The Left Hand of Darkness

"Unlike my other choices, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin doesn’t deal with technology but Le Guin uses fiction to perform a thought experiment. Hers is to say what the world would look like if gender was not an issue. She imagines a world where a state of gender fluidity means that people could transfer from male to female and back again. “Her society isn’t immune to human failings—whether male or female” The criticisms she received were also interesting. She was criticised for not going far enough with her thought experiment—for not taking the gender argument further. Which I think is unfair in many ways—this idea that you have to go somewhere with a thought experiment. In her case her fictive journey takes her in a particular direction. I like the book for the debate it engendered. By coincidence, I read it in Iceland which was a remarkable experience. In Left Hand of Darkness the world is called Winter and there is peace and gender equality—which is very similar to Iceland today in all sorts of ways. Well this is connected to why she was criticised. People wanted her, in exploring a gender fluid society, to discover a utopia. And she didn’t, it’s no utopia. Society nearly succumbs to war. These people are not better or more trustworthy for being genderfluid. The perceived ‘bad’ elements usually considered hyper-masculine are not eliminated in the society that Le Guin describes. Her society isn’t immune to human failings—whether male or female."

"Le Guin introduced the notion of what some people would call ‘social science fiction.’ I’m not sure I entirely embrace that term, because the social and the scientific are always working together. But because there is this older tradition of science fiction being all about physics, space travel and stuff, there were attempts to imagine technological change without social change, and social science fiction refuses that worldview. Indeed, sometimes there are not even any technological changes but just social changes that mark the world as different. But let’s get back to the novel. In one of the introductions that it has been published with, she specifically describes it as a thought experiment. It’s a simple idea: what if there was no gender? What if people were neutral in their gender, and only took on gender characteristics for sexual reproduction? If anybody could take on either masculine or feminine characteristics, and if throughout your lifetime you might be both, then what would it mean? We have a world thoroughly saturated with gender difference and patriarchal worldviews, and Le Guin makes us realize how true this is by the contrast. Again, much like we were talking about with The Dispossessed , this doesn’t mean we get a magical utopia where everybody gets along. There are no gender hierarchies, but the power games are different. In fact, one of the things that was most exciting for me about this novel when I first read it is how Genly— —yes, how much he gets wrong, because he can’t help but see the world through the assumptions of a gendered culture. So he makes mistakes: he genders people, even when their understanding of themselves is not gendered. Because of his sense of who is female and who is masculine, he trusts the wrong people. He misunderstands the power games that are going on. So it’s an extended experiment in how thoroughly cultural assumptions shape our ability to even perceive the world. To me, that’s the most exciting part of the novel. I know other people are interested in the relationship of trust that develops between two characters across different cultures; there’s also that really strong interpersonal dimension to the novel. To a degree. She was also very influenced by Taoism, notions of balance, and perceiving difference dialectically rather than as a binary, so yes it can be arbitrary or mistaken, but that doesn’t mean that there is an opposite to that which we could call correct. That’s something that comes out strongly in her philosophy. The quotation you just read reminds me of one of my own favourite things she said. This was when she got the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters in 2014; in her speech she not only thanked the committee for giving her the award, but said it was high time that speculative fiction writers were recognised as participants in the culture of literature, instead of being sort of segregated to a ghetto—she called them “realists of a larger reality.” And she reminded everyone how important science fiction is because the genre is about “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now.” I strongly agree with her and I hope this comes through in the work that I do. Science fiction is such a necessary genre today, because in many ways we do have to remember how to think otherwise in the dystopian world we are living in: a world of ever-present racism, ever-growing economic inequality, and returning ethno-nationalism, a world where Covid-19 has shown us how vast the gaps between the privileged and non-privileged are. This is not just the way things are, unchangeable. She said: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—so did the divine right of kings.” We no longer live in that world. So that capacity to imagine things otherwise is so important, politically."

"As I said, the theme of Dune is the environment, and the theme of The Left Hand of Darkness is gender, which is something that I think all of us are deeply interested in on the most personal level. The setting of The Left Hand of Darkness is a world where the inhabitants are humans, or very closely related to humans, with the exception that they don’t have a gender most of the time. They can turn either male or female for a couple of days a month and that’s the point when babies get made, if I can put it that way. Apart from that, there isn’t the gendered hierarchy of society that we’re used to. The story is about an explorer who comes to visit the planet and becomes engaged and entwined with its politics. The other thing to say, which is one of the other striking parts of the portrayal, is that the planet is portrayed as very cold. There’s a particularly memorable passage of a desperate attempt to escape across an ice field. Both climate and the new society are very compellingly described by Ursula Le Guin, who was one of the greatest science fiction writers of the 20th century. One comes back again and again to the gender question. This isn’t just a political adventure set among primitive inhabitants of a cold planet; this is a setting that makes us challenge and question some of the things that most of us consider pretty fundamental to our human identity, and maybe shows us that there are other ways of thinking about these things. As I say, I work in Europe. There are languages that I have contact with, like Hungarian and Finnish, that don’t actually have grammatical gender. And it’s notable that Finland was the first country in Europe where women got the vote; I wonder if these two things are connected. That’s a world that’s closed to those of us who don’t speak Hungarian or Finnish, which is most of us. Ursula Le Guin manages to open up these questions for an English-speaking audience, or, indeed, for an audience that speaks any language with gendered pronouns."

"Ursula Le Guin may be the writer I most admire. The Left Hand of Darkness , published in 1969, may be her best novel. Set on a beautifully evoked wintry planet, it concerns a diplomatic envoy called Genly Ai who visits the world to invite it to join an interplanetary polity called the Ekumen. The inhabitants, the Gethenians, have no fixed gender. For three weeks in the month they have no gender at all, then for a week they go into “kemmer”, a period of sexual receptivity during which they may become either biologically male or female, depending on the gender of those around them. This enables Le Guin to explore the extent to which gender determines society – what would a world look like if its gender roles weren’t fixed the ways ours are? There is something solid and appealing in the society Le Guin portrays, although at the same time it is intensely conservative, the frozen landscape it inhabits an externalisation of its inner stasis. The novel also incorporates a mystical aspect, one the rationalist Genly finds hard to assimilate. Travelling from the quasi-Western country of Karhide to Orgoreym, ruled by a quasi-communist totalitarian regime, Genly eventually makes his way over the glaciers back to Karhide with his companion Estraven. The novel increasingly focuses on the love that grows between Genly and Estraven – which Le Guin handles very movingly indeed. The Left Hand of Darkness is often discussed, and indeed taught, as a machine for thinking about gender, and it performs that function admirably. But there is much more to it than that. There is a rather dangerous gender-essentialism in the assumption that Le Guin, being female, must have subordinated her aesthetic project to feminist proselytising. Le Guin’s writing is always much more balanced than that. Indeed, that balance as such forms one of her major concerns. Left Hand balances form to theme, and symbol to narration, flawlessly. In a strange way, the book also articulates something about time – in this case, about stasis as both security and oppression."

"If I hadn't loved those books, I probably wouldn't have married him."