Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness
Little, Brown
ISBN 0441478123
Monika says:
If the League of Worlds makes first contact with worlds that have never
been in touch with other civilizations they traditionally send a single
person because this way people who would regard even two strangers as a
threat take in their ambassadors. Genly Ai is sent to the planet Winter,
or Gethen as the natives call it.
The people of Gethen are humanoid, but different from the people of
Earth in an elementary way: they are male as well as female and able to
procreate only in a short span of time they call Kemmer. During
this recurring cycle they become either male or female and they never know
before which sex it will be next time. The rest of the time they have no
sex. They regard Genly Ai as a biological curiosity because he is
constantly in Kemmer. He has a hard time convincing the Gethenians
to join the League of Worlds as an outpost of the inhabited part of the
Milky Way.
LeGuin’s award winning novel that was published in 1969 tells in a
poetic way the adventures of Genly Ai on a planet at the height of an ice
age with two nations at war and him stuck in the middle. She creates a
world where everything familiar is turned upside down. The traditional
roles of the genders that have shaped life on Earth for millennia don’t
exist on Winter. Thus a completely different society has developed even if
the physical appearance of Gethenians is hardly any different from us
humans. Deeply rooted human characteristics like the tendency to wage war
also still exist, even if the war between the genders is unknown.
What makes the Gethenians particularly likeable is something we might
call "Gemütlichkeit". Their means of transportation are no
faster than cars on Earth at the beginning of the 20th
Century, although their technology is more advanced than that. If you
like to escape from the hectic of our society and are willing to slip
into LeGuin’s world you will be enchanted, even if it takes a while to
get into the book. Once you got used to the author’s style you will
easily be able to transfer yourself to the icy vastness of Gethen and
shivering look over the shoulder of Ambassador Genly Ai as he tries to
make first contact. |
