-Very thoroughly recommended
Ursula K. Le Guin is an impossible anthropologist. You can see it in many of her short stories and novellas, especially those of her book of short stories, Changing Planes. In that volume she imagines the social consequences of a small minority of people possessing an unreliable ability of flight, of a sentient species that migrates en masse two or three times in the course of their lives, of four-party marriages, of a planet where dreams are communal. Alongside this she dissolves reality into a mass of disparate experiences, through the bewildering, hard to control and frankly creepy instant inter-stellar communication of the churten.
The churten is an excellent illustration of the way Ursula's writing continually returns to change, mutability, and the uncertain. In The Left Hand of Darkness, this comes together with her investigative anthropological streak and she calmly reimagines gender and physical sex in the most literal expression of gender fluidity possible.
It's worth noting that this doesn't lie at the heart of the novel - or rather, it doesn't reign there alone. It's rather fine to find so grand a concept as a mere part of a greater complexity. And it's also worth noting that Ursula in later life considered her choice to use the pronoun 'he' for her single mutably-gendered species as less than perfect, and something she'd have changed had she written the book at a different time.
So what does lie at the core of this book? It's the opposite of a conquest, if you like, the tale of a free invitation extended to the peoples of Winter to join a confederation of ideas spanning many light-years, a confederation that chats through the churten like a magnificent radio, but is restricted in physical contact by that immense distance it spans. It's the story of the envoy of that request, Genly Ai, and how he (this 'he' is like one of our own species in that he doesn't physically shift sex in a regular cycle) must wait and offer, and wait. There's friendship in it, deep friendship past the recognition of difference, there's the physical majesty of a vast winter planet, and there's the sense of something truly other, examined carefully and with respect.
Suppose I were to talk with Le Guin about this book? Alas, it is impossible, as she is no longer with us, though I must point readers to her website: her fine catalogue of writing and prolific posts from the blog she started at the age of 81. Supposing it possible, though, and supposing I were not utterly tongue-tied in her presence, the one authorial choice I'd want to better understand is the way she drew the country of Orgoreyn as a clear, satirical, bitter portrayal of Soviet Russia. The parallels are so exact, the satire so biting, that it drew me out of my belief in Winter as a separate world to our own, and made me remember I was reading a book. But it might well be, in 1969, that making that critique was important enough to her that she judged it warranted, even at the cost of immersion.
I'm going to finish by quoting a chunk of her preface to the book, because frankly it's a damn cheek for me to be expressing opinions about her work poorly when she took the time to say them far better herself:
"All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor...
..A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.'
This is of course a salutary reminder that no amount of book review, no quantity of discussion, is ever a substitute for the book itself. So, I wholeheartedly recommend you engage with Genly Ai's tale directly, and read what he has to say.
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