The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

write this introduction I read the novel for the fifth time and I’m still finding new rooms behind new doors I never noticed before.

violence have a gender? Rape does not exist on Gethen, and seduction “would have to be awfully well timed,” but what of marriage, sexism, misogyny, and feminism? Is gender at the core of the self, or is there a deep-down “Gethenian layer” where we, too, are neither male nor female? Is

“No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.

“Vagueness breeds vagueness. And some questions of course are not answerable.”

“The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion…. Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”

only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

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.

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.

did they consider war to be a purely masculine displacement-activity, a vast Rape, and therefore

in their experiment eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femininity that is raped?

Here man has a crueler enemy even than himself.

Their tenderness towards their children struck me as being profound, effective, and almost wholly unpossessive. Only in that unpossessiveness does it perhaps differ from what we call the “maternal” instinct. I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic….

The king was pregnant.