The Left Hand of Darkness is kind of a unique story for this collection. It's what's usually called sci-fi, a loose tale on Romantic premises set on another planet. There's an odd weave of loose resemblances between The Ekumen and Euro-American colonizations, though the dark side of that seems to have mysteriously evaporated.
The plot dominates the social comparisons, which are many but loose.
Basically, here goes. Genly Ai has arrived at Karhide, a banana-republic style kingdom on Winter, a very cold planet. Genly carries an offer of alliance from The Ekumen, a loose federation of 84-odd planets of remarkably similar hominids who can't even really visit each other effectively because of the distances involved, but manage to communicate and travel a bit because of presumed time-distortions of relativity, physics' signal contribution to plot-contrivances.
Ai finds Karhiders' overly polite and indirect, gets booted out of the country by the king, a jealous king, who would have no other kings before him. He then gets busted by the cartoon-totalitarian country-across-the-way until his supposedly dishonest and disloyal original adviser, now in exile, busts him out and leads him across the local midwinter Siberia back into Karhide, to call the space ship and make another attempt at truce.
Entering Karhide, Ai's chum rides past the guards and deliberately gets shot to death. One might imagine that he does so because it's somehow diplomatically convenient for Genly, though that makes little sense, considering that Genly is a rather recognizable alien, and goes immediately to mourn his friend's corpse.
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