Stating the Obvious, Reading Ursula K Le Guin

Spending time with our girl Ursula

This started as my monthly Reading Report, but then I had too much to say about Le Guin. Report forthcoming. Instead, here are one thousand words on why you should read one of the most celebrated science fiction authors of all time.

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Last month, I was at a bookstore and asked the bookseller to recommend books with plot—they recommended Rent Boy, the Gary Indiana novel I read last month, which is such a viscerally intense book that it truly demonstrates a certainty of character to recommend to a total stranger. And I also mentioned being a science fiction enjoyer, but I had never read any Le Guin. “It’s time,” they said, and handed me a copy of The Left Hand of Darkness.

They were right: it was time. I loved it so much I immediately read another book by her right away. Now, I feel unequal to the task of writing about these books. They are the kind of book that reach in and rattle your brain stem: serious books about political and moral philosophy grounded by flawed characters in the throes of personal, societal transformation. I’m sad I didn’t read Le Guin earlier and I’m thrilled there are so many more to read and that I did come to them now.

She is also an author whom people deeply care about on a personal level. The first ever derisive Substack comment I received was on a Note about reading her. As a casual reader and not nearly so passionate reader, I had to be reminded: people really love Le Guin. Her public persona has reached hagiographic levels. She’s an author whom many people read young, when reading matters so much to your sense of self. I feel more cautious writing about and recommending Le Guin than any of the canonical literary classics I’ve written about before. Nobody cares about Flaubert as much as people care about Le Guin. She seems to live in the deepest of hearts, the place where reason does not apply.

But I’m writing for everyone who did not jump on the boat at sixteen. I was busy trying to convince my English teacher to let me write an essay comparing—for reasons understandable only to the sixteen year old psyche—John Irving and Chuck Palahniuk.¹ I’m catching the boat now, and my friends, there’s still room on the boat.

All aboard?

The first 150 pages of The Left Hand of Darkness contain impenetrable sci-fi sentences like, “The Stabiles of the Ekumen are very patient men, sir.” If you are out of the habit of reading science fiction, sentences like this make your eyes cross. Stabiles? Ekumen? This book is filled with a cornucopia of unexplained capitalized nouns. Seasoned science fiction readers are rolling their eyes at me right now, like, yeah girl, that’s the whole idea. But this is the barrier to entry for outsiders! It is precisely the convention that makes authors like Margaret Atwood pretend like she doesn’t write science fiction and causes the passing reader to cringe! Le Guin has made up not only place names, but the internal logistics of an entire society, its customs and the names for those customs. It would be cumbersome and quite frankly bad writing to explain what every capitalized noun means, so we just move on and move forward.² I promise, my skeptical friends, it’s all worth it and it serves a purpose.³

I love a book with a lot of scaffolding holding up the story. I love a book that requires me to spend several breaths explaining some speculative, internal logic before the actual plot. The ease with which I climb the scaffolding is the measure of how much I’ll enjoy it—I love Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, but have no interest in the Dune series. This is not a measure of the quality of either category, but an acknowledgement of personal bias.

So here is the scaffolding of The Left Hand of Darkness: the people who live on the planet Gethen have no set gender. For the majority of the month, they are asexual and agender, developing both for the brief window on a lunar cycle. They live in highly ritualized and class-based societies on a planet still in an Ice Age. Onto this planet, into one of its countries (the monarchical Karhide), arrives Genly Ai. Genly is the book’s actual plot: a man from Earth (sort of) sent as a sole ambassador of a coalition of human worlds, attempts to convince the people of this planet to join the coalition.

Shenanigans of politics, loyalty, friendship, and gender ensue. The people of Gethen seem generally unimpressed about the arrival of an alien and the news of offworld intelligent life, absorbing it as a chess piece in their politics and court intrigue. Meanwhile, Genly has to abandon his understanding of gendered identity. His main contact is the monarchy’s prime minister, the mercurial Estraven. Their relationship is what takes this from a novel solely of ideas (the scaffolding, as it were) into something truly beautiful. I was profoundly moved by their story. Together, they undertake an incredibly physically demanding journey during which Ai reflects:

I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time: I mean joy.

This conception of life, the hard work and elusiveness of joy, underscores her other most famous work, The Dispossessed. I read this immediately after the story of Genly and Estravan’s complicated dance of politics moved me to tears. The Dispossessed is an easier-to-crack book: the people in this story have similar biology,⁴ and there are far fewer nonsense nouns. Here, the verdant world of Urras has a desert moon, Anarres. Urras’ capitalist society spawned a rebel offshoot of anarcho-syndicalists who were sent to live on the nearly barren moon 200 years prior to the novel’s start. This society has produced an incredible physicist Shevek (our protagonist) who wants to travel back to Urras, to prove the efficacy of Anarres and share ideas. The chapters alternate between timelines before and after his arrival on Urras.

Where Left Hand confidently uses (without great explanation) a series of made-up nouns, The Dispossessed spends far more time straightforwardly detailing exactly how the anarchist utopia works. This book is half novel, half thought experiment on the potential of a society without governance or laws. Anyone can do anything, but living on a near-barren moon means they rely entirely on each other to live. Mutual aid makes life possible. The social organism self-regulates to the demands of people—but social convention creates its own demands. The novel is not a romanticized politics: we move through the arc of Shevek’s bildungsroman or kunstlerroman, the timeline of how he ends up on Urras and what happens to him once there.

Le Guin uses Shevek to voice a critique of capitalism and warmongering that feels ever more relevant.⁵ To avoid being overly didactic (which it is at times), the ideas in the novel are not presented as easy solutions. The subtitle is An Ambiguous Utopia. Anarres is not possible without continuous, sometimes backbreaking work. It is not possible without Urras, without the unifying identity of what they are not—this idea is not really unpacked in the novel, but felt ever-present to me, as someone whose entire country’s politics is constantly reshaping itself in contrast to a nearby power. Having something to define yourself as not being like is as powerful as having your own sense of self. That said, the Anarresti have a strong sense of nationhood, of national self.

And like Left Hand, the thing that brought the novel alive to me is the emotional character arc. Shevek is a physicist with ideas that could shape the known universe—in fact, his idea already exists in The Left Hand of Darkness. The novels take place in the same loose cycle of stories; the coalition of human planets Genly Ai represents has an embassy on Urras. That said, the plot-level connection between the books is loose, and they are functionally standalone books.

It is harder to write about books I loved than it is to dissect books I thought were mediocre. These two Le Guin books are interesting and alive. I have just barely gotten to the scaffolding of what holds these books together. There’s also physics (but not too much) and critiques of nationhood. There’s love, both chaste and romantic. This has been a lot of words to say: these books are good and in my humble opinion, if you like serious books about serious topics, she should be at the top of your list. The boat is at the dock.

1. Instead I wrote a four-thousand word essay about two Chuck Palahniuk novels. In the process, I discovered that I didn’t think he was a very good writer. A learning experience.

2. For the record, the exact opposite is true about movies. The more unexplained proper nouns the better. Movies are not for interiority: Jupiter Ascend me to heaven!!! Let movies be stupid.

3. The purpose is vibes.

4. In addition to gender and sexuality, the people of Gethen can go into ‘dothe’ wherein they can perform tasks of superhuman strength. This was, to me, the most standard science fiction moment of the novel that had my eyes rolling. I’m sorry.

5. Shevek trying to understand capitalism:

“He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.”

A quote from Odo, the central philosopher whose nonviolent revolution spawn Anarres:

“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”