Independent content studio Critical Content has optioned the rights to Ursula K. Le Guin’s seminal sci-fi classic The Left Hand of Darkness. Producer Tom Forman (Limitless) will oversee the project, which will adapt Le Guin’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel for television as a limited series. Le Guin will serve as a consulting producer, as well.
According to Variety, Critical Content hopes that the strong response to Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale will create an appetite for Le Guin’s discussions about sexuality and power. The novel follows Genly Ai, who travels from Terra to the planet Gethen (a.k.a. “Winter”), to try and convince the planet’s nations to join the Ekumen, a peaceful confederation of planets. But as he explores Gethenian culture, Ai is stymied by both the Gethenians’ ambisexuality—the androgynous inhabitants can shift their gender according to mating rituals—as well as the planet’s politics.
Forman, Andrew Marcus, and Raymond Ricord (also both from Limitless) will executive produce the series. No word yet on a writer to adapt the novel.
