Well, I am on an Ursual le Guin binge. Like my friend who was never allowed to watch TV as a child and now spends evenings staring slack-jowled at So You Think You Can Dance, I’m making up for lost time. I really should have read her sci-fi when I was about twelve, at the same time as I was charmed by the Wizard of Earthsea series, but better late than never.
Left Hand of Darkness is set on a world that has two chief weirdnesses. First, it’s freezing cold. That’s why the world is nicknamed ‘Winter’ by the aliens sent to persuade it to join the alien equivalent of the United Nations. Second, the people are neuters, neither male nor female, except for one week or so each month when they go into heat and mate with another neuter in a bizarre hermaphroditic frenzy.
Narrated from the perspective of Genly, a lone alien emissary sent to get the planet to join up with the intergalactic civilisation, there is a lot of snow and ice in this book. Which is great – only last year I had my obsessive ‘snow and ice challenge’ phase when I was gripped by any and all stories of survival on high mountains or down icy ravines (Touching the Void, Edmund Hillary’s autobiography View from the Summit, etc). And this book has a huge ice plain endurance test! Where the alien and a neuter local spend weeks battling across a blizzard swept glacier! Running low on alien food supplies! Occasionally having odd cross-species sexually charged ‘moments’! Awesome.
According to the introductory bios, le Guin’s parents were big on the 1950’s anthropological scene. And it shows, with delightfully subtle imaginings of alien ways and culture. Half of the book seems to be taken up with Genly’s cultural problems. His misunderstandings and confusion could be those of any alien anywhere in space-time – like my husband’s British inability to comprehend the Australian phrase ‘Ya right?’
I really enjoyed this book. The characters still have silly names that you suspect are anagrams, like Genly and Slose and Estraven. But this annoyed me less than before. Maybe, like Genly the alien on the weird ice-world, I am becoming acclimatised…
If this book was a person, it would be Gandalf the wizard, wearing a space suit. Actually, a space dress.
In a nutshell: An alien ambassador is trapped on an icy planet inhabited by stoic Scandanavian type hermaphrodites who wear a LOT of fur.
The Left Hand of Darkness scores eight and a half chocolates out of a possible ten, all of them slightly chilled chewy caramels, requiring a lot of chewing over and giving a corresponding amount of sweet satisfaction.
Left Hand of Darkness is set on a world that has two chief weirdnesses. First, it’s freezing cold. That’s why the world is nicknamed ‘Winter’ by the aliens sent to persuade it to join the alien equivalent of the United Nations. Second, the people are neuters, neither male nor female, except for one week or so each month when they go into heat and mate with another neuter in a bizarre hermaphroditic frenzy.
Narrated from the perspective of Genly, a lone alien emissary sent to get the planet to join up with the intergalactic civilisation, there is a lot of snow and ice in this book. Which is great – only last year I had my obsessive ‘snow and ice challenge’ phase when I was gripped by any and all stories of survival on high mountains or down icy ravines (Touching the Void, Edmund Hillary’s autobiography View from the Summit, etc). And this book has a huge ice plain endurance test! Where the alien and a neuter local spend weeks battling across a blizzard swept glacier! Running low on alien food supplies! Occasionally having odd cross-species sexually charged ‘moments’! Awesome.
According to the introductory bios, le Guin’s parents were big on the 1950’s anthropological scene. And it shows, with delightfully subtle imaginings of alien ways and culture. Half of the book seems to be taken up with Genly’s cultural problems. His misunderstandings and confusion could be those of any alien anywhere in space-time – like my husband’s British inability to comprehend the Australian phrase ‘Ya right?’
I really enjoyed this book. The characters still have silly names that you suspect are anagrams, like Genly and Slose and Estraven. But this annoyed me less than before. Maybe, like Genly the alien on the weird ice-world, I am becoming acclimatised…
If this book was a person, it would be Gandalf the wizard, wearing a space suit. Actually, a space dress.
In a nutshell: An alien ambassador is trapped on an icy planet inhabited by stoic Scandanavian type hermaphrodites who wear a LOT of fur.
The Left Hand of Darkness scores eight and a half chocolates out of a possible ten, all of them slightly chilled chewy caramels, requiring a lot of chewing over and giving a corresponding amount of sweet satisfaction.
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