Ursula Le Guin may be remembered as a sci-fi and fantasy writer, an inventor of complex and believable foreign worlds, but her core interest was always describing the conditions of our own planet. ‘Science fiction is not predictive, it is descriptive,’ she writes in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Purely speculative fiction risks becoming meaningless, inaccurate. Sci-fi is just like any other fiction: its power is in its ability to speak truth, to encourage us to think about our own conditions, and not just those of exotic biospheres millions of miles away.
Left Hand describes a world that behaves pretty differently to Earth, even if occupied by human beings. The world is Gethen (or Winter, to outsiders), and the Gethenians might as well be an alien species for how unusual their biology is — they have no fixed sex, only gaining male or female characteristics during short windows within each month called ‘kemmer’. On this basis, society on this planet behaves very differently. Since anybody can become pregnant, ‘Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make.’
Gethenian society is also far less stratified, hierarchical and violent. These are the observations made by one of the earliest ‘Investigators’ of Gethen, an envoy from Le Guin’s Earth equivalent, Terra. They conclude that on Gethen ‘One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.’
With its promise of egalitarianism, Gethen may look like an androgynous utopia. Yet there are still Kings and kingdoms, elaborate ceremonies and an archaic fixation on land that is the cause of a longstanding border dispute between Karhide and its neighbouring kingdom, Orgoreyn. The Gethenian concept of shifgrethor — ‘prestige, face, place, the pride-relationship, the untranslatable and all-important principle of social authority in Karhide and all civilizations of Gethen’ — represents the contradiction of these elements: it is a shame society based on mutual respect. These political and social differences ultimately cause problems for Genly Ai, a Terran native sent as a lone envoy to Gethen many generations after the original Investigators.
Ai is on a diplomatic mission in the Gethen nation of Karhide to convince its king, Agraven, to join the Ekumen, a vast confederacy of planets. He relies on prime minister Estraven to win favour with the king, however, Ai cannot fully understand his motives. Things then take a nosedive. Estraven is banished for apparently betraying the king, and Ai’s proposal is rejected, in part because of his association with Estraven — forcing him to leave Karhide to find other ways to advance his cause. While the two seem to be working at cross-purposes, Le Guin reveals their fates to be bound, and a story about intergalactic politics is also one of love, communication, and understanding.
Many have seen gender to be a key component of Left Hand. Yet some Feminist readers have critiqued its representation of gender as reinforcing a masculine view of androgyny. Ai is the window through which the reader initially experiences Gethen; Ai is a male from Earth, so is accustomed to seeing gender in terms of binaries, going so far as to label all of the Gethenians with male pronouns by default. He admits this much: ‘Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes.’ It would be unfair, though, to hold this against him: the reader also sees Gethen as a strange place, and the mystery of the planet only deepens as we are exposed to scientific reports and folklore in between chapters of story narration. Gethen may be very alien to us, however, Le Guin convinces us that we, the onlookers, are the aliens.
With Estraven as our second narrator, Le Guin remedies Ai’s perspective. Estraven is an empath; he puts a unilateral degree of trust in Ai and risks his life when Ai is captured. He sees Agraven, and Karhide, as being swallowed by fear, and intends to work against it. Technically he is androgynous, but we might see him more like a male who has been rounded off by femininity. Ai describes his features as sleek and otter-like, having ‘a sombre blandness of expression’. His lack of gender makes him unreadable to Ai; at the same time this unreadability is tied to his femininity, his ‘effeminate deviousness’.
When both characters embark on a treacherous 800-mile journey across a plain of ice, this barrier of understanding is confronted. In Left Hand, Le Guin addresses the difficult question: how can we understand those who are not like us? And what do we risk when in doing so?
There are no straight answers, only fragments of clarity. Take the typically sci-fi creation mindspeak, a form of telepathy mastered by Terrans such as Ai. Estraven asks Ai to teach him this ability so that he can better understand Estraven’s motives, but when Ai’s voice takes the form of Estraven’s dead brother, it is like an invasive pyschodrama. ‘Perhaps Gethen, being singularly complete, feels telepathic speech as a violation of completeness,’ reflects Ai. This new bond between them is ‘not so much admitting further light… as showing the extent of darkness.’ Perhaps the need for illumination is itself illusory.
It is Le Guin’s reference to Taoism that provides a more philosophical answer to this conundrum. ‘Light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness is the right hand of light.’ So goes a proverb of the Handarra, one of the main religions of Gethen. Its revelation for Ai is that ‘it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, that… love came’. What this ‘love’ is exactly, is hard to categorise — Le Guin avoids a typical concept of romance, but this relationship also goes beyond friendship and brotherhood. It is mutual trust; understanding and appreciation of the other. The Handarra, despite having Fortellers that predict the future, strive ‘to learn what questions not to ask’. The acceptance of unknowability is at the heart of Le Guin’s concepts of enlightenment, and of love.
It would be too much to expect fiction to provide solutions for the problems of society. Anybody looking for a manifesto on gender might be disappointed with Left Hand — even Le Guin had admitted the inadequacy of using male pronouns across the novel, and that Genly Ai’s character represents a concession for what was in 1969 a largely male readership. Looking past this, the novel captures the challenges of crossing social and cultural boundaries, and the unknowability of others. When Ai jokes to Estraven that their journey back to Karhide would be much more efficient if his people had invented aeroplanes, his reply is revealing: ‘How would it ever occur to a sane man that he could fly?’ Gethen is a planet without birds. Le Guin doesn’t have the answers, and can’t show them to us — but she is a master at making us ask the questions.
