Book review: The Left Hand of Darkness

Is Light, obvs. Just in case you were wondering. This is a famous well-regarded LeGuin, which I re-read for the first time since my childhood recently, prompted by E reading it. She liked it, and so did I. The story is good, and well told; the gender-politics is interesting, and well folded in.

Wiki says The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in 1969, its popularity established Le Guin's status as a major author of science fiction. The novel is set in the fictional universe of the Hainish Cycle, a series of novels and short stories by Le Guin, which she introduced in the 1964 short story [Semley's Necklace]. It was fourth in writing sequence among the Hainish novels, preceded by City of Illusions and followed by The Word for World Is Forest... [it] was among the first books in the genre now known as feminist science fiction, and it is described as 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. And all that is fair enough. I don't rate TWFWIF, BTW.

Of the story: mostly told through the viewpoint of Genly Ai, Envoy of the Ekumen, to the world of Gethen aka Winter. Alone, so as to not arouse fear, and unable to wow the yokels by the Law of Cultural Embargo, he struggles to make progress in the kingdom of Karhide, partly because the king is "mad", especially after Estraven, who appears to be his chief supporter, is exiled. He goes instead to Orgoreyn, a sort of grey-commensual East-Germany-like place, where political jockeying leads to his imprisonment in a gulag, from which Estraven rescues him. They escape across the Ice and after a long journey make it back to Karhide, by which time he has called his ship down, and politics turns in his favour.

The Gethenians are generally neuter, except for a brief monthly interval in which they become either male of female at random, and in that phase are sexually active. But mostly, the book makes much of their usual asexuality, and tries to convince us that this make a big difference to the way their society works. But notice that I didn't need to mention this when outlining the story, and I'm not really convinced that her thesis is correct. I am politcically-philosophically motivated in saying that, though: my thesis is that a great many features of human society are generic, and would be present in any intelligent civilisation. The main different LeGuin presents on Gethen is the absence of large-scale war; but the book provides no explanation for that; indeed, the characters wonder at it. And there seems no strong reason why neuterness would matter - obvs, you could make some up; but equally you could make up climate-related ones too.

I think the virtue of the neuterness is more that it makes you think a little about how it might affect the world. One nice aspect, in that no-one knows which sex they'll morph into, is that the general populace has an interest in making the world good for mothers-tending-children. E was underwhelmed by the gender aspects, perhaps reasonably: her generation has grown up with both-sexes-are-equal type stuff, and indeed with the idea that people get to choose their gender, and while we're clearly not quite there yet the... excitement has perhaps faded somewhat.

Quibbles: I think that, biologically, moving from N to M or F in a few days and back once a month is a bit too frequent; perhaps once a year might have been a better cadence. The naughty East Germans have, apparently, found drugs that allow you to choose M or F roles rather than leaving it to chance, and I can't help but feel this would be rather popular, and would have spread widely and become universal by now. The lack of adoption of tech, leaving us in a cute mediaeival-type world, is useful for the story and yet doesn't seem all that likely: there are, after all, at least two feuding nations: would they really not accept the help that using tech would give, in the struggle? Oh, and the Handdara: an organisation of LeGuin's idealised monks-without-religion: they have no creed, they live simply in Fastnesses, and so on. They have developed Foretelling, which is the ability to answer any question, in order to demonstrate that knowing the right answer to the wrong question is useless. Predictably, their answers are evasive and corn-dolly-like unhelpful: the answer to "when will I die" is not a helpful date, but "on a Thursday" for example; so, they are cheating. The book treats their ability as real, and perhaps it is necessary to give them their mystique, and yet this too seems to me to be cheating.