I revisit Gethen

I read Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" in the mid 1970s. In these intervening years, I've come to believe that this book isn't addressing feminist concerns directly so much as it is trying to take gender out of the human equation to look at what it means to be human, regardless of gender. I didn't feel this week's essay for my scifi/fantasy class did justice to the thinking I've done about this novel for many years--hard to cram it into the 320 word limit. But here's my stab:

Ursula LeGuin's introduction to the 1976 edition of The Left Hand of Darkness offers ideas about science fiction literature that informs this and other works. LeGuin says some science fiction is "extrapolative"; it follows a current situation to a predictive and hellish conclusion. But she calls Left Hand a descriptive "thought experiment," the purpose of which is to better understand what is by placing it in an imaginary world, like a game of "what if?"

Our "experiment" as readers, then, is like the Ekumen's: To learn what it means to be human from many people in many cultures. Space travel is how we arrive at the experiment, and the experiment's boundaries are Gethen, where, like Genly Ai, we have no guide in a harsh climate among androgynous people.

What do we learn? For one thing, environment shapes human endeavor and behavior. For example, where the landscape offers only bleak vistas of snow and ice, radio, plays, and storytelling are ascendant artistic forms. Religion evolved to help Gethenians cope, through ritual fasting and strength concentration (dothe), with a climate that inflicts periodic deprivation. Gethenians must often wait on weather, thereby learning patience as well as deep subtlety that often eludes Ai. 

Gethenian androgyny (resulting from a long ago bio-engineering experiment?) works with the planet's environment. Gethenians do not waste precious energy on constant sexual tension except during brief periods of kemmer. Androgyny connects them to family and community because they can both mother and father children. Gethenians can be perfidious and murderous, but climate and biology have left them free of warfare.

Some feminist critics, focusing solely on the novel's androgyny, condemned Left Hand as an imperfect vision of sexual equality. But LeGuin says that the book is not prescriptive or predictive; humans are already androgynous. The reader must decide how to understand that. What this reader decided is that love is a human constant that transcends biological and environmental constraints.