An Incomplete Experiment

Mar 2024
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin – Orbit, 2017
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At the risk of appearing a contrarian, I have to say that I don't think that this is Le Guin's finest work. The consensus among SF fans is that it is one of her best, but it is also one of her earliest and to me that shows. The premise is very interesting: on the planet of Winter, or Gethen, humanity has developed a sexual cycle where people are androgynous and celibate most of the time, but become male or female at random during a short mating period each month known as kemmer. But to me this wasn't reflected in the depiction of the cultures of Geth, which had rather too many Asian referents to be comfortable. For example, the King's cousin in Karhide is described as having "a yellow face all webbed … with wrinkles" and the story's main protagonist, Genly Ai, an envoy from the confederation of planets known as the Ekumen, comments on the fact that the locals pronounce his first name as "Genry" because they struggle with the L sound, which now reads as astonishingly crude stereotyping. The brutal courtly politics and the heavy emphasis on shifgrethor, or honour, also felt like a westerner's interpretation of Japanese or Chinese historical cultures seen through a very thin SF veil rather than a natural outworking of the main idea.
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