"The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969

**Simply put, one of the finest works of fiction ever written.  Not just science fiction, but fiction period.  Written by a master who was decades ahead of her time**

Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.

The year was 1969.  Science fiction, though exiting the "Golden Age" and entering the "New Wave", was still largely dominated by male authors writing for male readers.  Although the industry had somewhat moved past the raygun adventures with sexy alien babes of the 50s, it was still very much a boy's club.  While much was made of science fiction "maturing" as a genre, in practice that still basically meant adventures with author-insert characters, and the "maturity" was just adding in sex and drugs (not to say that it was a complete desert, of course.  I think the work of some guys like Bradbury and Vonnegut still hold up very well.  But they were few and far between)

Anyways, into this walked Le Guin, writing a novel about a cisgendered character traveling to a planet of genderfluid people, and the mistakes he makes and misunderstandings he falls victim to because of his unconscious tendency to fit people into gender roles.  Yeah.  You could publish this novel in 2026, *more than 50 years later*, and it would still feel fresh.  It would still win awards, just like it won every award the industry had to offer when it was first published

I've written on this blog in the past about the two competing schools of thought for science fiction--those that are trying to "predict" the future or the future path of technology, and those that are simply using future technology as a metaphor to say fundamental truths about humanity.  While I appreciate both, I find myself tending more to the latter as I get older.  And in this debate, I think that Le Guin is the finest champion the "metaphor" side of the argument has.  In the Introduction to the 1976 re-release of the novel, Le Guin explained further what she was trying to do:

Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are.

Again, she wrote these words literally half a century ago.  Ursula K. Le Guin, her memory be a blessing, was truly a visionary and we are lucky to have had the joy of her gifts.  I've been waiting (almost a year and a half since I started this blog) for a special occasion to write about "Left Hand", and as we enter Pride Month I thought this is the time to do it

So, backing up.  In this book, the natives of the planet of Gethen are ungendered for three-quarters of the month.  Then for one week, they enter a state of "kemmer" in which they adopt a gender (could be a different one each month), and this is when sexual reproduction happens.  Then, they go back to their standard life

What Le Guin does in this book, what she did in dozens of her other works, is start from this idea of biology and then play it out.  How would a society operate, with this biology?  How would jobs accommodate everyone taking a week off per month?  How would long-term relationships work, how would child-raising work?  With the eye of an anthropologist (here parents' profession, which explains a lot, she builds up this whole society--not as an info-dump on the page, but certainly she had it all put together in her mind before she ever started writing

And it is into this society that she drops Genly Ai, her version of the classic scifi hero from those pulpy 50s novels to which I alluded earlier.  An emissary from Terra, come to convince the people of Gethen to join the Ekumen (her "Hainish Universe" series' confederation of planets).  And basically, for much of the book, he finds himself making mistakes and making assumptions and letting his biases lead him astray.  He has no idea how easy he is to manipulate due to his commitment to cisgendered thinking, something Le Guin paints very clearly

In many ways, you could consider this novel more of a political thriller than anything else, as much of the novel concerns Genly Ai's negotiations with the various political leaders of this world.  Le Guin's description of these unscrupulous politicians is cutting and uncomfortably accurate.  Honestly, her takedown of jingoistic politics, delivered by Estraven (the novels secondary main character, native of Gethen and supporter of Genly Ai's mission), resonates terrifyingly well with political rhetoric from throughout human history:

"How does one hate a country, or love one? [Some politicians talk] about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession. . . . Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of [my home in] the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope."

I think about this line often.  Every time I see some politician spouting vitriol and venom, I think about this (another quote:  "His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate.").  I can only hope that my love does not have a boundary-line of hate

I loved this novel because, in the end, that's what this novel is about:  Humanity's foolish obsession with putting up boundaries.  Boundaries between people, boundaries between nations, boundaries between genders.  And it's about how all these boundaries only hurt us

I loved this novel because it tries to tell us that these boundaries are illusory, and if we let go of our obsession with them, what wonderful things we could find in each other

This is an incredible book.  This is an incredibly important book

I loved this book

To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.