About ten years ago, I read Ursula Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness for the first time and really enjoyed it. When I really enjoy a book, I try to get around to re-reading it. The LHOD is set on the planet Gethen, also known as Winter since the planet is in the midst of a period of glacial expansion. And what better time to pick the book up again than in the middle of one of the hottest Julys on record?
The Left Hand of Darkness is the story of Genly Ai, a representative of the Ekumen, a galactic federation of planets. He is an Envoy whose solo mission is to bring Gethen into the Ekumen.
The Left Hand of Darkness is also the story of Estraven, the prime minister of Karhide, one of the major kingdoms on Gethen. Estraven is one of the few people in power to accept Genly Ai's mission and attempts to help Ai.
Ten years ago, I was most struck by the novel's examination of gender: Gethenians are all the same sex, which is to say that they possess both male and female sex organs and everyone on the planet is capable of bearing children. (There's no hot Gethenian-on-Gethenian action in the novel so pervs needn't bother.)
Reading LHOD this time around, what struck me was the political intrigue. Estraven is labeled a traitor and forced into exile by the ambitious Tibe, who preys on the fears of Karhide's insecure king. Tibe becomes prime minister and to confirm his place in power threatens war with the neighboring nation of Orgoreyn. All of this depends upon dramatic appeals for national unity.
The best fiction -- whether it has "science" or any other modifier in front of it -- holds up a truthful mirror to reality. I couldn't help but think of things going on in our own planet when I read the following passage. Genly Ai suggests that Estraven hates Orgoreyn.
"How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks 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 the 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 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."
Ignorant in the Handdara* sense: to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing. There was in this attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract, the ideal, a submissiveness to the given, which rather displeased me.
Yet he added, scrupulous, "A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such as thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it."
* a mystical Zen-like order that Estraven trained in as a young man.
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