The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
Review by Victoria Snelling

I put The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin up for my book club to read. There was a point before I’d read it where I was getting worried that it would be really hard going, because two people had given up on it only a few pages in.

But I have two hours of commute and I was determined to see it through to the end. As I am quite interested in gender representations in literature and keen to avoid problematic stereotypes in my own writing, I felt that this was an important book to read. Le Guin sends a male protagonist, Genly Ai, as an ambassador to a world in which people are not defined by gender. Each person has a monthly cycle in which they are sexually active for about a quarter of the time and pairings change into male/female pairings depending on the interaction of hormones between them. Every person will be male sometimes and every person will be female sometimes. Every person will be both father and mother.

The first third of the book is hard going. There is fantastic depth to Le Guin’s worldbuilding and there’s a lot to take in. The narrator of this section, Genly Ai, is also highly unreliable, although that doesn’t become clear until later in the book. While reading it I was disturbed by the judgements Ai was making, in particular the negative qualities he clearly identified with the female. The book was written in the late sixties and reflects a very stark correlation of masculinity and positivity. I’d like to think that is less true today, but perhaps it’s just less boldly stated.

Anyway, the world that Ai is visiting is split into nations and there comes a point at which Ai goes to another nation. Here the book changes. Another character, Estraven, becomes a POV character. Through Estraven’s eyes we see things differently and realise just how unreliable Ai is as a narrator. The pace of the story picks up and in the last half is quite the adventure story.

I was awed by Le Guin’s worldbuilding. Her world is worked up from the bottom meaning that everything is different and new and we can’t make any assumptions. After having read so many fantasies lately where the worldbuilding has been quite superficial, this was both inspiring and intimidating! The writing is wonderful; I really enjoyed the lush, detailed language. The characterisation is subtle and effective. If was going to make any criticism it would be that the various voices could be more differentiated, but it’s a tiny point. The Left Hand of Darkness is amazing; go and read it now.

This review originally appeared on Boudica Marginalia.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
Review by Adam Whitehead

Thousands of years from now, the myriad colony worlds of Hain (including Earth) are being reunited under a new interstellar government, the Ekumen. Genly Ai is the First Envoy, who sets foot alone onto the surface of the frigid planet of Winter (Gethen to its inhabitants) to bring offers of trade, peace and alliance to the people of the planet. However, the genderless inhabitants (who only have sexual urges and genders for a brief period once a month) are sceptical of Ai’s claims, and he soon finds himself a pawn of political factions in two neighbouring countries eager to use or discard him as they see fit.

The Left Hand of Darkness was originally published in 1969. It is set in a shared future history which Le Guin has used for several other novels and short stories, though foreknowledge of these other works is completely unnecessary to read this book. The novel also has a formidable reputation as one of the most critically-acclaimed science fiction novels in the history of the genre, noted for its complex themes and its use of metaphors to tackle a wide variety of literary ideas.

The novel spends a fair amount of time talking about the genderless inhabitants of Gethen, who have no sexual urges at all apart from a brief period called kemmer, when they are able to mate and reproduce. Le Guin has put a lot of thought into how not only this works biologically but also the impact it has on society and on the world. Her notions that a lack of sex drive for most of the month reduces the aggressiveness of humans (Gethen has never had a major war) seem obvious, but these ideas are constantly examined and re-examined during the course of the book and she steers away from trite answers.

Whilst the gender theme is notable and the most oft-discussed aspect of the novel, much is also made of the planet’s cold climate and the challenges the people face in living in a world mostly covered by glaciers and icecaps where the warm seasons are perishingly short. The politics and divisions between the neighbouring countries of Karhide and Orgoreyn are also described in some detail. As a result Gethen, also called Winter, is as vivid and memorable as any of the human characters in the novel.

Amongst the individual characters, the dominant ones are Ai himself and Estraven, the Prime Minister of Karhide whose interest in Ai sees him suffer a fall from grace and having to travel a long road to try to redeem himself. The book is told from the first-person POV of both characters, moving between them with interludes taking in myths and legends from Gethen’s past and also on matters such as the Gethenese calendar and sexual biology (there’s also an appendix which handily collates this information into an easy-to-find collection). The two characters are compelling protagonists, with Ai’s bafflement at his status as a man from another planet being considered incidental at best to the trivial politics of two nations leading him into difficulties, whilst Estraven’s characterisation is subtle and compelling, with the reader constantly having to review his or her opinion of him based on new information as it comes to light.

The themes that the novel tackles extend far beyond the obvious ones of gender and climate. Duality (expressed in Ai’s discussion of Taoism with Estraven), faith, the difficulties of communication even when language is shared and politics are also discussed and examined. But where The Left Hand of Darkness impresses is that these thematic discussions are woven into the narrative in a manner that is seamless and stands alongside a compelling plot. The book’s climax, where the two main characters have to traverse a 700-mile-wide icecap with limited supplies, is a fantastic adventure narrative in its own right.

Complaints are few. Written in the 1960s, Le Guin presents a few outdated ideas on gender roles and sexuality that were common at the time, but these are minor issues at best.

Overall, The Left Hand of Darkness is a smart and intelligent read that has a lot to say and does so in a manner that is page-turning, compelling, relentlessly entertaining and refreshingly concise (the novel clocks in at a slim 250 pages in paperback). One of the all-time classics of the genre and a book that more than deserves its reputation.

This review originally appeared on The Wertzone.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
Review by Zhenya Bourova

Feminists have been reading, and re-reading, The Left Hand of Darkness for a long time. Le Guin herself returned to the book and its setting more than once as her feminism developed alongside and through her writing. Now, over four decades after it was first published in 1969, the text itself has become bound up with the history of its interpretations.

I first read The Left Hand of Darkness two years ago. Pushing away the image that had imprinted upon my mind’s eye – those two tiny figures, all alone upon the ice – I remember feeling smug and ready to criticise. The book had begun, in Le Guin’s own words, as a “thought-experiment”: she “eliminated gender, to find out what was left”. Yet in insisting so strongly upon a people in whom the masculine and the feminine were blended, Le Guin made the gender binary – and the very idea of masculine and feminine characteristics – even stronger. If there was a radical point to that experiment – that is, the deconstruction of gender, as opposed to its hypothetical elimination — then the experiment had failed.

Reading it now, I feel that the book is not so much about that experiment as it is about impossibilities. The impossibilities created by our insistence upon dualities; the impossibility of representation, by the self and of the other, and also the impossibility of contact between the two. It is about the violence done to the other’s subjecthood in ascribing them to one half of a duality, and the impossibility of exiting a worldview premised on dualities to see an other as they really are.

The plot is sparse and far from fast-paced, but in a good way. A man, Genly Ai, comes as an envoy from Earth to the planet Gethen, seeking to persuade its rulers to join a coalition of eighty-three planets called the Ekumen. Gethen has an Earth-like atmosphere, but a semi-arctic climate, for which, on other worlds, it is known as Winter. But most of all it is a world set apart by the biology of its inhabitants, who are androgynous and sexually inactive except for an oestrus period each month known as kemmer. During kemmer, the Gethenians can take on the role of either male or female, in sex and also in reproduction. The rest of the time, Gethen is a society without sex.

The effect of the Gethenians’ ambisexuality, we are told, is multiple:

“Anyone can turn his hand to anything… The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be… ‘tied down to childbearing’, implies that no one is quite so thoroughly ‘tied down’ here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be — psychologically or physically… Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.”

On Gethen, Genly is seen as a “pervert”, a “sexual freak” whose state of “permanent kemmer” and fixed maleness make him the subject of both suspicion and wonder. When he fails to convince the paranoid, capricious (and pregnant) king of Karhide to form an alliance with planets beyond his own, he decides to try his luck in the neighbouring nation of Orgoreyn, which has a very different government. Arrested and taken to a labour camp in the far north of Orgoreyn, he is rescued by Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, who was once Genly’s patron at the court of Karhide. Together, the two of them undertake an incredible eighty-day journey back to Karhide across the Gobrin Glacier.

At first, despite the book’s far-flung setting, this sounds incredibly familiar. The male hero, by going on a physical journey through an unfamiliar and threatening landscape, undergoes a transformation. But for me, the most interesting part of the book is the extent to which that transformation does not, and can never, succeed, due to the effect of symbolically entrenched binaries and hierarchies on Genly’s ability to make connections with others.

When the story begins, Genly has been on Gethen for over a year. Yet he has by no means come to terms with being surrounded by people who, for three-quarters of the time, have no sex at all. He insists on labelling the Gethenians he encounters as either “masculine” or “feminine”, despite himself acknowledging that this is a purely artificial game – and one that usually fails. When he asks his building superintendent, whose curvy figure and “prying, spying, ignoble, kindly” nature lends itself to the label “landlady”, if “he” has borne children, he is answered in the negative; the lady has borne none, but sired four.

But the way Genly plays the game also betrays his internalised misogyny. The characteristics he associates with femaleness – in the absence of females capable of serving him as sexual objects – are mostly negative. He admits to disliking and distrusting Estraven’s “femininity”, which he describes as “all charm and tact and lack of substance”. At any sign of shiftiness, spying, intrigue, playfulness – but also, later, softness and vulnerability – in a Gethenian, he categorises them as female (and therefore other to himself). His difficulty with Estraven, then, is one of intimacy. Knowing him better than anyone else in Karhide, he cannot truly call him either a man or a woman without knowing the insufficiency of either label. And yet as long as he is unable to perceive Estraven as “an integral man”, he is also unable to trust him.

To some extent, this changes out on the ice. Genly is forced to confront the violence that his insistence on a gender binary does to the non-conforming subjectivity of his companion. When Estraven goes into kemmer, Genly realises that all along he had been pretending not to see the female in him:

“Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality… I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship, to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.”

But to what extent does Genly – to whom even the women of his own world are “more alien” than the Gethenians – become capable of accepting that kind of “reality”? Reflecting on their journey, Genly later concludes that he and Estraven “had touched, in the only way [they] could touch”. Yet was it only the man (who was also a woman) that he reached out to?

One conversation between Genly and Estraven suggests that it is not possible to transcend thinking in terms that divide and bisect the other, while remaining intelligible to oneself.

“You are isolated, and undivided,” Genly says to Estraven. “Perhaps you are obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualism.”
“We are dualists too,” Estraven replies. “Duality is an essential, isn’t it? So long as there is myself and the other.”
“I and Thou…Yes, it does, after all, go even wider than sex…”

It is impossible for Genly to conceive of wholeness. But then, is it possible for anyone? Genly is unable to conceive of an other as a full person. He can only reach out and touch – the mindspeech between him and Estraven is certainly some kind of connection – but to represent that connection, or the being with whom that connection was made — that’s something else altogether. This connection remains depressingly untranslated, by the end of the book, into the ability to see the Gethenians for who they really are.

Or, for that matter, to really see women.

“There are no women in it”, wrote Joanna Russ of The Left Hand of Darkness in 1972. The absence of women is not only a result of Le Guin’s (later regretted) insistence upon using the masculine pronoun ‘he’ throughout the book. It is also exacerbated by the fact that although the book insists that the Gethenians are manwomen, we see almost nothing of their alleged femaleness (except for the associations made by Genly). We see nothing of childbearing, or child rearing. If no one on Gethen is quite so free as a male anywhere else, or as “tied down” as women elsewhere, we are shown only the freedom, and nothing of the being “tied down”.

The woman-shaped gap in The Left Hand of Darkness seems to be very much a consequence of Le Guin’s commitment, when the book was written, to a bourgeois individualist writing tradition – and to a science fiction that answered questions about what another world might look like only in relation to its male population. It was, after all, written at a time when a major category of science fiction comprised what Russ described as “intergalactic suburbia” – where the world building, however imaginative in relation to things like technology, left unquestioned the gendered division of labour, and replicated on faraway planets the core values of the American middle class.

To be fair, Le Guin’s “thought-experiment” does question the universality of some of these values. For instance, the book does not export laissez-faire capitalism to Gethen (though the precise nature of the economics of Karhide and Orgoreyn is left relatively vague). Gethen is also a planet that has never known war. Yet a comment by Genly makes it clear that the causal link between biological sex and the division of labour is one thing that will not be questioned:

“It’s extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child rearing…”

Genly’s assumption – that women’s biological role in reproduction should also be determinative of the division of labour in the raising of children – is a depressing outlook for what is supposed to be a league of (I repeat, eighty-three!) futuristic worlds. If Gethen is to be the odd one out, it is doubly to be expected that the allocation of responsibility for the raising of children – not to mention the structure of a family – will be a point of interest to an outsider (and certainly to the reader, looking in). There is no excuse for deeming that side of life too matter of course – too humble, too ordinary – to be the subject of a novel.

And yet, for all its shortcomings, The Left Hand of Darkness has a feminist following well beyond the usual readership of science fiction. Perhaps this is not so much because of what the book has to say about gender as it is about the questions that it leaves unanswered – and the questions it inspires.

Perhaps it is also because its shortcomings have been acknowledged by Le Guin herself, who admitted that the book had Estraven doing only “manly things” during his journey across the ice, and regretted locking the Gethenians into heterosexuality. After over 20 years of experience as a feminist, Le Guin admitted that in her early years as a writer, she did not yet “know how to write about women”. Certainly the story ‘Coming of Age in Karhide’, published nearly 30 years after The Left Hand of Darkness, focuses back on the family, gives an insight into Gethenian child rearing practices, and incorporates same-sex encounters into the story. And Le Guin’s later works – such as the other stories that make up The Birthday of the World (2002), and her latest instalments in the Earthsea saga – also focus directly on the perspectives of women, without marginalising their experiences.

The Left Hand of Darkness thus becomes more than a thought-experiment. In being bound up with its many re-readings, it also becomes about the growth and development of Le Guin as a writer, and the journeys traced by her and other feminists in the context of science fiction. It becomes about the growth of the women who read and re-read it, who are inspired to take a new look at gender, and ask questions of their own.

This review originally appeared on beyondescapism.

For more information about this book, please see the entry on kwerey.com.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
Review by Isaac Yuen

“Estraven stood there in harness beside me looking at that magnificent and unspeakable desolation. ‘I am glad I have lived to see this,’ he said.

I felt as he did. It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” (p 220)

In a foreword, Le Guin describes The Left Hand of Darkness beginning life as a thought experiment, a story that grew out of a series of “what ifs”. One of those hypotheticals concerned place: What if a world was in the midst of an ice age? The result: Gethen, in all its frozen splendour. Rereading the novel, I was struck by the bleak beauty of this fictional planet, brought all the more into focus during the second half of the story as the main characters embarked on their bitter winter journey across the Gobrin ice.

Having a better appreciation for prose and imagery now than I did when I first read the book, I was finally able to perceive this world as Ai and Estraven experienced it, journeying along in spirit as they traversed through a “deep cold porridge of rain-sodden snow”, trekked past a volcano with “worms of fire crawl down its black sides”, and sledged over a glacier that resembled “an abruptly frozen, storm-raised sea”. The raw fury of nature is on display on Gethen.

“But the ice did not care how hard we worked. Why should it? Proportion is kept.” (p 257)

In a book filled with unforgettable quotes, Ai’s realization as he struggles across the ice stands is seared into my memory. Bordering on poetry, these three short statements help me keep my own cares and concerns in perspective, remind me of humanity’s collective insignificance in the face of nature’s vast indifference. For me, the passage serves as a perennial source for both humility and awe.

Along the way, Le Guin inserts metaphors from her fictional Gethenian myths into her character’s accounts of their adventure. In those instances, I see the landscape come alive, transforming into a being that pants smoke from fiery mouths, belches soot and stink from its depths, uses ice to scrape raw earthen bones, and yells hate in a blizzard’s tongue. Le Guin, like her creation Estraven, knows how to spin a good yarn:

“Our hosts got Estraven to tell them the whole tale of our crossing of the Ice. He told it as only a person of an oral-literature tradition can tell a story, so that it became a saga, full of traditional locutions and even episodes, yet exact and vivid, from the sulphurous fire and dark of the pass between Drumner and Dremegole to the screaming gusts from mountain-gaps that swept the Bay of Guthen; with comic interludes, such as his fall into the crevasse, and mystical ones, when he spoke of the sounds and silences of the Ice, of the shadowless weather, of the night’s darkness.” (p 276)

In a talk hosted by Orion magazine, author Rebecca Solnit spoke of the power of blending nature writing with anthropology, stating that to truly understand a place requires an understanding of a people’s connection to that place. The daughter of renowned anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, Le Guin grasped this more than most. Her treatment of Gethen as both setting and character, as an agent that shapes people and is in turn given meaning, infuses her world with a vivid and vital quality. As a result, Ai and Estraven’s entirely fictional expedition stands as one of my favourite pieces of nature, travel, and mythic writing, and a gold standard I wish to strive for in my writing practice.

The ambisexual nature of Gethenians has profound effects on their outlook and behaviour. In a world inhabited by potentials that can become either men or women with every 26 day cycle, humanity is not separated into two hard halves. With no inclination towards dividing the world into strong and weak, dominant and submissive, active and passive, exploitation on the individual, societal, and environmental level seems to be drastically lessened.

Another fascinating outcome is that war is unknown in Gethenian society. There are assassinations, blood feuds, and skirmishes, but no large-scale conflicts. Yet Gethen is by no means a utopia. Although diminished, exploitation is not entirely eliminated. Power relationships are still prominent on this warless world: Politicians still jockey for prestige in Karhide, while the Orgota state has no qualms about committing atrocities on its own people for the sake of the greater good.

By creating a planet of androgynes and exploring its sociological ramifications, Le Guin managed to create a race as alien as any imagined in science fiction. An observer from the Ekumen summarizes this vast difference in another one of my favourite passages:

“A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.” (p 95)

I always get a kick out of that last line. The Left Hand of Darkness was a groundbreaking piece of work when it used the science-fiction genre to ask these questions, but they are no less relevant today as gender roles continue to shift in societies across the world. What is the connection between one’s gender and one’s humanity? Do qualities that make for good human beings have anything to do with gender? Can we separate learned differences from the innate ones? Can we see and treat people not only as men or women, but also as human beings?

Le Guin is wise not to attribute these enormous differences solely on physiology; her characters speculate that the harsh environment also plays a major factor in shaping Gethenian society and outlook:

“And in the end, the dominant factor in Gethenian life is not sex or any other human thing: it is their environment, their cold world. Here man has a crueler enemy even than himself.” (p 96)

With much of their energies focused on surviving on a marginal world, the Gethenians have developed slowly, having never gone through an industrial revolution, not achieving “in thirty centuries what Terra once achieved in thirty decades” (p 99). Yet their slowness and caution brings certain advantages. Gethenians have found ways to live within their world’s carrying capacity. Their global population has been stable for over a millennia. They use centuries-old sustainable stewardship practices to manage their forests. Much of the technologies featured throughout the story emphasize economy, durability, and function: A portable stove/heater/lamp that could run for fourteen months straight; sledge runners coated with polymers that cut drag resistance to nothing; architecture designed for optimal function in deep snow.

With little room for experimentation living on an unforgiving world, Gethenians have adopted a worldview that focuses less on progress, and more on presence. As a world obsessed with the former, we would fare well to devote more attention to the latter.

The Left Hand of Darkness is told through a series of documents, with the bulk of the tale consisting of Ai’s report to the Ekumen and Estraven’s journal entries to her people. Interspersed between these two main tellings are shorter, self-contained stories, ranging from ethnological musings from the first Ekumen observers to Karhidish tales and legends. There’s even an Orgota creation myth thrown into the mix.

This narrative structure makes for tricky first readings. I remembered being confused at the insertion of seemingly random tales, which on the surface seem to have little to do with the main plot. But with a repeat reading, I saw how each perspective added another layer to the overall story, whether it be providing context to an alien world, setting up recurring themes, or foreshadowing in subtle fashion what is to come. For example, an Ekumenical report speculates on how Gethen and its people came to be. An ancient Karhidish story of a feud between two domains alludes to Estraven’s own past and her unspoken secret. These interludes are a clever way to add depth and complexity to the world and its characters.

“The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.” (p 1-2)

One of the (many) things I love about The Left Hand of Darkness is its acknowledgement of diversity in viewpoints. The multiple narratives help to remind me that a range of perspectives are often necessary to convey a story in its entirety. From lore to report to hearth tale, each is treated as a legitimate way of seeing the world and is accepted as a crucial piece to a larger, more meaningful truth. By seeing the same events occur through the eyes of Ai and Estraven, the story also illustrates how difficult it can be to communicate with another across gender, culture, and worldview, and how easily motivations and intentions can be misconstrued. It helps cultivate empathy and understanding, encourages me not to so quickly criticize or dismiss others, and to better listen to others who may have more in common with me than I initially believe.

“Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou.” (p 259)

For me, connection and change are the central themes in The Left Hand of Darkness, which at its heart is a story of two exiles coming together to find companionship. Their story has a rocky beginning: Ai mistrusts and misjudges Estraven’s motives, while Estraven is frustrated at Ai’s ignorance. Over the first half of the novel, misunderstandings pile up between the two, despite the fact that they both in reality want the same thing: An alliance between Gethen and the Ekumen.

But after Estraven rescues Ai from Pulefen Farm and they embark on a journey across the ice, they learn, as Estraven muses, “to pull together”. Much of this work is internal, revolving around Ai realizing and overcoming his own prejudices towards Estraven, who was the only Gethenian who was receptive to Ai’s mission when he first arrived:

“For [Estraven] was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust and friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.” (p 248)

As Ai comes to accept Estraven as she is, he becomes less absorbed, more aware of his actions on his companion, and a wiser and more appreciative person. His companionship with Estraven profoundly changes him and how he perceives the alien world that is now his home. For me, Ai’s growth highlights the notion that one’s own wholeness of being can arise from a relationship in which both parties strive to accept one another. At first, this seems to be a contradiction: How can one discover oneself through another?

The Left Hand of Darkness suggests that it is through love, defined not as physical intimacy or shared affinities, but rather as the risky act taken to accept another wholly into our being, that we come to know ourselves. To willingly embark on the journey to change from the isolating and defensive mindset of “Self and Other” to the receptive and vulnerable mindset of “I and Thou” is a vital step towards becoming a person who is at ease with oneself. In this way and form, love is not only a powerful tool for connection, but also for self-knowledge and growth.

Le Guin carries this definition even further in the novel, suggesting that this love on the personal level, between individuals, must be the foundation for any lasting societal, international, or universal relations. Idealistic? Definitely. But this is a story of “what ifs”, and the world as it is can probably use such a dose of optimism.

The Left Hand of Darkness, through the beauty of its prose, the craftsmanship of its narrative, the complexities of its world and characters, and the enduring relevance of its ideas, remains a masterwork almost a half century after its publication. It has grown over time into one of my favourite novels. I urge those who have not read it to give it a try, to be patient and open with it, and those who have read it to return to the world of Gethen and rediscover a gem of an Ekostory.

This review originally appeared on Ekostories.

For more information about this book, please see the entry on kwerey.com.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
Review by Chris White

“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.”

So begins Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. The story is one of an ice-planet named Gethen (Winter), and the arrival there of an Envoy from a vast human empire (although that’s an odd way of describing the Ekumen League of Worlds), sent alone to invite the humans of Winter into their collective. After all, “One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion”.

The Envoy lands in the kingdom of Karhide, where all kings are mad. The inhabitants of Winter have evolved in a singular (or rather, a binary) way – no Gethenian is male or female. They are neuters, until they reach kemmer (which is analogous to animals being in heat), and they rapidly change gender (or gain gender, I suppose.) Which leads to great sentences like “The King was pregnant”.

It also leads to a near-complete misunderstanding of social cues, and even between the two humans – “Ai was exhausted and enraged. He looked ready to cry, but did not. I believe he considers crying either evil or shameful. Even when he was very ill and weak, the first days of our escape, he hid his face from me when he wept. Reasons personal, racial, social, sexual – how can I guess why Ai must not weep?” It is a fantastic exercise in the social and psychological snags between two alien minds, even when so similar.

Ursula Le Guin writes beautiful science fiction, my favourite style of science fiction: anthropological science fiction. From the Kingdom of Karhide to its rival, Orgoreyn, she explores different political extremes as well. Karhide, an aristocracy, torn by power struggles at court and with a complex system of honour and social positioning, is dysfunctional, “Karhide is not a nation but a family quarrel”, especially when seen alongside Orgoreyn, at least at first. Orgoreyn is a socialist nightmare, is dystopian.

“He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.”

With Estroven exiled, the Envoy departs for Orgoreyn with the King’s words still in his ears: “…you’re not a traitor, you’ve merely been the tool of one. I don’t punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman”.

This review originally appeared on Chris White Writes.

For more information about this book, please see the entry on kwerey.com.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
Review by Grace Troxel

Ursula K Le Guin is phenomenal. A few months ago, I read her novel The Telling and loved the anthropological manner in which she describes the culture of her sci-fi worlds. I had heard good things about The Left Hand of Darkness, and was not disappointed. It is now one of my favourite books of all time.

In a futuristic world, Earth has joined other planets in a collaboration known as the Ekumen, an intergalactic group facilitating diplomacy and trade between worlds. The Ekumen contacts new planets by sending a lone representative to try to convince them of the merits of joining, on the principle that one person is somewhat innocuous, whereas two people could be interpreted as an invasion.

The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of Genly Ai, a man from Earth who is sent to the planet Winter as the first representative of the Ekumen. The people on Winter don’t have the same gender divisions that we do, but rather are completely androgynous. They are only capable of sex during a short period each month known as kemmer, at which point they assume either masculine or feminine genitalia. On Winter, normal humans such as ourselves are considered to be perverts, because their sexual instincts are never able to be turned off, and they are confined to one gender. Because of these differences, the social climate of Winter is vastly different than that of Earth. Rather than viewing the world as a dichotomy, denizens of Winter choose to live in the moment and focus on the greater whole. Le Guin makes us question the role of gender in shaping society and culture, while at the same time questioning how much of Winter’s culture is instead shaped by the planet’s harsh climate.

Genly Ai must navigate the subtleties and politics of the countries of Winter in order to convince its leaders to join the Ekumen. While doing so, he must to put aside his own preconceived notions of society and learn to adapt to a new planet, which is easier said than done, as Winter is still in the middle of an ice age.

Le Guin does a masterful job of worldbuilding, creating an entire mythology and history for the planet. Her descriptions of the icy world are vivid and breathtaking.

I’d highly recommend this book. Le Guin is the kind of author who can tell a beautiful story while at the same time constantly make you think about your own perceptions of reality. If you get the Ace edition published in 2000, I’d also suggest reading the author’s introduction to the novel, as it’s quite good. It describes her own views on science fiction, and is interesting to keep in mind while reading.

This review originally appeared on Books Without Any Pictures.

For more information about this book, please see the entry on kwerey.com.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
Review by Ian Sales

Le Guin is an author who grows as you grow. You can read and admire her at thirteen, and you can read and admire her at forty-three. As I have done. Because I think it must be around thirty years since I last read The Left Hand of Darkness. I’d never really felt the need to reread it because I knew the story. It’s one of those novels whose plot and characters have entered science fiction common knowledge – we all know about it even if we’ve not read it.

Which is a shame. Because it’s definitely worth reading, and it certainly stands up to rereading.

The book is set in Le Guin’s Ekumen, a loose mystical/economic interstellar polity of eighty-odd human planets with the world of Hain at its centre. Earth was seeded by the Hainish. The Left Hand of Darkness is set on Gethen, also known as Winter, which has just been invited to join.

The Gethenians have no space travel and, strangely – and uniquely among the humans of the Ekumen – they are hermaphrodites. For three weeks of every month they are effectively neuter, but for a week they are in heat, or “kemmer”. And the gender they take during kemmer depends entirely on those around them.

The Left Hand of Darkness is essentially a character study of a Gethenian called Estraven. He is the royal contact of Genly Ai, the Ekumen’s lone Envoy to the world. And it is through Ai’s, er, eyes that we come to know Estraven and, by extension, the people of Gethen. The novel is essentially world-building, and it’s a fascinating society Le Guin has created – a result of both the Gethenians’ sexuality and the planet’s harsh near-Arctic climate.

The plot of The Left Hand of Darkness is considerably less complex than the world itself. Estraven falls from favour and is banished from Karhide. The king’s new adviser is not interested in joining the Ekumen, only in provoking a war with the neighbouring police state of Orgoreyn. Ai visits Orgoreyn, hoping to have more luck with its “commensals”. He meets the exiled Estraven, who warns him that no one is interested in the Ekumen, only in using the Envoy to improve their own political fortunes. When those machinations fail, Ai is arrested and shipped off to a “Voluntary Farm”, where he is continually drugged and interrogated. There is an ongoing discussion amongst the Gethenians regarding Ai’s true nature – is he what he claims to be, or just the perpetrator of an elaborate hoax? This is purely Gethenian speculation; for the reader, Ai’s nature is never in doubt.

Estraven rescues Ai from the farm, and the two trek across the northern ice shield to return to Karhide. Since the commensals had claimed Ai had died of a virulent fever, his miraculous return should be enough to provoke the king of Karhide into inviting the Ekumen ambassadors to Gethen.

The story is told by Ai, who begins the novel with the line:

“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.”

Ai’s narrative is interspersed with excerpts from the journal of Estraven. And between the two they cover the entire period between Estraven’s exile from Karhide and the landing of the ship containing the Ekumen ambassadors. The focus remains firmly on the two narrators.

Since the Gethenians are neuter for 75% of the time, and can be either gender when in kemmer, their society is essentially single-gendered. So The Left Hand of Darkness is as much a book about gender-roles as it is an exploration of an alien Other. And, while it was first published in 1969, perhaps in order to better contrast Gethenian society with the reader’s, Le Guin seems every now and again to drop into gender stereotypes – especially for women, since Ai is male and Estraven is neither. But that’s a minor quibble.

The Left Hand of Darkness is Gethen. And Gethen is one of the best-realised worlds in science fiction. I’d last read this book years ago, but had since then reread The Dispossessed… and decided the latter was the better of the two. But having now read The Left Hand of Darkness once again, I find I’m not sure. There’s no doubt they’re the best two of Le Guin’s Hainish novels – which makes them amongst the best the genre has produced – but I suspect I’ll never decide which is best and which is second-best.

The Left Hand of Darkness does not disappoint. In fact, it does the opposite – I like it even more than I thought I did. I will definitely be reading it again one day. I might even add it to the bottom of my favourite novels list…

This review originally appeared on It Doesn’t Have To Be Right…

For more information about this book, please see the entry on kwerey.com.