The Left Hand Of Darkness (SF Masterworks) Read online

  BY URSULA K. LE GUIN

  NOVELS

  The Hainish Cycle

  Rocannon’s World

  Planet of Exile

  City of Illusions

  The Left Hand of Darkness

  The Word for World is Forest

  The Dispossessed

  The Telling

  SHORT STORIES

  In The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

  Semley’s Necklace

  Winter’s King

  Nine Lives

  Vaster than Empires and More Slow

  The Day Before the Revolution

  In A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

  The Shobies’ Story

  Dancing to Ganam

  Another Story, or, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

  Four Ways to Forgiveness (all)

  In The Birthday of the World

  Coming of Age in Karhide

  The Matter of Seggri

  Unchosen Love

  Mountain Ways

  Solitude

  Old Music and the Slave Women

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-1-40552-527-5

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public

  domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely

  coincidental.

  Copyright © 1969 by Ursula Le Guin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior

  permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Charles

  sine qua non

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  By Ursula K. Le Guin

  Copyright

  Introduction by China Miéville

  Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Introductory Note for the 40th Anniversary Edition

  1 A Parade in Erhenrang

  2 The Place Inside the Blizzard

  3 The Mad King

  4 The Nineteenth Day

  5 The Domestication of Hunch

  6 One Way into Orgoreyn

  7 The Question of Sex

  8 Another Way into Orgoreyn

  9 Estraven the Traitor

  10 Conversations in Mishnory

  11 Soliloquies in Mishnory

  12 On Time and Darkness

  13 Down on the Farm

  14 The Escape

  15 To the Ice

  16 Between Drumner and Dremegole

  17 An Orgota Creation Myth

  18 On the Ice

  19 Homecoming

  20 A Fool’s Errand

  The Gethenian Calendar and Clock

  Coming of Age in Karhide

  Some Karhidish Words, and Two Songs from the Domain of Estre

  Author’s working sketch map

  Sketch map of the Planet Gethen

  INTRODUCTION BY CHINA MIÉVILLE

  The unluckiest books are those ignored or forgotten. But spare a thought too for those fated to become classics. A classic is too often a volume that everyone thinks they know. Classic-ness’ can be a gilded cage, constraining a live book’s unruly pages. It can be preserving fluid, or a sumptuous coffin.

  That The Left Hand of Darkness – this extraordinary, revered, multiple-award-winning work – is a classic, everyone enthusiastically agrees. Its regularly granted the dubious honour of transcending’ science fiction (sf). the field Le Guin has the temerity never to have repudiated. In fact one thing it transcends is precisely that ambivalent classic’ status there’s little danger of it suffering the ignominy of becoming any kind of nostrum, something given. It’s too loved and too live for that.

  We its readers return to it repeatedly, finding a new book on each rereading, and we pass it on to new generations who surrender as we did to its empathy and its questions.

  In theory, at least, sf excels at defamiliarisation. (‘[T]he door’, Robert Heinlein famously wrote in Beyond This Horizon, ‘dilated’. It’s a good line, a neat moment, a pleasurable jolt as you get the idea. Still, it does sf no honour that it’s Heinlein’s (often misquoted) line that is by far the field’s canonical example of the technique, rather than Le Guin’s much greater formulation, here: The king was pregnant’.

  Heinlein renders one corridor strange: Le Guin reconfigures society.

  In its problematizing of gender, The Left Hand of Darkness has been incomparably influential, a keystone of feminist fiction. Which is not to suggest that it is ‘only’ about gender: it’s a poised and sensitive love story of social control, understanding and misunderstanding, faithfulness and betrayal. It deals, slyly, with race: not for the first time Le Guin’s protagonist is of colour. It’s a book of snow and ice, a melancholy cryophilia all the more poignant now in a world heating up, as we mourn the ongoing death of cold. It’s a book about communication and its potential, alive though Le Guin is to its failures and manipulations: there is in the beautiful conceit of the ‘ansible’, a device allowing instantaneous communication across impossible distances, a utopian kernel.

  In all these themes, and others, it is never not about gender, too. All its aspects, in Le Guin’s words, ‘are involved with its sex/gender aspects quite inextricably’.

  Because in these pages kings become pregnant.

  To the world of Gethen – Winter – comes a messenger, Genly Ai, inviting the local humans to join the Ekumen, a coalition of human societies across a range of worlds. We follow him as he negotiates complex mores and traditions we don’t understand; Byzantine intricacies of court intrigue: shifts in loyalty and allegiance. And as he struggles with the strange ambisexual specificities of the Gethenians, like Estraven, his closest companion, who accompanies him on an arduous journey.

  For the bulk of each month the Gethenians are effectively asexual androgynes: only for a short period of ‘kemmer’ do they experience sexual desire and adopt sexual characteristics, becoming temporarily ‘male’ or female’, without control, predisposition or preference, to engage in enthusiastic, uncoercive sex, perhaps to biologically mother and/or father children.

  Le Guin wrote, she said, out of a desire ‘to define and understand the meaning of sexuality and the meaning of gender, in my life and in our society’.

  The way I did my thinking was to write a novel’, she has explained. That novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, is the record of my consciousness, the process of my thinking.’

  The book remains radical and affecting – and that is if we read the Gethenians now, half a century on from their birth, in an era shaped by decades of feminist struggle, gay politics, trans voices, militant gender trouble, of growing insistence on the fluidity and performance of sexuality. If it is not immediately clear to some new young reader how radical it was on its arrival, before it was a classic, that’s because they read it now in its own aftermath, and that of the books and battles it inspired.

  It may seem paradoxical, then, that, as Le Guin recollects in a wonderful New Yorker interview of 2009, ‘the feminists … gave me a hard time about it [the book] for years’.

  Though she has shifted in her opinions, the editor and critic Sarah LeFanu, for example, once considered that Le Guin didn’t go far enough in challenging the heterosexual status quo’. The writer Joanna Russ was frustrated that questions of familial life were relatively neglected, and that Estraven was masculine in gender, if not in sex’.
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br />   With honourable exceptions, writers of fiction aren’t renowned for the grace or open-mindedness with which they respond to criticism. It’s a measure of how normalised a certain authorial prickliness is, a baseless assumption that writers are the authorities on their own work, that what Le Guin goes on to say about her feminist critics is so startling.

  They wanted me to have been braver. I guess I wish I had been.’

  To a perhaps unique degree, Le Guin has always striven to reexamine her own work in the light of thoughtful critique. How hard this process is for any writer is evident from her 1976 essay, ‘Is Gender Necessary?’ This rumination on The Left Hand of Darkness and its critics is fascinating and illuminating, but not without defensiveness. But Le Guin pushed herself back to the issues repeatedly. 12 years later she rewrote the essay as ‘Is Gender Necessary? Redux’, supplementing the original text with new notes, sometimes flatly contradicting her earlier words.

  She is not gentle with herself. ‘This is bluster’, she says of an initial claim that ‘the real subject of the book is not feminism or sex or gender… I had opened a can of worms and was trying hard to shut it.’

  On rethinking, Le Guin accepts various feminist criticisms, allowing that women were justified in asking more courage of me’, that the exploration of Gethenian homosexuality hadn’t occurred to her. She completely overturns her initial defence of the use of the generic’ pronoun ‘he/him/his’, words that, she allows, ‘shaped, directed, controlled’ her thinking. (Given such sensitivity to inherited language, that this edition calls the book a Masterwork’ is not without a wry irony.)

  What’s striking is that Le Guin doesn’t revise the novel: rather, she lets it stand and supplements it with a growing rather, she lets it stand and supplements it with a growing palimpsest of reconsiderations. The result is a book astonishingly enriched, a text embracing its own metatext, both artefact of and dissenting from its time and culture, becoming new artefact and new dissent as times change. This is a book both still and in motion.

  And the motion doesn’t stop. The dialogue continues. To raise questions, to agree or even to disagree with the text or its commentary is to take part in a conversation that Le Guin herself has invited. It is to love the book.

  Profoundly humane, The Left Hand of Darkness takes nothing about humanity for granted. It starts, rather, from a position that to do so would be a betrayal to humanity itself.

  In a part of ‘Is Gender Necessary?’ that Le Guin does not revise, she decries a dualism of value’, ‘[divisions’, the fact that ‘interdependence is denied’. She aspires for ‘a much healthier, sounder, more promising modality of integration and integrity’. It is with this approach that she can present a paradox that becomes its own solution. A pregnant king.

  And in that method is the most important paradox of all. Each return to this book gives something new. It is. as all Le Guin’s books are, profoundly generous to readers, and, through them, to the urge for emancipation. It is by assuming nothing, in her very ‘ungivens’, that Ursula Le Guin is the most giving writer we have.

  China Miéville, 2017

  INTRODUCTION BY URSULA K. LE GUIN

  Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

  This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.”

  Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.

  Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn’t the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer’s or the reader’s. Variables are the spice of life.

  This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let’s say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens…In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.

  The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future—indeed Schrödinger’s most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the “future,” on the quantum level, cannot be predicted—but to describe reality, the present world.

  Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

  Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

  The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

  “The truth against the world!”—Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth!

  They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region, the author’s mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

  Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?

  But our society, being troubled and bewildered, seeking guidance, sometimes puts an entirely mistaken trust in its artists, using them as prophets and futurologists.

  I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that the awen cannot come upon them, and the god speak through them. Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? if they
did not know it happens, because, they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands? Maybe only once, once in their lives. But once is enough.

  Nor would I say that the artist alone is so burdened and so privileged. The scientist is another who prepares, who makes ready, working day and night, sleeping and awake, for inspiration. As Pythagoras knew, the god may speak in the forms of geometry as well as in the shapes of dreams; in the harmony of pure thought as well as in the harmony of sounds; in numbers as well as in words.

  But it is words that make the trouble and confusion. We are asked now to consider words as useful in only one way: as signs. Our philosophers, some of them, would have us agree that a word (sentence, statement) has value only in so far as it has one single meaning, points to one fact which is comprehensible to the rational intellect, logically sound, and—ideally—quantifiable.

  Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number—Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then.

  I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

  The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

  Oh, it’s lovely to be invited to participate in Futurological Congresses where Systems Science displays its grand apocalyptic graphs, to be asked to tell the newspapers what America will be like in 2001, and all that, but it’s a terrible mistake. I write science fiction, and science fiction isn’t about the future. I don’t know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less.

  This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by announcing that it’s set in the “Ekumenical Year 1490-97,” but surely you don’t believe that?

  Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.