Week 10: The Left Hand of Darkness


This may be my favorite book I’ve read yet for class this semester. I know Ursula K. Le Guin’s work from when I was a child, and I believe I read A Wizard of Earthsea around the time I was 8 or 10, though I don’t remember much except for the fact I liked it. The Left Hand of Darkness has a really interesting setup, since it has a familiar concept: an alien comes down to a planet as an emissary to space. Le Guin then messes with this premise until it becomes something fresh and unrecognizable. The alien is actually a human, and the planet is icy, with a culture based on snow and divided starkly between two major nations. Instead of a thriller, the alien’s arrival is all very businesslike, and he spends most of his time in politics trying to convince people to officially join the conjoined group of planets and peoples that he represents. Nobody really seems to listen to him, and he foresees it taking years to get the job done. The biggest divide between the emissary and the planet Winter is that the inhabitants of Winter have no sex – they live most of their lives androgynously, with short periods of being gendered in between, where they can have children as the male or the female. The emissary first finds himself repulsed by this idea, thinking that it resembles how animals go into season instead of being fertile year round, but as the book goes on, he warms up to the idea. He stops seeing everyone he meets strongly as a male or a female, and when his own people finally arrive, he is instead disgusted by how gendered they are. More important than these generalities though, it’s the specifics of our protagonist Genly Ai’s relationship with a person named Estraven that really made me like The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin takes her thought experiment and really fleshes it out into reality. Despite being from different planets, Genly Ai and Estraven eventually become friends and allies. Estraven helps Genly with his mission as an emissary, even to the point of severe danger. The two journey great distances and seem to get close to being more than friends, but ultimately the relationship stays platonic. Towards the end, Estraven gets himself killed by border guards in order to help Genly one last time with his mission. In this sense, Genly succeeds, but he’s left in mourning without his closest friend. It’s really a heartbreaking story, one which does an admirable job of throwing the concept of gender away without ever straying from its overarching narrative. Beyond even gender, the book has a lot to say about overcoming differences to forge friendships. No matter how different their peoples are, the alienation between Estraven and Genly fades away in the face of their growing bonds. The walls we build between ourselves here in our society seem insignificant in comparison, yet we seem often incapable of surmounting them.

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