Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Content warning:
death (parent, child), discrimination and bigotry (mutual queerphobias between protagonist and other characters), gun violence, incarceration, incest, kidnapping, murder, mild sexual content, suicide, torture, war and displacement
Synopsis
The Left Hand of Darkness is a literary science fiction novel. Genly Ai, an envoy from an interstellar federation known as the Ekumen, carries out his diplomatic mission on Gethen, a planet populated by a human subspecies of genderless, ambisexual people. As a result of the planet's lack of gender and prohibitively cold equatorial temperatures, Gethenian society has never known war. Cognizant of the cultural value such a society would bring to the Ekumen, the envoy works to convince representatives of the planet's semi-industrialized nations to join. However, political corruption, mutual distrust, and several misunderstandings force the envoy to become a fugitive and make a long journey across the ice with a selfless Gethenian friend.
Essay
Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.
The Left Hand of Darkness is arguably Le Guin's most famous novel. Written in Portland in the 1960s and taking place on a distant planet, the book does not directly engage with Oregon themes but nonetheless illustrates an alien culture that, in a few important ways, feels like the Oregon we know today. Oregon is most certainly not Gethen, but in the current political climate, the state has become a refuge for queer people. As queerness is defined relative to a hegemonic culture, the Gethenian definition is inverted. The permanently cisgender male, heterosexual Genly is the queerest person around, a "pervert" according to some of the less open-minded locals. Le Guin brilliantly facilitates this inversion through the Gethenians' monthly procreative state of kemmer, during which primary sexual traits polarize from a neutral state into the Gethenian equivalent of male or female. (This is similar in narrative function, if not in biology, to the Vulcan state of pon farr in Star Trek.) As you might expect, this difference in physiology from Terrans (as Earth humans are called) creates a multitude of misunderstandings for Genly, whose own cultural biases cause him to miss important opportunities for forging an alliance, ultimately making his task harder than it needs to be.
The meandering conflict of the book derives from persistent patterns of miscommunication between Genly and the Gethenians he interacts with. Between differences of gender, planetary climate, and social organization, the book spends its time searching for understanding between different cultures. This creates numerous beautiful moments, and pain in equal measure. In another parallel to contemporary politics, the mad king of the Gethenian nation of Karhide wants to rapidly develop the country through war, but Genly has an equally convenient and more peaceful route to progress, which is cross-cultural exchange. Genly's solution depends on an Ekumenian technology known as the ansible, a faster-than-light communication device. While parallels can be drawn between the ansible and the Internet, recent history has shown that the exchange of ideas does not necessarily lead to understanding. Genly's solution to the world's problems is his messianic fantasy whose closest technological equivalent in our world comes with the same potential for harm that any technology can have, and a lone representative of an entire culture, if the character were less altruistic, could seem imperialistic or even dictatorial. Le Guin presents a world untroubled by gender, yet it still develops a kind of warrior masculinity, and the best solution she can imagine is fraught with issues that are clearer now than they would have been half a century ago. Nonetheless, the book presents a defiantly optimistic view of a diverse and accepting unified society, and this optimism is infectious. I want to believe we can reach that utopia without starships, without ansibles, without magic.
Author Bio
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a prolific and world-renowned author of speculative fiction. Born in California, she moved to Portland with her husband and children in 1959. After several short stories, her first novel to be published was Rocannon's World (1966), set in the same universe as The Left Hand of Darkness. She wrote more than twenty novels, numerous short stories, and works of poetry and non-fiction.
Further Reading
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002)
- Short story collection including another story set on Gethen
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
- Sci-fi novel explicitly set in Oregon