Review: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)

Genly Ai is an emissary to the planet Winter, which is covered in ice and whose inhabitants are all humanoid hermaphrodites. His mission is to befriend these people and persuade them to join the Ekumen, an alliance of planets designed for the sharing of culture and information. But his dubious position as an outsider keeps him on shaky ground, and when global politics repeatedly get the better of him, his only chance for survival comes in the form of Estraven, a former prime minister banished for treason. Together, these two exiles undertake an epic voyage across the ice that gives Genly a closer look than ever at the minds and values of these androgynous people.

If you've seen my selection of Le Guin's blog, you already know that while I respect her as one of the most insightful speculative fiction writers I've ever had the luck to read, her outlook frequently falls just short. This could be disappointing, but it's more important to look at the massive questions she does ask. This book is crammed with those.

The main issue raised in the novel is that of the differences between our visions of gender. Her foreword, which is a beautiful little piece about the use of fiction to frame real life, explains that science fiction and its cousins test our capacity for thought by contrasting what we think is impossible against what we cannot conceive at all. With a detailed explanation, it's easy to imagine someone who can transition between biological femaleness and biological maleness, and perhaps even exhibit both at once, but can you imagine someone who is psychologically a man and a woman at the same time? I don't know enough psychology to dispute which traits Le Guin identifies as feminine and which as masculine, but I give her all the credit I can for not pretending that women and men are the same people with different plumbing downstairs. I don't know about other parts of the world, but a lot of Americans have slurred this latter one together out of a strange need to justify civil rights. (Psst: Treating people well is not at all like treating them the same, and you don't need to make up an excuse to do so.)

Given a pretty good sense of what makes men and women different, Le Guin does quite a job of uniting these behind an alien mindset. This happens mostly because she shows it in the characters rather than describing it, for the most part. So while it's established here that competitiveness is primarily masculine and hospitality is primarily feminine, Genly the narrator cannot quite figure out what's motivating a Gethenian (as the aliens are called) in any given action. It's a function of Le Guin's subtlety that there's still an obvious, complex difference between Genly and the Gethenians that stems from the difference that while they are both male and female, he is only ever male.

Put The Left Hand of Darkness high on your list. It should be up there with Dune on the list of complex and intelligent science fiction creations.

The Problem

Since my main quarrel with this book is one of ideology, and didn't make me enjoy it any less, I'm separating it from my recommendation. If anything, it makes me like the book more for arousing the scrappy, perhaps competitive (heh) literary critic I wish I could be.

Taken as a whole, The Left Hand of Darkness turns into a panorama of wishful thinking. You may have read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which envisions the result of a profound problem with human civilization. The Gethen Le Guin creates here is a formal inverse of the dystopia; it's almost Edenic, but its circumstances are not what would really bring about paradise on Earth.

The two main features of Gethen are its ice-age climate and its inhabitants' bisexuality. Genly occasionally chronicles the differences that have arisen between Gethen's civilizations as a whole and that of his own Terra (Earth). For example, from fighting against such bitter weather conditions, Gethenians have cultivated the value of permanence rather than our 20th- and 21st-century preference of progress and innovation. But then Le Guin drops the fact that although Gethenians murder each other from time to time, the planet has never experienced a war in its several millennia of recorded history. This is partly, as she says, because the weather is already so good at killing them, but also has something to do with never having learned violence as a result of their androgynous physiology. Most importantly, it is physically impossible for one Gethenian to rape another. A large part of the plot deals with the fear that Gethen's first-ever war will break out soon, but that quickly fizzles, both in terms of the plot and of the narrative's interest.

It's all as if Le Guin is saying that there would be no violence, neither war nor rape, if we were all sexually equivalent and if our planet beat us back rather than vice versa. These ideas were fun at the dawn of the 70's, around the time of the book's publication, just as they are now. But the circumstances are impossible. And to pin strife on theories of gender and ecological destruction distracts from the reality that greed and selfishness are demons we all have to fight. Just as there doesn't need to be an excuse for selflessness, it can be harmful to disguise that its opposite is not also an inextricable piece of human nature.

Review: The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen R. Donaldson (1986)

Close your eyes. Imagine that The Lord of the Rings is your favorite book. You've read it more times than you can count, and you remember more about Middle Earth than you could recite in a day. (For some, this isn't such a stretch.) Now imagine you've found another series by Tolkien, read by few, that takes place not in Middle Earth, but in an entirely new fantasy world. Ravenous for this new discovery, you pick it up and begin to read.

It's a romance novel. Not only that, but it's a mediocre romance novel.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the fantasy, mystery, bodice-ripper offered to the world by one of my biggest fantasy influences. It was one of my most bizarre experiences of 2012.

Terisa Morgan is a woman who almost literally has no life. She's quiet, submissive, and friendless. She lives alone in an apartment paid for by her rich, aloof father, and spends all day working for a soup kitchen without forming any bonds with the poor she serves. Her biggest fear is disappearing entirely without anyone noticing. This all changes one night when a strange man bursts through her bedroom mirror. His name is Geraden, and he comes from a land in which mirrors can create anything imaginable. Geraden is on a mission to retrieve someone to save his kingdom from destruction, and he believes Terisa to be that champion. With no reason to stay in the life she knows, Terisa follows Geraden into a fantasy world full of familial plots and political games. Amidst a background of danger and wits, Terisa must choose between the affections of Geraden, and a master Imager named Eremis, who is always one step ahead of the plots threatening the land of Mordant.

Donaldson thrives in a setting where ordinary-world people interact with archaic-speaking people who are differently complex: who have an eye for patterns and schemes but who are blind to different subtleties than we are. For example, many of his characters seem to perceive familial ties as something tangible, which makes them stronger than you or I, but we might be quicker to see how relationships might shift, and catch onto deceit more quickly. Even when a Donaldson fantasy character is skeptical, it's in a solid, direct way. This interaction between cemented values and our own subtle shades of gray is what powers the Thomas Covenant series, and it's what saves The Mirror of Her Dreams, but not by a long shot.

You'd think, perhaps as a joke, that your favorite author could pull off a silly romance. After all, the best writers usually know how to shift genres with some skill. The problem is that this is still a fantasy, and Donaldson's fantasy, as opposed to his other work, is usually highly methodical. He ratchets up the tension by revealing one thrilling detail at a time, getting quite a bit of mileage out of each aspect of the plot. This works wonders in Thomas Covenant. But in this novel, where half the details are repetitive flirtations, it gets boring quickly.

There's a fair amount of philosophic value diluted amid the sappiness. Although Terisa's fear of disappearing makes a bad metaphor, it creates some interesting avenues for existential questioning. A good amount of space is devoted to the question of whether Terisa existed prior to appearing in Mordant. Even she is unable to resolve them. The philosophy is relatively outdated, but it's still solid.

If you're a connoisseur of romance novels, try this one on for size. If not, don't make this your introduction to Donaldson. I plan to read the concluding sequel, A Man Rides Through, which I hope will be an improvement.

Review: The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany (2002)

One building in Cairo becomes the focus for a multitude of different people facing different struggles. Zaki el Dessouki is an aged playboy who lives with his spiteful sister, and whose golden age has long since passed. Busayna el Sayed is a poor young woman who is forced to sell her body in order to support her family. Her boyfriend, Taha el Shazli, finds his dreams squashed repeatedly because of his low social status, and gradually feels the tug toward an Islamic fundamentalism that hides something darker. Hatim Rasheed is a gay editor who can only express himself in terms of power and manipulation. And the worst of all, Hagg Azzam, is a millionaire who buys a spot in the political machine, only to discover that as rich as he is, there are always powers capable of buying and destroying him. As the book develops, these and more characters weave in and out of each other's lives, some never quite meeting despite sharing the same chaotic space in the world.

This is the last installment of my Arabic literature reviews. As far as I know, this one is not indicative of typical Egyptian novels; the professor told us that more than any book he knows, it's intended to offend everybody. So buckle in.

The fascinating aspect of this book is its unresolved question of who is a good person, and who is evil. A dedicated third-person narration washes the authors hands of this somewhat, but of course the events of the plot speak to a certain expectation of life's outcomes. So we, the readers, must decide whether each character receives his just desserts, or whether the outcomes are random. Some characters fall disgracefully, while others find a little happiness at last. For the most part, the resolution is bleak. Such is life, I suppose.

At the same time, however, there's something about almost every character that draws out some sympathy. This is especially true of the two young characters, Busayna and Taha. Both are totally demeaned throughout the course of the story. Though I disagree with my classmate who sees Busayna as a total victim, with no volition of her own, I understand her as an expression that few condemnable actions are total choices, easy to avoid, and that no lifestyle stands on its own. Certainly Busayna is hurt more than she ever hurts anyone else, even herself. Taha, on the other hand, carries this example to its extreme. Unlike Busayna, he is never offered any alternative to the path he eventually follows, other than the option to remain poor and untouchable. A variety of forces, no single one to blame, warp his brain and his values into something he thinks is holy. To me, Taha's resolution is the most heartbreaking part of the story and of any piece of this course.

The book is very explicit about violence and sex; be aware of that when picking it up. And be ready for some psychological trauma. But other than that, it's an intelligent read with a variety of subtle values. Give it a try if you're on a postmodern kick and want to read something non-Western.