The Left Hand of Darkness

How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills, rivers, and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plow land in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession. . . . Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.

Really 3.5 stars for me. This novel is typical Le Guin: amazingly realistic world-building, huge concepts successfully telescoped into fewer than 200 pages, characters that one genuinely cares about...and lengthy passage that are extremely dull (in this case, the seemingly endless journey across the ice). Overall, though, I really enjoyed this and suspect it will stay with me for quite some time.

I love the way Ursula LeGuin builds alternate worlds. She makes them differ from ours in meaningful ways, she changes things we take for granted and explores the consequences of the differences well. I want to read more of her sci-fi work.

The Left Hand of Darkness was a great book, all in all. It tells the story of an envoy of an interplanetary cultural and economic league, called the Ekumen, to the planet called Winter (or Gethen, by the locals), whose inhabitants, though humanoid, don't have a set sex: they go in heat once a month, and then their body temporarily chooses a sex practically arbitrarily. The same person could perform as male one month, and then get pregnant the next. The planet is also much colder than Earth, and thus practically in perpetual winter.

Genly Ai, the envoy, is caught in a very intricate web of intrigue and politics, trying to get the rulers he encounters to accept the Ekumen and join it.

LeGuin uses language deftly, mixing English with made up words in precisely the right amounts - for example, she uses "native" Gethenian words for concepts that don't easily translate to English, as they are alien to us, and very central to Gethenian culture.

As I mentioned above, the world building was also great. LeGuin manages to describe more than one Gethenian culture, and manages to separate them from each other, and also make them reasonable and unique.

Finally, I loved how the book tries to explore gender by positing this hypothetical humanoid race and trying to make sense of the different societal structures that could arise from it. My only gripe with this element is that the narrator often comments on the natives using pretty dated and somewhat sexist ideas about the sexes. I guess this can be explained away by an unreliable narrator, or by the fact that the book was first published in 1969. In any case, even though a bit off putting for a book that has such a revolutionary take on gender, this flaw is sparse and I could overlook it.

On rereading this recently, I was struck by two things; one was how well this book has aged. Granted, it has many flaws, most of which LeGuin addresses herself in forwards to some newer additions. It's oddly heteronormative, and takes male for default in a way which is just annoying, and can only partly be attributed to Genly Ai's narrative voice. However, LeGuin acknowledges these faults and in fact has written several short stories trying to address them, so I'm just going to mention them and let them go.

But I think the book has aged well because, although first published in 1969, this book remains one of the most creative re-imaginings of gender in the field of SF. It's still the yardstick by which we measure other books on the topic.

The second thing I was struck by, though, was LeGuin's depiction of cold. Approximately the last third of the book is a polar trek, and the whole of the book takes place in conditions not much warmer than a Siberian summer, so it's not too incredible that there would be a lot of cold in it, but LeGuin gets cold in a way that I've seen other writers fail at. She gets that the enemy of warm isn't cold, it's damp, and that the technique for staying warm involves addressing the challenge of trapping the heat the body produces without trapping the moisture. She gets the way everything turns fragile in the cold, and the way you can be warm for only so long as you keep moving. She gets the way that sleeping cold is almost as bad as not sleeping at all, and the calories the body needs to stay warm. I wonder if she's lived somewhere this cold, or if she read polar exploration accounts, or if she is merely very, very smart.

Any time you want to know what cold is like, this book is a good source.