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Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
The Left Hand of Darkness

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929- )
Genre: Science fiction--alien civilization
Type of Work: Novel
Time of Plot: The distant future
Location: Karhide and Orgoreyn, competing countries on the planet
Gethen, also known as Winter because of its ice age
First Published: 1969

The Story
The Left Hand of Darkness is a report from representative Genly Ai to the Ekumen of Known Worlds, an organization of about eighty planets clearly analogous to the United Nations. Ai has been sent to enlist the two hostile countries of the planet Gethen, Karhide and Orgoreyn, to join the Ekumen. He needs a formal guarantee of welcome for his orbiting spaceship and the Ekumen representatives therein. This requirement is complicated for the ill-at-ease Ai by the dislike between Karhide and Orgoreyn, by their unsettled internal political states, and especially by the sexual ambiguity of the people of this world. They are hermaphroditic, combining both female and male sexual characteristics and playing one or the other sexual role at different points in their lives, depending on complex psychohormonal circumstances.

The Gethenians' competing governments are a challenge for Ai. His Terran reliance on sexual identity as a basis for forming relations of trust with another human offers no guidance on Gethen, only confusion and distrust. Estraven, the head minister to the king of Karhide, is banished, ending Ai's hopes of a friendly reception. The Terran envoy feels little for the exiled ally on whom he had pinned his hopes. Seers known as "Foretellers" predict that Gethen will join the Ekumen within five years. Hopeful of a better reception elsewhere, Ai moves from the medieval-flavored monarchy of Karhide to the bureaucratic country of Orgoreyn, a seemingly orderly and thoroughly organized nation-state reminiscent of both ancient Egypt in its monolithic building style and the Soviet Union in its centralized systems and icebound prison camps for freethinkers.

Ai fails there as well, even though he has the support of Estraven, who has been granted an uncertain refugee status. Ai sides with the Open Trade Faction, a losing political movement, and is sent to a frozen labor camp similar to Soviet Siberia. Estraven rescues him, and both begin an arduous and hazardous trek across the Gobrin Ice that is the contested land between the two countries. Estraven's know-how and Gethenian cold-weather gear make for a successful crossing.

Finally, Ai can call in his spaceship, for the Orgoreyn leaders have trapped themselves in a lie by reporting Ai's "accidental" death. Karhide's king can gain an advantage on Orgoreyn by welcoming Ekumen. Lord Tibe of Karhide has Estraven killed because he had been exiled under sentence of death. Ai's mission therefore is successful, but at the sacrifice of his new friend. The book ends with Ai meeting Estraven's parent (Gethenians do not mate for life) and child, both androgynous, and telling them of his friendship with Estraven on the ice. The implication is that Ai has come to accept the humanity of people without clear gender.

Analysis
The prophetic insight of The Left Hand of Darkness lies in its exploration of what came to be called gender issues. As Ursula Le Guin herself has said, in 1969 the feminist movement was only beginning, and even gender bias in language--she uses "he" throughout for the hermaphroditic Gethenians--had not been investigated. The real difference between men and women, however, was an elemental question for Le Guin and other feminist thinkers of that time. Her "thought experiment" of having a hapless Terran male adrift in a world with no gender markers was inspired.

Ai's discomfort at having no clues to guide his relationships is fascinating and instructive. He suffers far greater unease than he would have if confronted with a conventionally alien life-form. The book captures the common human process of perceiving a new acquaintance: The sexual shell often disappears and, over time, the inner, sexless personality emerges. To confront the personality without the matrix of gender, as Ai does, can be frightening. Ai's accommodation to this new perspective is truly humane: To Ai, Estraven becomes familiar yet alien, reassuring yet finally mysterious, like another human. Le Guin thus makes her point about gender differences.

The novel involves far more than gender twisting. The two societies of Karhide and Orgoreyn are wonderfully conceived, evocative of familiar societies while retaining their distinct alien identity. Karhide is medieval and monarchical, a traditional society still youthful in the stiff, independent rectitude of its citizens, a country vaguely reminiscent of Eastern Europe. In perfect contrast is Orgoreyn. Its people have chosen the completely different route of overorganization into bureaucratic apparatus, and the initially benign appearance of the society turns out to be a cover for secret police and prison camps. The two societies inevitably suggest the contrast of the disorderly individualism and frontier ethic of the United States in juxtaposition with the collectivism and group consciousness of the former Soviet Union, with its Potemkin villages and gulags in the snow.

Religions also are contrasted. Handdara, the faith practiced in Karhide, is an Eastern type of religion stressing a yin and yang opposition: "Light is the left hand of darkness/ and darkness the right hand of light." Yomesh, found mainly in Orgoreyn, is more in the Western tradition of a revealed faith based on a prophet, with truth capable of being distinguished from illusion. The contrast in the two religions parallels the sexual and political contrasts in the book, with the suggestion that experience of both viewpoints is necessary for a full and humane understanding.

If science fiction is to be judged not only for the validity and interest of its ideas but also for the integrity and believability of the fictional worlds it creates, The Left Hand of Darkness succeeds brilliantly on every count. In its exploration of gender and of the never-resolved differences of East and West, the novel is an excellent primer for the problems that bedevil Earth, yet Gethen is as complete a world as one could wish for, detailed and utterly convincing. Le Guin shows the value of seeing through the eyes of the Other as well as the enormous difficulty in perceiving what is complimentary in the initially alien.

--Andrew Macdonald