills.
In Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin was successfully able to mirror 1960s society and its countercultures in a country thousands of years in the future. She highlighted the lows as well as the possible highs humanity could reach. The novel not only highlighted how different the future was from 1960s America, but how things were still similar as well. It also used science fiction as an important vehicle to show issues in a different