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Hello. We're back with another vlog!
The book I want to review this week is "The Left Hand of Darkness."
So what's it about?
A man from another world visits a new planet that has humans living on it.
We had actually colonized dozens of other worlds in the past, but they'd all lost contact with each other.
Now contact is being reestablished.
But this world is different. First, it's in an ice age, so it's cold, icy, and depressing. Just awful in general.
It's also different because all the people on it are hermaphrodites. They can be male and female.
Every 26 days, they get a hormonal rush that lasts for three days, and which can cause them to go either way.
They can get pregnant or get someone else pregnant. It doesn't matter.
It really impacts society in many ways, which are often very subtle.
So when our visitor lands, he's viewed with suspicion, but it's for two reasons.
First, of course, is that he's probably crazy or lying -- he doesn't have a lot of evidence.
But the second reason is that he's male. All the time! He doesn't change genders or live somewhere in between. To them, this is perverted.
It's an interesting and different perspective. I was fascinated!
So he tries to win over one country, which fails, ejecting him, and then he tries another country -- only to have both countries go to war with one another.
He escapes back to the original country through the frozen North, and things proceed from there.
But most of the story switches back and forth between the plot and the history, culture, legends, fables, and myths of this society.
It fills in a lot of the background of this culture. It's fascinating to see how different it is.
It's interesting -- while I was reading it, it seemed to be both a pure adventure and a piece of social commentary.
It looks at how men behave differently with other men versus how they behave with women, and vice versa.
It also looks at how they treat each other and how sex and gender in general can affect our behavior in many small ways.
A lot of times, it's easy to stereotype someone's behavior -- "Typical woman," or "Well, he's a man, of course."
But you can't do that on this planet. Either their behavior stems from other factors, or it doesn't appear at all.
It can set up a real sense of dissonance. You can't generalize based on the person's gender or, really, get the kind of response you were expecting, which takes you aback.
So it's a cool book! I have to admit, I wasn't fond of this author before.
She wrote fantasy in a style I didn't like very much, but I fully recommend this book!
That's it. Thank you!