Scholes, author of Structural Fabulation,holds the premise that Le Guin forces readers to examine how sexual stereotyping affects all personal relationships and individual personalities.

Ursula K. Le Guin works in a very different manner from John Brunner. Her fiction is closer to fantasy than naturalism, but it is just as grounded in ethical concerns as Brunner's work, despite its apparent distance from present actualities. Though some would argue that her political novel,The Dispossessed(1974), is her best work, and others might favor her ecological romance, The Word for World is Forest(1972, 1976), or her young people's fantasy, A Wizard of Earthsea(1968), today's critical consensus is still that her best single work is The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).

In The Left Hand of Darkness Le Guin moves far from our world in time and space, to give us a planet where life has evolved on different lines from...