An Incomplete Experiment

[mtvessel]

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.

The other main viewpoint character, Estraven, is an engaging character, but their narrative has the balanced flow of a Tolkienian fantasy hero and so reads as a masculine voice rather than a neuter one. The use of "he" as the primary pronoun by both protagonists does not help - Le Guin presumably chose not to use invented pronouns or they/them to avoid disrupting the narrative with neologisms or hard-to-parse sentence constructions, but Genly uses phrases like "God knows" which is pretty disruptive in itself (which god?) and at one point Estraven quotes a temperature of 88 degrees for a warm climate, implying that the Gethen use the Fahrenheit scale for temperature. The explanation of the process of kemmer and its possible origin as a Hainish experiment is rather awkwardly shoe-horned into the narrative as field notes from an Ekumen investigator, rather than being incorporated into either of the protagonists' experiences. I was also mildly irritated by the throw-away comment that same-sex kemmer, or indeed any other variation on the kemmer process, is either extremely rare or considered perverted, which read very heteronormative to me.

Of course, the details of the world are impressive and the descriptions of the privations that Genly and Estraven endure as they travel through the harsh landscapes of Winter are vivid. The plot, however, has very little to do with the basic SF premise, revolving as it does around political factionalism. Le Guin seems to be implying that if sex and gender differences are taken out of the human equation, political strife is all that's left. This probably wasn't the intention, but I think that some opportunities were lost to investigate the more imaginative consequences of her intriguing thought experiment, especially on relationships and cultural institutions.