skygiants | Entries tagged with ursula k. leguin

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.

It is almost this month's book club, which reminds me that I never wrote up last month's book club book, Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven.

The Lathe of Heaven is one of those deceptively short, simple LeGuins that takes a premise and just steadily and relentlessly works its way through it.

In this case, the premise is that when hapless little George Orr goes into REM sleep, his dreams accidentally change the world.

Nobody knows about or remembers any of the previous iterations of reality but George, and George is EXTREMELY STRESSED about all of this. So stressed that the mild dystopia in which he lives eventually mandates that he go to therapy -- where his therapist Dr. Haber becomes the second person to learn about George's abilities, and has the bright idea of combining hypnosis with sleep manipulation to create a perfect (for Dr. Haber) society!

Dr. Haber has probably not read The Monkey's Paw or any of the other various helpful fables about being careful what you wish for, but even if he had read them, he probably wouldn't think they applied to him anwyway.

What follows is an increasingly weird series of dystopias, as George fumbles through an effort to take some sort of responsibility for his unwanted powers by attempting to convince Dr. Haber that he should not be taking responsibility for the whole world, while, around them, any kind of definitive sense of 'reality' starts to fold inward on itself like the end of an Ikuhara series.

The book has three characters -- George, Dr. Haber, and Heather Lalache, George's lawyer and love interest, who in the first half of the book seems like she is going to be a force on the order of the first two and in the second half of the book functions almost entirely as a metaphorical symbol for Why A World In Which Race Does Not Exist Is A Dystopia. (Heather is mixed-race.) This is probably my biggest frustration with the book and the reason I do not wholeheartedly love it, but is also something that I do not think would have happened were this not one of LeGuin's first novels, and written in 1971.

There have been a couple of TV movies made of this book and I haven't seen any of them, but the more I think about it, the more I would love to see a really surreally animated version.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/452538.html

I've been vaguely meaning to read more Ursula K. LeGuin for a while now; The Word For World Is Forest jumped to the top of my list by virtue of being available from my library as a downloadable Kindle eBook.

This is quite a depressing little book, isn't it? The plot is fairly simple:

- humans colonize a heavily wooded alien planet, including enslaving exploiting the local alien species in all the gross ways that one would expect
- to everyone's surprise, the initially-pacifist aliens eventually revolt
- the one anthropologist who has established friendly relations with the aliens is depressed
- suddenly, deus ex orders arrive from Earth dictating that everyone needs to calm the hell down and behave more ethically
- alas, gross humans continue to ruin the planned de-escalation and everything ends in bloodshed

Obviously, I find none of this implausible. It's kind of a misery to spend at least half the book trapped inside the head of the grossest human being of all -- again, I fully believe people like Davidson exist, but he's so! awful! I don't think I'll ever be rereading this one; life's too short to spend that much time in his head again.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/429411.html

I have an unexpected day off work today, and I have SO MUCH stuff I could and should be doing with it, but instead I spent all morning finishing up Ursula K. LeGuin's Annals of the Western Shore trilogy.

The trilogy consists of three loosely-linked books, which take place across an array of neighboring cultures; the protagonists of the first book are supporting characters in the second, and just a reference in an internal text for most of the third.

Gifts, the first book, is the quietest and most claustrophobic and, for me, the least compelling. It takes place in a hardscrabble mountain culture, governed by ruling families who have some kind of hereditary gift, often violent -- the gift to twist things, the gift to cut with a knife from a distance, the gift to make things ill. The protagonist's best friend has the ability to call and understand animals; his father has the hereditary power of unmaking things by looking at them, and his mother is a foreigner who loves books and stories and only half-believes in gifts at all. When the protagonist does come into his gift, it seems to be wild and uncontrollable, and so, for the sake of the people around him, he and his father agree to seal away his eyes, which is extra difficult for him because it also seals him away from books and from his mother's culture that she's been trying to share with him. So the book is about how he deals with this. I loved his mother, I loved her story as a foreigner living in this very difficult world by choice and trying to understand it; as for the main story, I think I understand what LeGuin was trying to do. But all the time that Orrec spent thinking bitterly how unfair it was that he had to choose to seal his eyes, I wish she had even just once had Orrec have a conversation with someone who was born blind.

Voices is a much more active book -- it's about a once-learned merchant city that has been living under an invading force for the past seventeen years, until a great poet comes to the city and sets off a chain of events that leads to revolt. The protagonist is a mixed-race girl, a "siege brat" from that initial conquest, who hates the invaders passionately and lives in a once-ruling house where secret learning is still kept. At first I rolled my eyes a little at how very, very awful the invading culture is, in contrast to the peaceable city inhabitants -- they're religious fanatics! they believe books are demonic and came specifically to BURN them! AND ALSO they're sexist and keep their women locked away, and and and -- but LeGuin is better than that, so even though the culture of the invaders is pretty much deliberately designed to horrify the readers as much as it horrifies the city inhabitants, the invaders are very much shown as people, too, and their culture as complicated and not monolithic. And the story is also about what happens after a tinderbox revolt, and politics and negotiations and compromise, and rebuilding afterwards. It's sort of an ideal scenario of how a revolution might go, but being ideal doesn't make it over-simplified or less complicated.

Powers, the third book, is actually the one I found most compelling, which I didn't expect. It's slower and more wandering than the others -- the protagonist of this one grows up as a house slave in the City-States, a military society which is very economically grounded in slave-ownership. He also sometimes has the power to see the future, not very clearly; this is almost incidental for a large part of the story. Anyway, he is actually fairly happy and unquestioning of his status in life until something awful happens that completely emotionally shatters him and also breaks his trust in the foundation of the system. After that he sort of bumbles in and out of various societies and situations, sort of grappling with the different systems of ownership and government and power that he encounters, and attempting to form real connections that can replace what he's lost. The book is also the most overtly feminist, and the discussion of slavery has a strong sub-theme of the ways that women are easily commodified, and even 'free' societies often and easily leave women out of that freedom. All this sounds pretty depressing and not all compelling, probably, but this morning I couldn't put it down. (And the ending is not depressing! In fact the happy ending comes almost too easily, after all the complicated, thoughtful depictions of everything else that happens.)

I really liked the series as a whole, and I think it benefits reading as a whole. Each book sort of indirectly complements and complicates the others, and the poem "Liberty" that links all of them means something different to each protagonist. And they all share a very strong interest in words and reading and stories and the power of narrative, and how that operates in different contexts. The one thing that links all the protagonists is their passion for stories and words.

The one thing I do want to say though is that there is are weirdly troubling depictions of disability, or at least they troubled me -- in the first book the 'gifts' are often used to disable people, but the victims of those 'gifts' appear as hearsay or unpleasant scenery, they're not really present and they don't have a voice. So then, as I mentioned above, the protagonist's blindness-by-choice is presented as a.) a terrible and difficult thing for him but b.) also weirdly and completely outside the context of blindness not-by-choice. That bothered me. Then in the third book, there's a character who as a child is described as walking a little strangely, his face a little askew, having fits of anger that he can't control -- and this character grows up to become horrible, violent, murderous, one of the symbols of the injustice of masters having unchecked power over slaves. So ... that's not good. And it made me less comfortable with the blindness narrative in the first book, because I can't trust that LeGuin was thinking very hard about disability in this narrative, although she was clearly thinking long and well about lots of other things.

Anyway this post is already very long so I'm going to stop it here, though there is loads more to discuss. I liked the books a lot! Project LeGuin continues to be a good project!

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/379256.html

I love that when I go to the Amazon page for LeGuin's The Dispossessed, the "also-boughts" includes a handful of other LeGuin novels, Russ' The Female Man, and something called Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? HELLO, CENTRAL QUESTION OF THE NOVEL. It's very clear that LeGuin began to write by having a kind of conversation with herself:

LEGUIN: Capitalist realism ... IS THERE NO ALTERNATIVE?
LEGUIN: OK, but what about socialism? What if it really did work?
LEGUIN: Right, right, okay, say there was a functional large-scale socialist society ... I mean, that sounds nice, but people would probably screw something up about it, right? People are people, we screw things up, that's what we do.
LEGUIN: Still better than capitalism, though. God, capitalism. UGH.

Basically, The Dispossessed just sort of flat-out transplants the Cold War to the alien planet of Annares, then throws a slight wrench into the works by positing the existence of a group of anarchist-socialist-separatists who make such a nuisance of themselves that the US-equivalent just kind of gives them a moon and tells them to go away. The socialist-separatists promptly go off and build themselves a giant and reasonably successful kibbutznik society on the moon, cheerfully teach their children about the Evils of Capitalism, and pursue a general policy of NO CONTACT EVER except the occasional trade ship and some scientific radio transmissions.

Enter our protagonist Shevek, a brilliant scientist, who decides he's going to be the first person since the moon settlement to return to Evil Capitalist Annares, For SCIENCE. The book alternates between chapters showing Shevek's experiences on Evil Capitalist Annares, and the life he's led in his anarchist-socialist-separatist moon society that made him think it was a good idea to leave in the first place.

While the book is super, super Cold War -- seriously, EXACT PARALLEL Cold War; kind of hilariously, there's a whole Soviet spy drama going on in the background that is not really a plot point because Shevek doesn't care about it AT ALL -- it's not like it's not ... still relevant? LeGuin has put a lot of thought into how a socialist-anarchist-separatist moon society could actually work, and how the structures instituted by that society would shape the kids who grow up in it, which is one of the most fascinating parts about the novel. The worldbuilding and culture-building is super solid, even aside from the political implications.

I mean, it would be interesting to see the version of Evil Capitalist Anarres she would write now, instead of in the seventies. I bet a lot of the gender stuff, especially, would be extremely different. But it wasn't at all for me like reading Heinlein or even Russ; none of that sense of "I'M TRAPPED IN THE SEVENTIES AND CAN'T GET OUT." The book works. I suspect it will go on working. Also, I need to read more classic LeGuin.

(Although I will say, the culture-building is really strong, but the sense of nonhuman culture, not so much. I kept forgetting the protagonists were not just basically meant to be humans until a character from Earth popped up at the end all "HELLO I AM AN AMBASSADOR FROM EARTH AND YOU ARE NOT HUMANS. JUST IN CASE THE READER HAD FORGOTTEN, WHAT WITH THE FACT THAT THIS IS LITERALLY THE COLD WAR.")