Comments on Substack.

Contains spoilers for the book.

Gethen, the planet where LHD is set, isn’t physically much different from Earth’s arctic or mountainous regions—unlike Dune’s Arrakis, whose ecology and climate differs profoundly from any desert on Earth. Sure, Gethen is cold, but not much colder than most cities in Canada.

However, there are two huge sociological differences between Gethenians and Earthlings. It is LHD’s exploration of these sociological rather than geophysical differences that makes it a masterclass in worldbuilding.

The first is Gethenian ambisexuality, which the book is now perhaps best-known for. Each Gethenian exists in a sort of genderless state for 26-28 days, then enters a period of kemmer during which they can assume either male or female form to mate. Their mate automatically assumes the opposite sexual form. Among other things, this means nonconsensual sex isn’t possible. Seduction is possible, but requires a lucky kemmer overlap (or an artificially induced kemmer, like the one Gaum tries). An Earthling anthropologist lists other implications of this unusual sexual cycle on Gethen’s culture: one of them is “[a] child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father. There is no myth of Oedipus on Winter [Earthling name for the planet Gethen].” Most importantly, though:

When you meet a Gethenian you cannot and must not do what a bisexual [Le Guin’s unfortunately dated term for someone from a society with man and woman, eg an Earthling] naturally does, which is to cast him in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the patterned or possible interactions between persons of the same or the opposite sex. Our entire pattern of socio-sexual interaction is nonexistent here. They cannot play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept. What is the first question we ask about a newborn baby?

This sets up the most important character arc in the story, that of Genly Ai. Early in the novel, he is unwilling to accept Gethenian ideas of self-identity on their own terms. He can’t help but think of Estraven, the powerful, dignified prime minister, as a man, despite his several prominently feminine traits. The idea of a pregnant king tickles him.

An anthropologist who visits Gethen before Genly has warned him: “The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being.” Yet, it is years after he first sets foot on Gethen that Genly is able to respect and judge—and fall in love with—a Gethenian as a human being.

I am slightly unimpressed with the unsubtle way in which this character development occurs when it does. Genly’s newly-accepted philosophy is thrust upon us from his thoughts:

His face in the reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak. And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty: and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.

By most yardsticks this is a great passage, as beautifully written as any in the book. Yet, I would have appreciated it more if I got to only see the character development rather than be told that it happened. To be sure, Genly’s attitude towards this character noticeably changes after this point in the story. But it may have been better for the reader to only get to infer the change of heart from Genly’s changed attitude. That said, for a book written within the tradition of science fiction in 1969 (!), the subtlety in Le Guin’s writing is astonishing. Heck, even today, LHD is one of the most literary, most sensitive science-fiction novels ever written. And despite the storytelling “flaw”, Genly’s character development is very satisfying to witness.

The second sociological difference between Earthlings and Gethenians is the latter’s idea of shifgrethor. Genly describes it as “prestige, face, place, the pride-relationship, the untranslatable and all-important principle of social authority”. Yet shifgrethor is best understood through the many examples sprinkled throughout the text. Characters “waive” shifgrethor: while seeking and giving advice for example, or while inquiring with what they judge to be an impolite degree of curiosity. In one funny episode, Estraven tries to “insult” Genly by giving him advice. But ironically, Genly is thankful, and somewhat frustrated by Gethenian unwillingness to lend the alien much-needed advice. Characters “play” shifgrethor, like when a king tries to embarrass another country’s government by showing that they have lied.

The word “shifgrethor” comes from an old Gethenian word for “shadow”: my guess at the etymology is that your shadow, like your reputation, precedes you. It’s implied in a legend in the book that someone curses a country’s people (the Shath Domain) for breaching his shifgrethor; when he forgives the villagers, he says: “I take back my name and my shadow.” This is a legend in the context of the book, so presumably the word he says for “shadow” is the root word for “shifgrethor”.

According to Wikipedia, the academic George Slusser has described shifgrethor as “not rank, but its opposite, the ability to maintain equality in any relationship, and to do so by respecting the person of the other”. This is a succinct summary of the idea.

To me, shifgrethor is probably more interesting than the Gethenian sexual cycle. With shifgrethor, Le Guin seems to have succeeded in creating a truly alien, arbitrary set of social mores. A wide range of things, from the personal taboo against giving or taking advice to national pride in diplomacy, are encompassed by shifgrethor. Among modern humans, analogues of similarly arbitrary social customs might be the shame associated with being naked, the association of the somewhat random body part “face” to social standing in Asia, the outdated practice of thrusting one’s tongue into one’s cheek to signify contempt, or the shame associated with crying (something Gethenians lack, by the way). Seeing a similarly arbitrary set of social norms in action can help us ponder on the arbitrariness of our own social customs. On the other hand, the thought experiment at the core of the Gethenian sexual cycle (“what if people were judged as human beings, rather than man or woman?”) has been tried countless times before Le Guin, so isn’t as intrinsically interesting (though Le Guin’s execution is still insightful on its own).

There are other, smaller-scale elements of interesting worldbuilding:

  • Gethenians haven’t even thought of inventing manned flight, simply because there are no winged flying creatures in Gethen.
  • The planet is punishingly cold (remember the Earthling word for Gethen is “Winter”) so it’s no surprise that they have “sixty-two words for the various kinds, states, ages, and qualities of snow; fallen snow, that is”, and “another set of words for the varieties of snowfall; another for ice; a set of twenty or more that define what the temperature range is, how strong a wind blows, and what kind of precipitation is occurring, all together”; this is similar to the (urban myth? misleading claim? fact?) that Eskimos have several words for snow.
  • Unlike on Earth, progress following the Industrial Revolution hasn’t been explosive on Gethen. As a consequence (or cause, or correlation), progress isn’t seen as virtuous: “Traffic … moves along, however crowded, quite steadily at the rate of 25 miles per hour (Terran [Earthling]). Gethenians could make their vehicles go faster, but they do not. If asked why not, they answer ‘Why?’ Like asking Terrans why all our vehicles must go so fast; we answer ‘Why not?’ No disputing tastes. Terrans tend to feel they’ve got to get ahead, make progress. The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence.” The bit about always living in Year One ties into this theme: “It is always the Year One here. Only the dating of every past and future year changes each New Year’s Day, as one counts backwards or forwards from the unitary Now.” (The idea of Year One is interesting, but I don’t think it would work in practice for long.)
  • When asked to choose between two ways to do a somewhat spiritual ritual he isn’t familiar with, Genly says, “I’m not sure. I’m exceedingly ignorant—” The young man he was talking with “laughed and bowed. ‘I am honored!’ he said. ‘I’ve lived here three years, but haven’t yet acquired enough ignorance to be worth mentioning.’ He was highly amused, but his manner was gentle, and I managed to recollect enough scraps of Handdara lore to realize that I had been boasting, very much as if I’d come up to him and said, ‘I’m exceedingly handsome …’” The Handdaras are a sect of fortune-tellers, and it’s interesting that they prize ignorance!

The book’s secondary protagonist Estraven is inspiring, like all well-executed idealistic and intellectually gifted characters in fiction (say, Jed Bartlet in The West Wing, or Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres in some segments of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality). At one point, he expresses views very close to my own on patriotism (emphasis mine):

How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe [a demagogue character] talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession … Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope. A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.

However, I have a qualm with a plot beat about Estraven: he dies at the end of the book. According to Wikipedia, some critics have described the death as the “price that must be paid for forbidden love” between him and Genly. I think this is a tad unfair; Estraven had plausibly strong motivations to commit suicide. He would have likely remained exiled from his motherland Karhide even after Genly’s mothership was called down; indeed, Karhide’s king refuses to clear Estraven’s name even posthumously. In Orgoreyn, Estraven would have had to work menial jobs or be sent to a labor camp for helping Genly escape. Estraven could have plausibly preferred suicide to these alternatives.

It’s also implied in the legend-in-the-context-of-the-book “The Place Inside the Blizzard” that he could only join his brother and lover, who committed suicide, by committing suicide himself. This may also have been a motivation for Estraven. Yet, it does feels a little like Le Guin didn’t know where to take Estraven and Genly’s relationship after their mission succeeded, which is why Estraven was killed off.

Le Guin’s prose is beautiful. When a volcano is “in eruption”, “[w]orms of fire crawl down its black sides”. Like masters of imagery, Le Guin has an eye for the suggestive detail. (At one point, Genly describes the landscape as “magnificent and unspeakable desolation”, which seems awfully close to Buzz Aldrin’s famous “magnificent desolation” quote from the Apollo 11 landing in July of the year the book was published. I’m sure this is just a coincidence, though.)

In sum, LHD was insanely good. I look forward to reading Le Guin’s other books.