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‘Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power. She sets up enormous challenges and meets them fully; she invites, as Tolkien does, total belief’ Observer
What Earthsea and the Hainish Cycle have in common is maximal impact with minimal page count.
Ursula Le Guin is a chemist of the heart. She constructs her characters with the same eye for detail that she uses to build her worlds.
Le Guin recognises that it’s the difference that is the point; that no bridge between two people – no friendship, no love – can exist without difference.
Heinlein renders one corridor strange: Le Guin reconfigures society.
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.’
Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
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.
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.
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.
I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
I’LL MAKE MY REPORT AS IF I TOLD A STORY, FOR I WAS taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.
Nothing succeeds like success.
The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence.
But I began to understand Karhide better, after a halfmonth in Otherhord. Under that nation’s politics and parades and passions runs an old darkness, passive, anarchic, silent, the fecund darkness of the Handdara.
I asked if these two psychopaths could not be cured. “Cured?” Goss said. “Would you cure a singer of his voice?”
“And I’ll change with it, Genry. But I have no wish to change it.”
“Faxe, I don’t think I understand.” “Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.” “But you’re the Answerers!” “You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?” “No—” “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”
Yet he still awed me a little. When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me out of a tradition thirteen thousand years old: a way of thought and way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unself-consciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present....
“Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer.... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
Whether he did this in shifgrethor against Tibe’s men who would kill an unarmed man, or in kindness, I do not know. Nusuth. “The admirable is inexplicable.”
When I heard this I let go of anger and laughed; at the pit’s bottom is no anger.
Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.
Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.
Our entire pattern of sociosexual interaction is nonexistent here. They cannot play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept. What is the first question we ask about a newborn baby?
One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
There must be sexual frustration (though society provides as well as it can against it; so long as the social unit is large enough that more than one person will be in kemmer at one time, sexual fulfillment is fairly certain), but at least it cannot build up; it is over when kemmer is over. Fine; thus they are spared much waste and madness; but what is left, in somer? What is there to sublimate? What would a society of eunuchs achieve?—But of course they are not eunuchs, in somer, but rather more comparable to pre-adolescents: not castrate, but latent.
I am a woman of peaceful Chiffewar, and no expert on the attractions of violence or the nature of war. Someone else will have to think this out. But I really don’t see how anyone could put much stock in victory or glory after he had spent a winter on Winter, and seen the face of the Ice.
Winter hasn’t achieved in thirty centuries what Terra once achieved in thirty decades. Neither has Winter ever paid the price that Terra paid.
Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
Here the clan looked after its own; nobody and everybody was responsible for them.
The king was pregnant.
It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once.
The Orgota seemed not an unfriendly people, but incurious; they were colorless, steady, subdued. I liked them. I had had two years of color, choler, and passion in Karhide. A change was welcome.
I put on my winter coat and went out for a walk, in a disagreeable mood, in a disagreeable world.
It was odd that in the less primitive society, the more sinister note was struck.
There was something fluid, insubstantial, in the very heaviness of this city built of monoliths, this monolithic state that called the part and the whole by the same name.
and yet each of them lacked some quality, some dimension of being; and they failed to convince. They were not quite solid. It was, I thought, as if they did not cast shadows.
The machine conceals the machinations.
To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
Orgoreyn and Karhide both must stop following the road they’re on, in either direction; they must go somewhere else, and break the circle.
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
Shusgis and others take Genly Ai about the city openly. I wonder if he sees that this openness hides the fact that he is hidden. No one knows he is here.
He must think me very uneasy; which, indeed, makes me uneasy.
There is an innocence in him that I have found merely foreign and foolish; yet in another moment that seeming innocence reveals a discipline of knowledge and a largeness of purpose that awes me.
Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?
They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.
