“Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”
–Ursula K. Le Guin (Introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness)
There are books that can be consumed in a matter of hours. Others, however, require a little more time and sustained effort. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin was one such novel – I spent the better half of spring break immersed in Gethen, the imagined world in which this story takes place.
I say “imagined” instead of “imaginary” because it’s quite staggering how richly Le Guin has rendered this world. Even as I was struggling to read through the first few chapters (where the writing style reminded me strongly of the ethnographic accounts I’d read in my anthropology class last semester), I found myself pausing often to admire the sheer ingeniousness of the novel’s undertaking. The Left Hand of Darkness cannot be classified as anything other than science fiction, yet at the same time, it subverts traditional notions of the genre.
Genly Ai is a human visiting another planet. The reader gradually infers this fact from the way other characters react to his supposed strangeness and from the way he describes the culture of Karhide (one of Gethen’s nations) comparatively, describing them in relation to lifestyles on Terran (our Earth). Genly has been on Gethen for two years as part of a diplomatic mission to persuade Karhidians to join the Ekumen, an intergalactic alliance meant to foster economic and political cooperation between worlds. However, his main difficulty at the beginning of the story lies in persuading the Karhidian king and governmental advisors that he is in fact an “alien” (and not a delusional Pervert*), as well as in navigating the complex political-cultural systems of Gethen.
Le Guin doesn’t fall into the common trap of equating advanced technology to mean a more superior or enlightened civilization. Although Genly comes from a society with “time-jumping” spaceships and instantaneous intergalactic communicators, he is portrayed as uninformed and relatively powerless, an unwitting pawn in the hands of the higher-ups in Karhide and Orgoreyn.** He quickly gets tangled up in a political “power struggle” (***) between the two nations; only with the help of Estraven, the exiled former King’s Ear (equivalent to a Karhidian prime minister), does he manage to extricate himself from the situation alive, as well as accomplish his ultimate objective.
Estraven is initially the most unfathomable character — the epitome of the Karhidian “other” — in Genly’s eyes. Genly trusts Estraven the least, even though the former King’s Ear is his only ally in his diplomatic endeavor. He is the seemingly passive yet powerful foil to Genly’s hurried and quick-acting character; more fundamentally, Genly can’t quite reconcile the fact that Estraven, like every other Gethenian, is neither man nor woman, defying “those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to [our] own” (12). Estraven’s adherence to the cultural concept of shifgrethor*** obscures his true motivations for supporting Genly’s mission and sets up a communication barrier between the two. Exposed only to Genly’s interpretation of events, we agree with his suspicions — until Le Guin suddenly begins narrating alternate chapters from Estraven’s point of view, bringing his seemingly incomprehensible actions to light.
As the story unfolds, we come to understand that Genly’s failed attempts to engineer an alliance between Gethen and the Ekumen stems from his inability — at least for most of the novel — to understand the Gethenians from outside his own cultural (and highly gendered) perspective. Estraven and Genly gradually reconcile their cultural differences in the final stretch of the novel, in which Estraven rescues Genly from Orgoreyn’s prison and the two journey together across the Ice back to Karhide. The Gethenian concept of “unlearning” and passivity as the business of life, which seems unfathomable to Genly’s race, finally begins to make sense, as Genly demonstrates in one of his last exchanges with Estraven:
“I thought it was for your [Gethen’s] sake that I came alone [as an Envoy to the Ekumen], so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself post no threat, change no balance…But there’s more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political.” (259)
The world of Gethen is as fully realized as our own, with its own geography, climate, languages, social systems, and biologically distinct race of humans. Yes, the context is all imaginary — but, as Le Guin says in the book’s introduction, “I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction… certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.” I can’t quite articulate precisely what the story of Genly’s gradual “unlearning” of Terran-centric views on humanity has shown me, but reading this book has offered me a glimpse of the broad potential in speculative fiction — maybe it’s not so alien after all.
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*In Gethen, a physiologically anomalous human who remains in a permanent “male” or “female” state, rather than being androgynous by default and only developing sexual differentiations on a monthly cyclical basis. The sexuality of humans on Gethen is perhaps best described here. (Please don’t let the unusual biology scare you off from reading the book! Le Guin uses this set-up to explore the cultural institutions of a world without gender [and by extension the nature of gender roles].)
**Another nation on Gethen with a “cultural mindset” distinct from Karhide.
***Actually, “power struggle” is an Earth-centric term that does not accurately capture the nature of this conflict. Cultures in Gethen operate on a prestige concept known as “shifgrethor” (an old word for “shadow” in the Karhidian language), where one’s social standing, both individually and collectively, depends on the subtle subtext one makes in the course of interactions with others. Outright war has yet to exist in Gethenian world history, although the course of events in the novel nearly bring Karhide and Orgoreyn to a unified hostility that would translate to our understanding as war.