50 years of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

At its core was the idea of gender fluidity much before the concept became current.

Imagine an ice world - so cold that people from Earth call it Winter. A world like ours – with countries, rivalries, loves and passions, politics and betrayal. And yet, a world profoundly unlike ours – where the humans are human in every way except one – they are hermaphrodites.

Ursula Le Guin at home in Portland, California. (Getty Images)

Such is the world of Gethen in Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic literary science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969. We experience this world through two protagonists: a single-sexed ‘normal’ human male, Genly Ai, visiting from Earth, and a hermaphrodite native, Estraven, Prime Minister of the Nation of Karhide. For four-fifths of the month, the people of Gethen exist in a state of gender neutrality, in which gender does not exist personally or socially; for one-fifth of the month they come into heat (‘kemmer’), in which they may manifest as a woman or a man. Thus the same person might sire a child at some point in their lives, and give birth to a child in another.

The Left Hand of Darkness changed science fiction forever. To classic golden age ‘boys with toys’ science fiction, Le Guin brought a sophisticated, complex, anthropological thought-experiment, which continues to reverberate in our times, as we look at gender, gender fluidity and transsexuality in new ways. Consider how all societies on Earth organize culturally, socially, and politically around fixed notions of gender and sexuality – and now take that away. How would that change things? On Gethen, there is no war, only small-scale conflict. There is no concept of the ‘alpha male,’ no ‘toxic masculinity,’ no rape of the environment. And yet the cultures are far from ideal; nor are they static.

When the story opens, there are tensions between the country of Karhide, a monarchy organised mostly around tradition, and the modernistic, bureaucratic, oligarchic nation of Orogoreyn, which is rapidly developing the ideas of nationalism and patriotism. The sabre-rattling of Orogoreyn over a border dispute arouses an answering nationalism among some factions of Karhide’s government. The innocent outsider in this complex situation, Genly Ai is a representative of a loose federation of worlds, the Ekumen, committed to peaceful and mutually beneficial relationships among planetary civilizations. His presence on Gethen, where flight, let alone space flight is unknown, is treated primarily with suspicion and disbelief. Only one person, Estraven, understands the implications of what Genly Ai is offering.

Interlaid with legends, histories, and field reports from previous envoys, the story of Genly’s adventure on Gethen is braided with Estraven’s own story until they come together in a remarkable denouement. Preceding the climax is a riveting account of the two protagonists journeying across a great continental ice sheet, where the land becomes a character in its own right.

In her introduction to the novel, Le Guin dismisses the idea that science fiction is about the future; instead, science fiction conducts thought-experiments, poses what-if questions that reveal something about us as we are, here and now. And indeed the story, despite the strangeness of its setting, indicates to us that there are times and contexts here on Earth where gender (among other things) becomes fluid. Thus she questions the notion that gender is fixed and binary, and explores through story its intersection with politics.

Le Guin’s essay “Is Gender Necessary?” written in 1976, with reflections added in 1987, is essential accompaniment to the novel. In it she responds with refreshing honesty and humility to feminist critiques of her novel: the use of the masculine pronoun for the androgynous Gethenians, and the absence of same-sex relationships. Later stories about Winter explore these once-blind spots of the author, as in her 1995 novella Coming of Age in Karhide.

The Left Hand of Darkness – with its bold conceptual innovations, complex renderings of social and political relations, and fine prose – remains resoundingly relevant 50 years later.

5 sci-fi thought experiments

1

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower – Published in 1993, this prescient novel tells the story of a young black woman, Lauren, who sets forth across an America ruined by climate change, where the socio-economic infrastructure has fallen apart. Terrifying and hopeful, this novel upends the Western science-fictional trope of the white male savior hero.

2

Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 – set in a drowned New York, this novel is a polyphony in eight voices, imagining in vivid detail the lives of people living with sea level rise; a critique of capitalism that posits some intriguing alternatives in the best tradition of imaginative literature.

3

Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death – a panoramic dystopic novel that draws on African cultures and histories to tell the story of Onyesonwu, a woman whose magical-realist journey of discovery across Africa decenters the West as the sole science-fictional location of the future.

4

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape – A fine example of science fiction’s ability to extrapolate from a current situation (skewed gender ratios) to a disturbing future where toxic masculinity, hypernationalism and capitalism have resulted in femicide – except for one girl child.

5

Walking the Clouds, edited by Grace Dillon – a classic of indigenous futurism, this first anthology of SF stories by indigenous writers from four countries presents iconoclastic, paradigm-shifting, often darkly humourous stories that challenge Western SF tropes by revealing (and mocking) the brutal face of ‘civilization.’

Vandana Singh is a science fiction writer whose latest work is Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories.