Slashdot Mirror
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.
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. You may also be interested in checking out a Le Guin site that Duncan recommends. Would you like to see you review in this space? Check out our book review submission guidelines first :)
I read this book a long time ago as part of a still ongoing study of gender in Science Fiction literature. Specifically "strange" gender. The Left Hand of Darkness certainly contained one of the more well designed systems of gender.
It is a good choice for anyone doing gender-studies into Science Fiction writing.
Another book that I read at almost the same time I believe was "Half-way Human" that was about a society that included three fixed genders, male, female, and neuter - where the neuters became the servants to the others. Also a brilliant book, but I do not recall the author.
Amerist.
Mill Avenue Vexations
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
My favorite aspect of the book was LeGuinn's attempt at blending stereotypically male and female characteristics into those of uni/multisexual beings. While reading the book, I alternated my gender perception of characters, and noticed different characteristics emerge from them as a result.
Consider the complex political situation of Winter. If you read the interactions between politicos, viewing them as female, they appear remarkably petty and intriguant. When presumed to be male, they suddenly seem ruthless strategists.
The opportunity to choose and change the gender of characters at will gave me the opportunity to discover some of my own gender-based prejudices - one's I was not aware I had - and to confront and correct for them.
The book was a real eye-openner for me in this respect.
When read from a different perspective entirely, it is a brilliant treatise on the meaning of "Statesmanship" and "Patriotism". The exploration of what it means to do the right thing for one's people, versus the recognition of this, and the consequences, is something that is as poingiant in today's terrorist age as it was during the times of the Vietnam and Cold Wars.
The World of Winter is a great creation in itself. The detailed and lifelike descriptions of the land, it's people, and their lifestyle and culture, all leave the reader awestruck and familiar with the planet.
The relationship that develops between Genly and his liaison on the glacier, was a remarkably beautiful and touching motif.
The tribal, almost mind-altering Seer experience, simply oozed sexuality, and cleverly melded the pagan "sexual divinity" with LeGuinn's own Taoist leanings.
Definitelly a worthwhile read, especially given how accessible U.K. LeGuinn's writing style is.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
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
...
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
I just remember this sea of slack-jawed, wide-eyed faces, wondering what planet I'd come from. Here I am, talking about this really great book, throwing out terms like 'latent hermaphrodite'. Is it any wonder I had no real friends there? Or that I didn't have any dates with any of my classmates?
Ahh, high school. Anyone know how to excise 4 years of memories from my brain?
It's curious that today this fine novel is under attack as being a "sell out." LeGuin, the critics argue, was unable to be bold enough in her depiction of Winter and so the novel fails because it does not go far enough.
I find these criticisms, coming long after "The Left Hand of Darkness" was written, to be a crock. This was an earthquake of a novel. It changed the way many of us viewed gender when we first read it.
I took this novel, along with the later "Dispossessed" to sea with me and it made its way around a good part of the submarine's crew. We argued about it for much of the patrol. It had REAL impact in 1975. It has real impact in 2001.
Just don't let the radical feminists tell you it's a cop-out.
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."
There are a couple other notable science fiction works that address gender and society. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time takes an oppressed underclass woman from mid-1970s America and projects her into a future utopia in which differences in gender and sexuality have been erased. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale imagines an America dominated by Reagan-era patriarchy.
In both these novels, gender difference is seen as the central problem in society. In The Handmaid's Tale, rigidly-defined gender roles form the basis of everyone's oppression. The utopia of Woman on the Edge of Time depends on the complete eradication of gender roles, even using technology to allow men to breast-feed.
In LeGuin's fictional world, however, genderless societies prove to be just as oppressive and intolerant as the real world. Militarism dominates one society, political repression the other, and in both, deviating from sexual and gender norms makes you a pervert.
The Left Hand of Darkness is more of a thought experiment on the subject of gender than it is a political argument. It achieves a sophistication lacking in the other two novels. Both The Handmaid's Tale and Woman on the Edge of Time based their fictional societies on contemporary feminist political theory. Piercy gives us an unintentionally insufferable utopia dominated by feminized (not necessarily feminist) forms of social interaction and 1970s commune culture. Atwood creates a cartoonish distopia dominated by masculine militarism and 1980s conservative ideology. LeGuin's fictional world is equally rooted in the political context of its times; its cold war themes make it read, in parts, like a John LeCarre spy novel. However, The Left Hand of Darkness seems more plausible and less dated than the other two novels because it draws on a broad view of society rather than one focused on gender as a single issue.