The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club for February 2018.

I'm Laura Miller, Slate's Books and Culture Columnist, and I'm your guest host holding down the book club fort.

Today, I'm joined by Slate's Jacob Brogan.

Hello.

And by Charlie Jane Anders, a writer and commenter, the author of the Nebula Award

winning and Locus Award-winning novel All the Birds in the Sky.

Charlie Jane. Hi. So good to be here. Yes, we're all

big fans of all the birds in the sky here. Okay, so today, we will not be discussing all the birds in the

sky, but maybe at some future date, we will. Today, we'll be discussing Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness,

a novel about an emissary to an alien world trying to make connection with the inhabitants.

This is a classic science fiction novel. It was published in 1969, and it really revolutionized the genre.

It was really the first classic feminist science fiction novel.

Let me ask each of you because I think we all have – this is a reread for all of us.

What was it like the first time you read this book?

Jacob, why don't you start?

Sure.

So I first read this book in a course taught by Hazel Carby 15 years ago on race and gender and by implication to some make sense, sexuality in science fiction. I read it in the context of Samuel Delaney's novel from, I think, six or seven years later, Trouble on Triton, which similarly is a science fiction novel that's trying to grapple

with the plasticity of gender. And at the time, I remember really fixating on those themes,

but thinking back, I also really remembered it primarily as an adventure story. The part that stuck with me are, the part that

stuck me with me was those chapters near the end, a section of about 100 pages where Genly I and Estravan

are wandering across the frozen expanse and trying to make their way back to Carhide.

...