(no subject)

[skygiants]

I had my father's copy of The Left Hand of Darkness on my shelf all the time I was growing up, and never got around to reading it. However -- knowing essentially nothing about it except that it was Ursula LeGuin and people generally have said it was good -- I brought it with me everywhere I've lived in the assumption that someday the stars would align and it would be the correct and proper time.

Then a couple years back when I was writing the first draft of The Iron Children, someone (I think it was aamcnamara?) asked if I'd read Left Hand of Darkness on account of Perilous Journey Through Snow, and I said no, and they looked thoughtful and said I might not want to read it until after I'd finished my own Perilous Journey Through Snow book. So I knew there was a big snow trip; and I think perhaps I had seen a post somewhere about how Ursula K. LeGuin was not sure that she would have kept the universal masculine pronoun, were she writing it now, and also I had seen this Tumblr post. All of which I thought had given me at least a decent partial sense of what the book was like.

Of course I was wrong, because, first of all, the book was much better and more compelling than I had imagined; also (only semi-relatedly, because the love story is far from the only compelling thing about Left Hand of Darkness), somehow over all the years no one had actually managed to convey to me the fact that the book is a bona fide textual love story. Definitely nobody had conveyed to me that Ursula LeGuin was simultaneously writing a haunting book about humanity's fear of and attraction to the other/alien, and the near-impossibility of cross-cultural communication, and whether it's possible to have a world without war, AND ALSO, SIMULTANEOUSLY, thoughtfully crossing squares off her trope_bingo card. My guy Genly Ai surely could have collected some folktales of Gethen that didn't involve the tragic romance of two siblings/two mortal enemies/two guys trapped together in a Canadian shack?

But of course he couldn't have, because this book is in large part about fear of & attraction to the other, and the thing that is most extremely Other to Genly Ai about Gethen is Gethenian sexuality. With the most profound respect for the author's right to change their opinions about their own writing over time, I do think Ursula K. LeGuin would have been wrong to change anything about the pronoun situation in this book. Using the universal he for the androgynous Gethenians is a bad translation, and the fact that it's a bad translation is, textually, important; the fact that universal-he is a band-aid that Genly Ai slaps over his misunderstandings and a huge stumbling block for his interaction with the culture as a whole is important! Bad translations are part of (but again very far from all of) what make the book so good.

While I'm talking about language, this, like Moby Dick is another book that occasionally hits Shakespearean enough on the register that it switches on the part of my brain that's constantly scanning dialogue for iambic pentameter. Estraven often has long dialogic speeches that are like 15-20% iambic pentameter. I tend to think of LeGuin's prose as clean, clear, not necessarily showy -- sometimes there's the sense that she doesn't want to get in the way of her own ideas -- but Left Hand of Darkness is truly just a beautiful book, all through. “I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.”

...and now that I've said all that, for anyone like me who didn't particularly know what the book was about: Genly Ai is the first ambassador for a pan-human galactic civilization to the small and extremely remote planet of Gethen where the population is fully androgynous and only sexual for a couple days of their reproductive cycle. At the beginning of the book, he's just had a falling-out with politician Estraven, who has originally seemed to be supportive of his mission to bring the Gethen into the pan-human alliance, only to make (what seems to Genly, who is not very good at his job) an sudden about-face. Then both of them have to (separately) flee the country. Then things get worse. Then they have to make a perilous and romantic journey across the snow together! Probably not science fiction's first perilous and romantic journey through snow, but certainly an extremely formative one, as it fully deserves to be.

Comments

[genarti]

YEAH IT'S JUST SO GOOD

And also, I get Le Guin's point but I agree with you about the pronouns. Maybe they could have changed in the Estraven chapters, but it's right that Genly gets it wrong.

Also also: I love that quote. I love so many quotes from it! Le Guin was just so good at words, and at the numinous juxtaposed with and infused through the everyday.

[skygiants]

It could have changed in the Estraven chapters, but the Estraven chapters are a translation too -- it's Genly compiling them, isn't it? -- so really I still think I stand by inaccurate-he-pronouns all through this particular book, though I definitely do want to read the shorts now that use other variants as well.

SHE WAS SO GOOD AT WORDS. It's truly unfair!

[sovay]

Then they have to make a perilous and romantic journey across the snow together! Probably not science fiction's first perilous and romantic journey through snow, but certainly an extremely formative one, as it fully deserves to be.

I wrote a poem for it for R.B. Lemberg.

(I was also once on a panel for Readercon called "Winter Is Coming: Feminist SF and the Frozen Tundra Buddy Trek," of which there turned out to be a surprising number. I am glad you are adding to the literature.)

I go back and forth on some things I think about this novel, but I read it my freshman year of college and it has been important to me since.

[skygiants]

It's a lovely poem!

(That sounds like a fantastic panel and I wish I could have attended it. Do you know if anybody ended up compiling a frozen tunda buddy bibliography? I'd be so curious just to see them all laid out next to each other.)

[starlady]

Such a good book. When I lived in Japan for the first time 15 years ago, when there were no smartphones and my Japanese wasn't that great, I often related my experience as an expat to this book and to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I should reread it soon.

[skygiants]

That makes so much sense as touchstones (and I do have to wonder how much this book owes to Star Trek, as well ...)

[kore]

I believe in one of the versions I have, Le Guin revised that scene so Estraven's pronouns change from male to female and then back, and it was really effective.

I can't wish Le Guin wrote the book differently because it inspired Joanna Russ to write "When It Changed," one of the most amazing SF stories I've ever read. And that grew into The Female Man, which is really fantastic. Le Guin also said, much later, she wished that not only had she not written Estraven as male, she wished she'd written Gethenian culture as queer-friendly, too. And she did write at least a couple of later stories -- one of which, "Winter's King," uses female pronouns instead. But I think the real internal rewrite of Left Hand came with "Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea," also narrated by a rather clueless guy, which introduces the concept of sedoretu marriage (now an AO3 trope itself!) which is plenty queer (altho for my money fandom takes the "moiety-cest" way too seriously and Le Guin herself IIRC wrote a fic where it happens).

[skygiants]

Yeah, honestly I think the treatment of queerness in Gethenian culture definitely ages less well than the pronoun usage (but also one can pretty easily assume as well that there's a lot more going around than Genly has documented in his fumbling attempts to understand what's happening below the surface level of Gethen.)

I definitely have to read the sedoretu original! I've been playing sedoretu fandom games for too long through pure osmosis.

[snickfic]

Genly is truly NOT VERY GOOD AT HIS JOB. I can't remember if the book itself posits that this is intentional on the part of his bosses, and they habitually send people who have lots of growing to do so they can grow with the culture they're sent to, or if that's just an interpretation I somehow came away with. But truly: NOT GOOD AT HIS JOB.

And you're so right, it's SO much tropier a story than I expected. That long isolated journey across the snow! Basically huddling for warmth! Incredible.

[kore]

I remember a part where someone very sensibly asks Genly, why on earth does this Ekumen send only one of you, with no backup, when you can easily be dismissed as a total nutbar? And Genly has this beautiful Le Guinian response about how as an individual he can only persuade &c &c., but teenaged me thought when I first read it: yeah, that is a good question!

[vass]

Using the universal he for the androgynous Gethenians is a bad translation, and the fact that it's a bad translation is, textually, important; the fact that universal-he is a band-aid that Genly Ai slaps over his misunderstandings and a huge stumbling block for his interaction with the culture as a whole is important!

That's a really good point.

While I'm talking about language, this, like Moby Dick is another book that occasionally hits Shakespearean enough on the register that it switches on the part of my brain that's constantly scanning dialogue for iambic pentameter.

Another one of those for me is Hades, the game. A lot of the characters will break into iambic pentameter, but Zagreus' awful dad most of all.

[skygiants]

Oh, fascinating! I've not played Hades and I had not at all osmosed that it has an iambic register.

[kore]

There's also a beautiful BBC full-cast adaptation: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/33199085

[skygiants]

I thought you meant television adaptation for a moment and was shocked I hadn't heard of it, but audio drama makes much more sense!

[serriadh]

Not to second-guess Le Guin on her own writing, but I wonder if when she reflected on the pronoun use she was thinking mostly of herself as the author, and us as the readers, when the story as told in the book is so clearly coming out of Genly Ai's head. And as you say, Genly Ai is not good at his job (you'd think he'd at least understand politics?!) and also thinks of the Gethenians mainly as men-who-can-give-birth.

I don't always think of Le Guin as a writer who is particularly good at the alien-ness of aliens (because she is so very very good at other things, and finding the common "human"ity) but Left Hand of Darkness and also the bit in Solitude where the visitors just cannot wrap their head around the extreme introvert culture are both absolutely brilliant at it.

[edited to add paragraphs]

[skygiants]

Yeah, and I definitely understand why she'd second-guess herself -- especially over the various decades and their various interactions with gender and sexuality that have come since; it's so easy to feel like your past authorial self was years behind your current understanding -- but Genly Ai is so much the guy he is and the fact that he is that guy is what the book turns on!

I've not read Solitude; I should. One does have the feeling that at this point in one's life one should have already read more Leguin, but also it is such a delight to have so much more Leguin left to read!

[littlerhymes]

You make me wanna read this again! The snow journey is such a memory for me. HUDDLING FOR WARMTH with a sexy alien of no specific gender... iconique.

[skygiants]

ICONIQUE. Genly Ai living the dream and eventually he even knows it!

[princessofgeeks]

I read the book for the first time as a teenager and a lot of the themes and sexuality went right past me, but I sure remembered the beautiful writing about the trek in the snow. And when I reread it years later I was amazed all over again.

It's an amazing book on so many levels.

revisiting

[brainwane]

I taught this book in a peer-led class during my bachelor's degree, 20+ years ago. And for the first time, now, I am thinking about those students possibly revisiting this book as they matured, AFTER I first introduced it to them. In class we definitely talked about the gender dimensions but probably not about the subtleties of its queerness, since I was so much less able to have or lead that conversation. I wonder what they think of it now.

[raven]

I was about to say, and let me lend you The Birthday of the World! before remembering you are, in fact, 4000 miles away. But I do recommend it, for Le Guin's own updated version of Gethen, from the POV of a Gethen young person living in a happy family set-up.

[skygiants]

It always seems so implausible that you are 4000 miles away! You ought to be able to lend it to me but since logistics interfere I will add it to my library list.

[lirazel]

Using the universal he for the androgynous Gethenians is a bad translation, and the fact that it's a bad translation is, textually, important; the fact that universal-he is a band-aid that Genly Ai slaps over his misunderstandings and a huge stumbling block for his interaction with the culture as a whole is important! Bad translations are part of (but again very far from all of) what make the book so good.


You know what? I hadn't thought about it like that...but you are correct.

Love your discovery that TLHoD is good, actually!

[skygiants]

TLHoD is good, actually! An incredible new discovery that I and I alone have made!!

[larryhammer]

the fact that it's a bad translation is, textually, important

Really good point. Really good.

[skygiants]

Genly Ai towards the end of the book just barely beginning to fumble towards the concept that his language is insufficient!

[oracne]

YAY URSULA.

[skygiants]

big ups to Ursula!!!

GIP

[ironymaiden]

Such a good book. My copy has the most amazing cover art (see icon) that is evocative without being prescriptive; it's always spoken to me with or without the story

Re: GIP

[skygiants]

That's the cover art on my copy, too! (Or ... it was, before the front and back covers fell off while I was reading it .....)

[pauraque]

This is a great book, and I love your reading of the pronouns as in-universe bad translation.

[skygiants]

It's really so well done how the whole book is shaped throughout by Genly's imperfect understanding of Gethen, all the way down to the language.

[rachelmanija]

That Tumblr post is hilarious.

[skygiants]

I still think to myself "and when he KNEW my cousin is PREGNANT?!" and start laughing on the regular.

[sophia_sol]

yes! yes!!!! it's SUCH a good book and I'm so glad you've read it now and I would like to enthusiastically rec to you all the Left Hand of Darkness fanfic I've collected because fandom has written some amazing stuff: https://pinboard.in/u:sophia_sol/t:-lefthandofdarkness

[skygiants]

HELL YES thank you so much for this important service, I cannot wait to dive in!

[heresluck]

Using the universal he for the androgynous Gethenians is a bad translation, and the fact that it's a bad translation is, textually, important; the fact that universal-he is a band-aid that Genly Ai slaps over his misunderstandings and a huge stumbling block for his interaction with the culture as a whole is important! Bad translations are part of (but again very far from all of) what make the book so good.

I love this insight a whole lot, and now I need to re-read IMMEDIATELY.

[skygiants]

I loved having the joy of reading the book for the first time but I ALSO cannot wait to have the joy of rereading it at some point in a couple years.

[luzula]

This is one of my FAVORITE BOOKS EVER.

[skygiants]

I think it has also quite rapidly become one of mine!

[obopolsk]

I have a vague memory that I read this as a tween, during my longest LeGuin phase, but I don't remember the specifics particularly well. This post has made me realize it might be interesting to reread for something I'm working on, so thank you for that!

[skygiants]

Ah wonderful, I hope you have a good time with it - I definitely think it's worth the reread!

[chestnut_pod]

GOD, the whole passage that ends 'I mean joy' is, to me, the most beautiful paragraph in the whole English langauge. It means so much to me.

I can't congratulate you enough for finally reading this book, my favorite book, the best book there is. I am SO glad it spoke to you.

[skygiants]

Thank you so much, I'm definitely running in here five minutes late with Starbucks but inexpressibly delighted to have made it to the party! WHAT a book & let me congratulate you in turn on great taste in best books there are.

[soosifroosh]

So I got myself out of the house to go to a book club meeting about this, which is a bit of a lift for me right now, but I very much wanted to hear opinions. And I think the most interesting thing that happened was: okay, I was born in the mid-80s, and I was sitting next to someone who was born in the mid-90s. And she was SPITTING MAD at Ursula's explanation in a later essay (written in the 80s) that of course Gethenians would do gay stuff, but it just hadn't occurred to her to write that in the 1960s. Le Guin had just assumed that the only way a society could be truly that egalitarian would be for everyone to assume all the different roles of heterosexuality on a random schedule, and then 20 years later was like "oh. Of course gay stuff wouldn't be a problem for them."

The decade-younger reader sitting next to me was SO mad about this, and didn't see the difference between retroactively gay-ing your characters between 1965 and 1985, and retroactively gaying Dumbledore. She had scrawled "WELL JUST WRITE IT THAT WAY THEN" all over her printout of the essay. It was so interesting to see how the position the reader is coming from changes, and how fast. (I personally found this a hard read when I was a teen because it felt like it was largely about Alien Russia, in a very Cold War-sy way, and I found that harder to relate to than my mother did reading the same book.)

[skygiants]

Oh, that's fascinating! (There definitely is some Alien Russia Cold War stuff in there, Orgoreyn is such a commentary on a Communist state in a way that tbh feels just as dated to me or more as the gender stuff.)

[rushthatspeaks]

One of the SF con panel experiences that I have had of all time remains at San Antonio Worldcon, where I was on a great panel talking about, among other things, this book, and I happened to say that although I ship Estraven and Genly (which I do) I thought it was for the best that they didn't have sex when Estraven was in kemmer, because the lines of consent would be something one would want to pre-negotiate beforehand, and they hadn't. Which I thought of as a fairly uncontroversial thing to say, and indeed, the conversation proceeded from there without debate.

And then afterwards Kim Stanley Robinson, from the audience, came up to me and said that I had blown his mind because it had never occurred to him that there could be a consent issue there, and he'd always just thought of it as homophobic squeamishness on Genly's part, and that it made the book into an unequivocal tragedy-- what he considers one of the most poignant tragedies in fiction-- and that his perceptions had just turned inside out. While what he was saying was turning my brain inside out, because the two of us were approaching the text from such different directions that I was experiencing the same kind of vertigo from him that he was getting from me... you read it how? And. Like. As a queer tragedy, specifically as one based around the opportunities homophobia destroys, it appears to have been incredibly influential on his life and his work. If I see it as a tragedy, which I do in some ways and don't in others, them not having sex is not why...

Anyway, Stan and I have been friendly ever since, and I am never going to forget that moment of sheer vertigo where the text transformed in and with both of us and we accidentally turned each other upside down.

[skygiants]

ahh, incredible; meeting someone else's understanding of a text and finding both the book and oneself transformed as a result is honestly one of the greatest joys of literature, I think (and perhaps one marker of a great book is when a text actually allows for that kind of transformation). Thank you for relaying this conversation -- tbh this is the first thing to ever really make me want to read Kim Stanley Robinson's books!

[rydra_wong]

Then a couple years back when I was writing the first draft of The Iron Children

... wait.

Okay, I had NO IDEA that's by you, and apologize if I should have picked that up, but anyway that just got bumped substantially up my list of things to purchase.

[skygiants]

ah yes that's me! 😅 I hope you enjoy it if you read it!