Then he went on, “And, sadly, there are budget constraints. As a Muslim, you would normally be eligible for up to four wives, but they only allow me the budget for one. You understand, at times like these, we must all be prepared to make sacrifices.”

“A few of the crew ended up heading out again on other ships as fast as they could. They couldn’t handle the idea of being back, so they became space rats instead. I almost did too. It might have been better for me if I had."

There are families in our culture who commemorate the memories of loved ones with rituals such as lighting yahrzeit candles on the anniversary of a loved one’s death, or going out to visit the graves of parents and loved ones, sometimes on particular days or in some cases as a weekly picnic or whatever. If the loved one is frozen, resting in some unclear legal and religious limbo, what happens to these kinds of visits? You wouldn’t exactly be mourning a “loss.” But neither is

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin is offered to us as a book full of insight, a new, fresh, and informed exploration of that stickiest of all human adventures—sex. Within the action of the book, however, we see proclaimed not the joy of sex, but the heroism of abstinence. Estraven, Genly Ai's closest native friend, normally a lusty sort of character (we gather), abandons his sexuality and suffers the tortures of the celibate in the name of the quest.