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The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin is probably the best known woman in science fiction. She made her reputation in the late 1960s and early 1970s and is certainly one of the few working 30 years ago to still be an active and instantly recognised name today. The Hainish novels she wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought her early renown and awards. The science fiction universe she created is sometimes buried by the success of her Earthsea books and the different directions of her later years but Le Guin has recently revisited and extended this family of books. In the course of her career she has written over 30 novels and short story collections which have, between them, earned her every significant award that SF has to offer, often more than once. Yet, some commentators have become uncomfortable with Le Guin's ideology, allowing their view of her best science fiction to be clouded by her subsequent academic reputation
The Left Hand of Darkness was the first great book written by Le Guin, winning both the Hugo and Nebula awards. It built on her journeyman novels set in the same Hainish universe but they pale beside this book, in which Le Guin fully found both her voice and her subject. The plot is, in barest outline, a standard trope of science fiction -- a visitor from an advanced civilisation brings a message to a non-space-age people. The essential twist seems simple in hindsight but it is an indicator of the new winds blowing through science fiction at the time. The people of the planet Winter are a variant human population, neuter five sixths of the time but who become either male or female when they become sexually active in the remaining part of the month. Every normal adult can -- and most do -- both bear and sire children. The result is a society where sexual inequality is simply impossible. This thought experiment is fascinating reading yet the book does not preach. These people have much in common with the wider community of humanity and the framework of the plot is strong enough for the discursive elements of the text.
Most of the story is told from the perspective of Genly Ai, the solo Earth visitor who holds the role of "First Mobile" to Winter from the League of Worlds. His mission is to bring news of the existence of other inhabited worlds and to encourage Winter's peoples to allow contact. He is, intentionally, a virtually unsupported ambassador, bringing a message of peace and technology; attempting to convince through his words and the presence of his space ship. They seem to find it difficult to believe (or acknowledge) that he is from another planet and consider his fixed sexuality a perversion. Despite his training, it is almost impossible for Ai to understand the personal or political values of the people he deals with. As a result, he is caught up in intrigue within and between governments. The neighbouring nations with which Ai is involved are broadly painted as a stratified, feudal country and a modern but bureaucratised nation. Given the different nature of these humans, the way such societies actually work is interesting through both the similarities and the contrasts with the expectations of first impressions.
Alongside Ai's reminisences, the book includes myths and stories as well as extracts from the journal of one of the inhabitants (which reads very much like an Antarctic sledging diary from a century ago, with its distance travelled and descriptions of ice and weather conditions). These give the book greater depth as an artifact and provide further explanation of the culture without filtering through Ai's understanding. Ai himself undergoes considerable physical and emotional suffering in the course of his mission; the book's ending tells as much about how he has changed as it does of the fate of his mission.
Le Guin's explanation of how Winter and its inhabitants came about is not hard science but the development of her ideas is fascinating. She builds up Winter's human and natural environments without falling into a lecturing style, offering plenty of food for thought by leaving as many questions open as she answers. The book also packs an emotional punch. Throw away any preconceptions and enjoy The Left Hand of Darkness.
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I really enjoyed "Left Hand of Darkness." She is a terrific writer.
The sequel is "Appendage of Antimatter" and is very hard to find.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
I find much Le Guin to have a very Taoist philosophy underneath it all. _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is no exception. Read it. Enjoy it.
Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes
not just "feminist" issues are covered in LHOD, she takes a pretty good swipe at sexual and racial indentification and sterotyping, too
i ?U rsula_K._Le_Guin
remember, the book was written in 1968/1969
here's a pretty good bio/biblio page
http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb-bin/exact_author.cg
she was way ahead of her time, as Heinlein was with "I Will Fear No Evil", when Heinlein's protagonist "he" becomes a "she" and has "her" first orgasm, many reviewers had strokes over the "smut"...In LHOD, LeGuin's approaches the subject much more subtlely and makes her points very effectively, just as Varley did with Scirocco Jones in the Demon Trilogy
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Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
... is Connie Willis. Reputed to have won the greatest number of Nebulas and Hugos, though who knows how one counts these things. Much of the SF is 'soft', but the characters are exceptionally well defined, she knows her history, and she can do tragedy and comedy equally well.
Doomsday Book is her most famous piece, and deserves its distinction. To Say Nothing of the Dog is set in the same circumstances, but a comic riff on things Victorian, including Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in A Boat .
I live in Portland, Oregon, home of LeGuin. I'm working on NW Raleigh St, just a few blocks from her house on NW Thurman. I've seen LeGuin speak, been to book-signings at Powell's, and seen her guest-lecture at PSU.
:). It's in her collection of essays, Dancing at the Edge of the World .
.)
She's brilliant, and her contribution to science fiction is immeasurable. I'm a man, and I don't want to bash male SF writers unduely, but until LeGuin started writing much SF was pretty dull.
LeGuin herself has said that for years she wrote SF as a man, because she had no idea how a woman would or could write it. Her main characters were male, they did manly things (conquered, explored, solved problems). After she wrote The Dispossessed she realized she was doing a disservice to herself, and to the world, and started to consciously write as she would - not as she thought others wanted her to. Her success is proof that many people agreed with her.
If you want to read more LeGuin, read two essays. A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be is beautiful social criticism, and interesting for other reasons: about half-way through she consulted the I Ching, casting the yarrows asking it to describe for her "a yin utopia." "Yang" being bright, masculine; "yin" being dark, feminine. A "yang utopia" would be, for instance, the highly-mechanized, clean, bright future cities of much of the male-dominated SF of the early century. A "yin utopia" would be, well, read the essay
Also, her introduction to The Norton Book of Science Fiction is a deep and thoughtful introduction to SF. The book is one of the best SF collections ever, and worth it for that essay alone.
(She's also written a beautiful poetic translation of the Tao Te Ching
On another note, for those who don't know, Philip K Dick also used the I Ching extensively when writing The Man in the High Castle. He said he threw the yarrow thousands of times, consulting the book at every plot point and decision. Circularly, the book's characters use it, too.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
On this planet, the founders wanted to both eliminate man's violence to women (and everything else in general), and to create a very stable society where change is possible, but frowned on. So they created a society consisting of 95% clones (all female), 4% 'vars', and 1% males. The 'vars' and males are produced by normal sexual means, but only very rarely. The clones are seen as normal, and each clone dynasty provides a specialized product or service to society. The vars are turned out into the world at adolesence to try to find their way, and if successful will create their own clone clan. The men are relegated to sailing ships and other minor tasks, are only used once a year to stimulate the cloning.
The story is about one var's coming of age in this society. And although it is not central to the story line, this planet has also been recently rediscovered by the main stellar society, which has sent a lone ambassador to attempt to initiate relations with the outside world.
Brin makes it plausible, and the storyline keeps the pages turning. I know most s.f. readers probably know him by his Uplift universe series, but this one is also a keeper.
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
About half of John Varley's stories contain the idea of safe, reversible sex-change operations. At least three or four contain the idea that this kind of sexual exploration is for the young. I can't narrow it down any more than that, I'm afraid.
His work is very interesting because, while it contains many elements that reflect what feminism should be about, he shows some pretty strong impatience about what feminism is.
I don't know the name of that book, but it actually echoes human sexuality in many earth cultures. Young men have wild sex at the drop of a hat... with other young men, taking both roles. When they go through the final rite of passage to join the tribe as an adult, they take a wife and never (publicly) sleep with another guy.
The benefits to the tribe are strong emotional bonds between the men, and a low (or nonexistent) teen pregnancy problem. It also totally freaks out our culture where even "teenage experimentation" is considered codeword for "flaming homosexuals in our midsts!" by a lot of people.
The point to all of this? No matter how weird an alien culture seems, there's probably an analogue somewhere on on Earth. Unfortunately most people dismiss these cultures as "primitive" (and worse), but science fiction settings can remove that stigma. Winter is one of the few exceptions where there is no terrestial analogue.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I remember this book getting criticism from leading lights in the gay community as well, to wit that her attempt to show adults with the characteristics of both genders (not to mention both sexes, for those of you who make the distinction) supposedly hit on sensitive stereotypes. Cattiness, in-fighting, etc. Never saw it myself.
A telling detail in Le Guin's bio: she's the daughter of an anthropologist and a writer of children's stories. As I am far from first to point out, the sciences in Le Guin's science fiction are sociology and anthropology.
Of course,the feminists who decry her work after the fact need to be--no, that joke was going to get me into serious trouble. Not that feminists are humorless or anything. I'll just leave quietly now.