The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, June 2023 Book Club Reading

[Falselogic]

From Wikipedia:
The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by U.S. writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in 1969, it became immensely popular, and established Le Guin's status as a major author of science fiction. It was fourth in sequence of writing among the Hainish series, preceded by City of Illusions, and followed by The Word for World Is Forest.

The Left Hand of Darkness was among the first books in the genre now known as feminist science fiction and is the most famous examination of androgyny in science fiction. A major theme of the novel is the effect of sex and gender on culture and society, explored in particular through the relationship between the book's characters. The novel also explores the interaction between the unfolding loyalties of its two main characters.

Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. She was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books.

 

[lincolnic]

Having never read any Ursula K. Le Guin, I'm very exciting to read this one. My library hold is currently in transit to my local branch, so I'll start it this week once it arrives.

 

[Falselogic]

Waiting for my copy as well!

 

[John]

I've only read The Word for World is Forest, which I liked a bit. I may have dabbled in the first Earthsea book, but they had no impression on me at the time. I just started this one, and it feels like it's going to be a dense and good read.

 

[lincolnic]

I finally started this last night, and I'll admit I'm having a bit of a tough time so far. I'm only two chapters in, but you really get thrown in the deep end immediately. There's a ton of Proper Nouns and Full Names and the writing (as would be expected from a book written as an official report) is very dry. I'm gonna stick with it, hopefully things will solidify a bit with another few chapters.

 

[John]

I also had the same reaction, but it does get easier. Starting in Chapter 3, she changes the point of view character around. If you want to cheat, skip ahead and read Chapter 7, which is a report from the first investigators, and details most of the stuff that’s unfamiliar. You can figure most stuff out through context though.

I just got to chapter 9, so still have quite a ways to go. I like it a lot, and its views on gender vs sex are still eye opening, all while navigating the different politics and sociology traits in these small microcosm city states. It reminds me a ton of The Moon Moth short story by Jack Vance, where communication and interpersonal relations are also governed by a Prestige system that readers are unfamiliar with. I wonder if Le Guin read that, borrowed the concept of strakh prestige and renamed it shifgrethor.

 

[Falselogic]

I just got my copy. I've got to finish up my current read though. I'm going to be cutting it close this month...

 

[Violentvixen]

Just finished chapter 1 and I am absolutely loving the beauty of the writing and how it hints at so much more to this culture that the narrator admits to not understanding. Death walks behind the king. People swarm like fleas. The speech on patriotism being about fear instead of the assumption of love.

 

[Epithet]

Oh, I just reread this recently, and I've been thinking about it. I remember being overwhelmed by the first chapter when I first read it, but on rereading it it kind of felt like a clear explanation of what was happening in plain language. Maybe it's the accumulation of an extra decade+ of experience, maybe it was context from reading it before, and maybe the feeling of alienation and confusion was a jumbled memory from...a decade plus ago. At any rate Genly is definitely overwhelmed and out of his depth at the beginning, on top of being baking hot in heavy winter clothes. I actually think the ways in which he is and isn't naive about politics are fairly interesting:

Spoiler: First half or so spoilers

He's from a kind enough society that he can't recognize when an Evil Vizier is after him, and he's oblivious to the specifics of shifgrethor despite knowing the broad strokes from the first investigators, but he's still enough of a historian and enough of a native of *Earth* to recognize a secret police when he sees one.

There's another later short story by Leguin, set on another planet, where a character remembers reading about Gethen and wonders what it's like to live in a world with No War, but Gethen is still defined by violent conflict in a lot of respects....

Spoiler: Stuff from the rest of the book that's more incidental\thematic

They've just been in circumstances where, for a long time, there weren't the resources or cultural disposition for a long time. In Karhide they were getting into feuds and bronze age raiding each other and burning granaries (no herd animals to steal, though) until they developed guns and everything. And even though mass conflict is unheard of, violent death looms large in the folklore that appears, even aside from the possibility of a full scale war being the crux of the plot. In the Orgota creation myth the Cain/Adam/Eve figure chops through like 30 dormant fellow-humans and makes a home of their frozen bodies, forever staining their descendants with their inevitable death.

 

[Ludendorkk]

Jealous of all you reading this for the first time. I think Le Guin is, bar none, the greatest writer of the 20th century, and this is a great book.

Just finished chapter 1 and I am absolutely loving the beauty of the writing and how it hints at so much more to this culture that the narrator admits to not understanding. Death walks behind the king. People swarm like fleas. The speech on patriotism being about fear instead of the assumption of love.

Nobody does fake mythos like Le Guin, you could tell both her parents were anthropologists

 

[Violentvixen]

Nobody does fake mythos like Le Guin, you could tell both her parents were anthropologists

So true, it's honestly the kind of science writing I wanted to do back when I wasn't sure I wanted to fully go into science.

Also a fun coincidence: I'm reading a local book about the history/geology/biology of the High Desert, and it happened to mention that Le Guin did a couple writer's workshops/conferences out here. I knew she came out here a lot but hadn't really thought about it and poked around a little to see what I could find.

I found this short diary-like piece on staying at a ranch out here for a week that is a lovely quick read.

Then I found this short essay on resorts and the Lynx at a local museum. It's from 2010 and she forsees all the issues with the cookie cutter resorts and lack of public transport that are significant in 2023, but the second half of the essay which focuses on the Lynx is breathtaking. I saw him when I was first here, his name was Snowshoe, he passed away several years ago but was beautiful.

Anyway that went on too long but I don't think I would have dug into this if I wasn't reading Left Hand of Darkness right now. I'm very happy this inspired me to find these pieces.

 

[John]

I was amusing myself by comparing Genly to Mario, and the Gethenians to the Shiverians (big round snow kingdom peoples in Mario Odyssey) but that turned dark once I got to the labor camp, where I’m currently at. Mario being chemically castrated and interrogated weekly while stuck doing menial labor is less funny than you’d think.

 

[Violentvixen]

Finished it, loved it. Beautiful writing although their time on the ice probably could have been 5-10 pages shorter.

Her choice to have Genly be a misogynist and also how little it comes up due to his assumption of maleness as the default is pretty interesting. How quickly he becomes discounts anyone with female features is an interesting twist in a book like this. The back of my kindle copy had a discussion of this and remarks that he's "bad at his job" which I think is an odd way of phrasing it, but it's certainly a character weakness.

Their sexual setup is a form of what I would love to have in real life honestly. Be neutral/androgynous at work and in general but then have times where secondary sex characteristics are prevalent and exciting.

I'd be curious to read others in the Hainish cycle. The note that all the people on the planets are the result of long ago experiments is fascinating. So, so glad I finally read this.

 

[Epithet]

Her choice to have Genly be a misogynist and also how little it comes up due to his assumption of maleness as the default is pretty interesting. How quickly he becomes discounts anyone with female features is an interesting twist in a book like this. The back of my kindle copy had a discussion of this and remarks that he's "bad at his job" which I think is an odd way of phrasing it, but it's certainly a character weakness.

I think that's partly a product of the time and the kind of things that were being published then. Like a couple of the other Hain books have male protagonists who occasionally conduct themselves in very dudely fashion, and some of her *really* old books feel kind of shrunk down by the expectations of older science fiction. I think Genly's reactions are an interesting part of the text, though, because there are no gendered standards of behavior, so it's easy for anyone's actions to repulse him as *feminine*.

I think a lot about how she was writing and looking back on her older novels for longer than I was alive. Like I remember reading the 25th anniversary edition of Left Hand, which has an introduction talking about how using "he" for all the Gethenians was a product of following prescriptivist latinized grammar and doesn't really fit the text. There's no changing a 25 year old manuscript, though, but there was a post script with like...a couple of chapters reworked in various ways, like using an invented pronoun or just using "she" for everyone to see how it changes the Vibes.

EDIT: Oh I was thinking of City of Illusion and Planet of Exile. This is a huge jump in power level, honestly. Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness are so good......

 

[Violentvixen]

I think Genly's reactions are an interesting part of the text, though, because there are no gendered standards of behavior, so it's easy for anyone's actions to repulse him as *feminine*.

Oh, I was thinking of how Genly says very negative things about his landlady and they are mostly to highlight stereotypically feminine traits and mocks them. Also I don't have specific lines to cite but I thought Genly noted how disturbed he was when Estraven had any more feminine traits and seemed unwilling to respect anyone overtly feminine. I feel like there were other points where more female-associated terms were used to mock people (the king being "shrill" for example).

The frustrating "maybe women are good at math but I dunno" passage can be cited to the times although of course it's wrong. Glad to see a human female step off the ship at the end at least.

like using an invented pronoun or just using "she" for everyone to see how it changes the Vibes.

There was a short essay at the back of my copy that mentioned Le Guin wrote about changing the pronouns to "she" and that she "couldn't help but feel that justice was on their side." And it says there's a short story from 1975 on Gethen that uses she which is cool. Definitely understand that publishing this book with "she" would never have worked at the time, but man wish we could now.

Maybe someday ebooks will allow the reader to pick the narrator's pronouns, that'd be neat.

 

[Adrenaline]

I read through the Hainish cycle over the last year and Left Hand of Darkness is definitely a highlight along with The Dispossessed, but the first three have interesting stuff in them as well. They're similar to the early Earthsea novels in that they're not as complex or modern but you can see her developing her voice.

 

[Epithet]

Oh, I was thinking of how Genly says very negative things about his landlady and they are mostly to highlight stereotypically feminine traits and mocks them. Also I don't have specific lines to cite but I thought Genly noted how disturbed he was when Estraven had any more feminine traits and seemed unwilling to respect anyone overtly feminine. I feel like there were other points where more female-associated terms were used to mock people (the king being "shrill" for example).

The frustrating "maybe women are good at math but I dunno" passage can be cited to the times although of course it's wrong. Glad to see a human female step off the ship at the end at least.

yeah, I wasn't really trying to contradict you. And I do think this is an element of some of her other older novels as well: the main character in The Dispossessed carries himself in a different 20th century dude fashion.

I've been digging through her old book reviews and I've been struck by this passage for a while.. (From the review of Heaven's Net is Wide, which I haven't read ; ; ).

This distance is not caused by the 13th-century Japanese setting, for films and stories have transported me to that far realm with no sense at all of unreality - rather with a terrific sense of living presence. They were, however, Japanese films and stories, or else translations and retellings by Lafcadio Hearn. I am reluctantly forced to consider that Lian Hearn's unmistakably great knowledge of the period, her passion for all things Japanese, her conscious repudiation of literary "colonialism," her avoidance of cultural co-optation by setting her tales in a nonexistent corner of Japan, do not entirely prevent her inventions from being essentially bookish - existing at one remove. Though thoroughly enjoyable, they never quite convinced me. I was always conscious that it was "just a story".

This may be a real element of their popularity. Why not? A great many of us are happy to be told a story with a vast cast of characters, boiling over with wickedness, nobility, violence, vengeance, courage, failure, sexual passion, romantic love, births, deaths, tragedies and victories, held together through hundreds of pages by a well-built plot, with a definite bias towards the good guys: the kind of novel Dumas set the pattern for, the kind of novel you aren't asked to believe. Dumas wasn't trying to do what Stendhal or Tolstoy did with the historical novel. He was a historical fantasist; and perhaps that is the best description of Hearn.

She also wrote a review of The True Deceiver, which is a really great novel by Tove Jansson. Somehow, the edition she read described Jansson as a Swedish cartoonist/author on the back cover, rather than Finnish, which is reflected by a correction printed for the review lol.

 

[lincolnic]

I finished this a few days ago, but I'm sorry to say that it just never clicked for me. Maybe it was just the style, I don't know. There were a lot of beautiful sentences, but while waiting for the next beautiful sentence to arrive I was often just bored. I think I was expecting more of a concrete plot beyond Genly goes to Karhide, Genly goes to Orgota, Genly goes to prison, Genly returns to Karhide. Genly felt like too much of a cipher for me to get invested in him. The world that Le Guin built is very intriguing, but presenting it through the lens of someone with no defining characteristics aside from misogyny and being good at pulling a sled made it hard for me to connect. Estraven, on the other hand, was a much more compelling narrator for me. Probably because he was the only character whose emotions we get a real glimpse into. I wonder how I would've felt if more of the chapters were from his perspective (though this would admittedly make it a very different book).

It's funny, because I think if Becky Chambers had written this, I would've been all over it. I went in more or less without knowing anything, so it's possible this is entirely on me. I don't think it's really the book's fault. If anything, this means it succeeded almost too well in its mission to present itself as Genly's mission report. Ultimately I'm bummed that I didn't like it more, because I really wanted to. I have a bit of a hunch that this is the kind of book that gets better on a second read, so maybe I'll revisit it some day.

 

[Violentvixen]

I've been digging through her old book reviews and I've been struck by this passage for a while.. (From the review of Heaven's Net is Wide, which I haven't read ; ; ).

Thanks for sharing this, really interesting.

 

[Exposition Owl]

Somehow, the edition she read described Jansson as a Swedish cartoonist/author on the back cover, rather than Finnish

Oh man. I imagine that giving Tove Jansson to Sweden is the kind of mistake that provokes an absolute storm of perkele-s.

Thanks for sharing this, really interesting.

Yes, that was a great passage!