One Gethenian creation myth begins, "In the beginning, there was nothing but ice and the sun." There are many precise and evocative words for snow: bessa, soft new-fallen snow esyot, granular snow neserem, "heavy snowfall on a moderate gale".
The Left Hand of Darkness has some of the most chilling descriptions of chilly conditions you'll find in fiction the reader and poor Genly Ai, who like us comes from a milder planet, very rarely get warm. They did not behave like men, or ants." A different off-planet investigator makes the very good point that in a society where all can and do fall pregnant, "nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else".īut perhaps it's not the lack of a male gender that keeps the peace, but the ice age that has Winter in its grasp: "perhaps they use up their fighting spirit fighting the cold". He notes that though their society is rife with politicking, double-dealing and status anxiety, it has never mobilised into war - "they behaved like animals, in that respect or like women.
He brings with him the standard prejudices of a gendered society, essentially seeing the Gethenians as distastefully effeminate men.
It's a normal man who introduces us to these genderless humans: Genly Ai, an envoy from the federation of planets, who has come to this icebound planet, Gethen or "Winter", to break the news that there is life beyond the stars. What if there were no gender – if humans only took on male or female characteristics when they went into heat once a month, and sex was kept separate from everything else? What would a society without the dualism of male and female look like? This was the "thought experiment" Ursula K Le Guin embarked on in her 1970 Hugo award winner, The Left Hand of Darkness.
0 kommentar(er)
