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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.

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.

I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.

“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.

didn’t take in what I read, which didn’t matter since I knew it by heart and was reading merely to shut up the interior voice that kept telling me, It has all gone wrong.

We are all men, you know, sir. All of us. All the worlds of men were settled, eons ago, from one world, Hain. We vary, but we’re all sons of the same Hearth. .

As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence.

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

The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) “tied down to childbearing,” implies that no one is quite so thoroughly “tied down” here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be—psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. 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.

A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.

Winter hasn’t achieved in thirty centuries what Terra once achieved in thirty decades. Neither has Winter ever paid the price that Terra paid.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose.

know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in 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?

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.

But the Ice did not know how hard we worked. Why should it? Proportion is kept.

had taken Estraven six months to arrange my first audience. It had taken the rest of his life to arrange this second one.

There again was the delight, the courage, that is most admirable in the Karhidish spirit—and in the human spirit—and

This novel showed me a reality where storytelling could help me question the ideas about gender and sexuality that had been handed down to all of us, take-it-or-leave-it style, from childhood.

Le Guin captures perfectly the pitfalls of communicating across cultures: the way people talk past each other and pick up on meanings that the other person didn’t intend.

A huge part of the value of a science fiction story like The Left Hand of Darkness is that it allows you to imagine that things could be very different. And then, when you come back to the “real” world, you bring with you that sense that we can choose our own reality, and the world is ours to reshape.

Maybe our rigid gender binary is just as made-up as their neutral-except-once-a-month gender is. Maybe our government-issued pronouns and official stereotypes don’t have to define us always. Especially for my fellow trans and nonbinary people, a story that undermines the assumptions behind coercive labels feels magical.

Genly Ai is a misogynist. This becomes more apparent to me every time I reread The Left Hand of Darkness, and it’s the main reason why Genly is bad at his job.

It’s fascinating, and very realistic, that Genly Ai is an enlightened representative of an advanced, harmonious culture—while also being a deeply messed-up individual who cannot see past his own limited ideas about gender and sexuality. He’s curious and open-minded about everything, except for the huge areas where his mind has been long since closed. He doesn’t even glimpse all the things that his privilege has allowed him to avoid looking at.

This, along with other linguistic concepts like the untranslatable nusuth, feels like a nod to the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language shapes the way we think.