Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
We join Genly Ai, as ambassador to the planet Gethen to convince its leaders to join the interplanetary union Ekumen.
The inhabitants of Gethen differ from other humanoid races in two aspects: (1) they have adapted well to tolerate the Ice Age climate of their world, and (2) they are ambisexual.
For the majority of lunar cycle they are essentially neuter, and for several days they enter a sexual phase, kemmer, during which they attain either male or female characteristics and become capable of sex.
On the surface, especially when presented with some of the older covers, it can easily be mistaken as one of those dated 1960s sci-fi novels.
But The Left Hand of Darkness is so much more.
It packs quite the sci-fi punch in the beginning, with its seemingly endless and meandering exploration of culture, custom and Gethenian terms that are thrown at you without any explanation or translation.
You’re left to work things out for yourself for quite a long time, but this slow set-up pays off in the end.
The world-building is rich and detailed, we’re thrown into a deep exploration of how cultural and political norms can force a wedge between societies, peoples, economies, collaboration…
The main distinctive feature of this culture we’re thrown into at the deep end with no life ring, is its ambisexuality and how that has shaped the cultural and individual attitudes of this society.
To really get the most out of the book, I recommend reading the foreword written by Le Guin herself, where she, in her typically poetic fashion, takes us on a tour of the themes in the story.
The main question we end up exploring is: What is the purpose of gender? And what is left when that is taken away?
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.
In this genderfluid society, the female and male labels have been stripped away as a form of permanently identity markers, so what is left when gender is a role that can be performed by anyone?
By extension, stripping away the ability to be permanently male or female – and only entering these states temporarily to procreate – also strips away sexual identity labels.
There is no gay or straight, there is only the individual who performs different roles at different times in their lives.
So, without these pesky labels getting in the way, does it get any easier to connect on personal level? And what happens when the person seeking to connect is not only a stranger, a foreigner, but an alien from a civilisation far beyond what the local one can even imagine?
No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.
Genly Ai takes us on a long journey of discovery, both of the self and the other.
As Genly Ai tries to navigate the politics and cultural norms driving societies apart, he risks his own life to bring about greater change.
The text does feel dry and dusty in the beginning, and I often found myself wondering why I should care for any of it, but Genly Ai kept pulling me deeper and deeper into the story, step by step.
And before I knew it, Le Guin had snuck in and struck me in the heart with a tale of humanity that is moving, poignant and heartbreaking, while being wholly predictable at the same time.
It’s by the guidance of Genly Ai that I, as the reader, finally begin to see how important it is to discard all the surface noise and connect with true vulnerability to others.
For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet, once more, as aliens. We had touched in the only way we could touch.
The storytelling is winding, the foreign language words and cultural customs are confusing, and Genly Ai, our guide, is only slightly less confused than we are as readers.
The story is a beautiful treatise on gender, without shoving gender politics down your throat.
A deeper perspective into who we are as individuals, an exploration of personhood and the miscommunication that keeps up separated from each other.
And not only does Le Guin strip away gender and gendered roles, but, indeed, most of the world. Driven into exile out on glacial ice is the only place where she finally allows two aliens from two distant stars to finally meet, only after they lose everything and become open to accepting what comes as death hovers near.
It’s a contemplative and measured anthropological sci-fi story which is memorable in how it presents the world, challenges your assumptions and reaffirms the humanity integral to us all.
Some people have said it was ahead of its time, but I don’t think so. It’s very much of its time, having been published in 1969 – only going to show that these ideas about gender aren’t new, even if every generation feels like they discover them anew.
Let me repeat; read the foreword. It will help you understand, if only after you’ve read the story to the end.
This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. […] The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future—indeed Schrödinger’s most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the “future,” on the quantum level, cannot be predicted—but to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
Like Genly Ai, you (the reader) are forced to be stuck in your own established ideas about gender, until they’re finally shattered and you get a glimpse of what lies beneath.
Le Guin has this funny way of writing that always makes me feel honoured to be allowed to read her stories. Funny, because these are commercial works written to be for sale.
But that just shows the skill of the writer and I am forever in awe.
This is a lesurely-paced, highly cerebral sci-fi that will change you in ways you never realised, and a shining example of how fiction is political, personal, and — above all — transformative.
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