The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Blurb:

A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.

Review:

In the beginning there was nothing but ice and the sun.

Ursula K. Le Guin. What can be said of the woman who was a chief pioneer of the Science Fiction genre? “The Left Hand of Darkness” is my first novel of hers, and I’m glad I didn’t delay any longer. 

Not because it was a particularly enjoyable experience, unfortunately. Moment to moment it was in fact plodding, seemingly simple, and often dull. There are very few characters. Emotion and action is present but often muted. Everything extraneous is removed, leaving it bare and naked as can be. 

A bit of a contradiction, but as I sat with it, it became clear these attributes were part of a larger functional consistency I could respect.

In those smoothed off surfaces there is a solitary and confident beauty that withstands the winds of time. Every line is purposeful and thoughtfully placed. Put a book copy on an elegant midcentury-modern table in a Frank Lloyd Wright house and you’ve got a full-page Bauhaus ad steeped in the ethos of “form following function.” Le Guin is a master craftsman.

Beyond the beauty though, I’m mostly glad I didn’t delay because it showed itself to be a seminal piece of literature for the genre. It simultaneously helped define “feminist science fiction,” took an original approach in examining androgyny in fiction, and I think most significantly, with Le Guin’s Introduction prepended to the novel, contextualized and offered one of her strongest messages on the power of science fiction and storytelling. These seeds and lessons have influenced works for decades and continue to be relevant in the zeitgeist today.

Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Though we didn’t start here.

Cast back over two hundred years and Mary Shelley birthed the modern Science Fiction genre when she penned Frankenstein in 1818. That beautifully symmetrical gothic story, folded within a story, within a story, told and finished, then finished, then finished again, was a neat trick of nesting doll structure, all in service of encircling the central question of “what does it mean to be a human?” Where does the answer lie between biology, science and soul? It was violent, beautifully Victorian, and hauntingly examined these questions, and yet Shelley had the gall to leave us wondering at the answers all these years later. Two hundred and seven and counting!

I won’t wax on the history lesson any longer. But I bring it up because Le Guin similarly has a couple tricks up her sleeve. “The Left Hand of Darkness” may not be quite as structurally poetic, at least as far as I can tell—I did call it dull and plodding after all—but what if we consider the ambisexual Gethenians, the “aliens” of the story? They are sexless and genderless the majority of the time except for when they “kemmer.” 

During these periods they take on alternating roles of a male or female, and it’s not just a quirky thought experiment. For if we examine their distant connection with humanity, we find we too are presented with the same centuries old question that Shelley asked us, of what exactly does it mean to be human? As integral as our genders are to many of our identities, how much deeper does our humanity extend? I won’t answer that for you, but look around and you may see we are scratching closer to the truth here. 

Our main protagonist, Genly, the “pervert” of the world by way of his maleness, is our single human envoy sent down to not scare the aliens. Of course to them, he is their alien, and he scares the local King regardless. Much like Frankenstein’s monster scares the countryside with his hideous inhumanity. A man permanently in kemmer? Disgusting abomination, and a threat to order and power. May he waste away across the ice fields.

So, spiritual as they are, the echoes are there between Shelley’s old and Le Guin’s “new” (if we pretend 1971 is new). Even as the genre continues to evolve we find ourselves drawn to those same questions with their same timeless quality.

There are originalities that set it apart as well. Setting up an androgynous people in this way leads to a society that lacks, for Le Guin, many hallmarks of our own, like most violence and war. There is still conflict, and even violence, but it is largely subdued within their cold planet. While there are volcanoes amongst the ice, this particular lack of fire is for me a chief source of the dullness, purposeful as it is.

It’s surprising that, when asked about any regrets about the book, Le Guin pointed to her own use of pronouns in it, where she defaulted to the male usage rather than a nonbinary one when referring to the Gethenians. The male default blends fluidly in the narrative as we’re reading from the point of view of the male, Genly, who struggles to comprehend the Gethenians and the fundamentally different reality they experience. But if the novel were written differently, with a more accurate nonbinary approach, I wonder what kind of imprint it might have left? Would it have been too ahead of its time? I hope not, and I wonder if instead it would have more strongly contrasted the differences between Genly and the others, and even strengthened the themes of sex and gender overall, and how those themes fit nicely with others.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

The world of Winter is a cold and often desolate place. Nothing flies in those skies. Everything and everyone remains grounded. Within this ice encrusted and quiet place, where physiology is symmetrical and equal for all, it’s easy to imagine how the Gethenian mythos and religion can flow from there, complementary halves forming a balanced whole. Ice and sun, male and female. 

Le Guin leans into this Taoism with other elements of the story as well.

Loyalty and betrayal loom large. Duty to the public, and duty to the individual. Betrayal to the country and betrayal to the individual. We see the story’s most effective arc in this way when Genly and the politician Estraven’s relationship fractures, repairs and grows again, and their bonds to their respective societies are similarly estranged. There’s a natural tension here that propels the plot forward as Genly looks both to fulfill his duty to humanity and his duty to Estraven. This tension between duties and characters complement each other as much as conflict with them. The conclusion resolves them in bittersweet and poetic fashion, quietly breaking the heart as one duty is loyally fulfilled and another is regrettably betrayed for a final time.

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.

And so “The Left Hand of Darkness” isn’t for everyone. While not particularly long, my fear is it’s going to be a mundane experience for most modern readers as attention spans continue to wane. But if you are curious about witnessing a legend, exploring a unique world from a brilliant mind, and are open to a subtle story full of thought provoking questions, then this timeless experience may be one for you.

In the end when we are done, the sun will devour itself and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing left but the ice and the darkness.

Le Guin has told a fundamentally simple story of a spaceman who found companionship with an alien while doing his duty to humanity. Her prose is beautiful and haunting. There is love, regret, and loss. While we journey across Winter’s ice we touch on those deep topics of the soul, but we dare not dwell on any for too long. For both our modern day society, and the far distant Gethenian’s, that’s just the culture we’re in.