If you return to The Left Hand of Darkness, two people go on a journey through a cold land; in The Dispossessed, a physicist leaves his stifling post-utopian planet for its neighbor. (This is an exceptional time for rereading that book, in the wake of the tale of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng.) And still those books carry more impact than the most lurid gravity-slingshotting shoot-'em-up.