I found it really interesting that there were so many concepts, themes, characters, or even words that we were able to connect with other science fiction type works even if this literary work wasn’t necessarily used for inspiration. For example we talked about how King Agraven is characterized as the “Mad King” which is mirrored in one of my favorite sub-plots of any literary work ever, that is found in George R.R. Martin’s  Game of Thrones. Because of the time the Left Hand of Darkness was written in, it very well could have been hidden inspiration for a generation of science fiction writers and movie creators.

Other similarities could include the theory of space travel and the Ekumen and even the word ‘sith’ that all bear similarities to George Lucas’ Star Wars while the concept of aging more slowly or quickly based on space travel reminds me a great deal of interstellar. These kind of similarities is to me what makes science fiction so grand because although many details of utopian or dystopian created words bear similarities, but science fiction writers are in no short supply of topics to discuss or worlds to create, and to me it seems like science fiction can only get better as writers and creators are able to build on ideas, worlds, and possibilities that those of the previous generation have laid out.

I just really enjoyed the fact that we were able to bring up different books and movies that we’ve all known and enjoyed and point out that there are many similarities between works that we love and the older works like Left Hand of Darkness that most of us haven’t read before.