Ursula le Guin: in memory of an outstanding writer

I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.

The words are spoken by a representative of the ‘Ekumen’, a federation of worlds, which has as one of its missions to find and make contact with all the far flung colonies of humankind across our galaxy. One of the driving forces for that mission is the knowledge that all of us, in every planet and solar system, are descended from one people, the Hain: the oldest human group with not thousands of years of civilisation behind them, but millions – more history than anyone can take in.

One of the acts of the Hain, at a period of their history, was to set out to populate planets throughout the Galaxy. That’s why there are so many human or humanoid groups out there: two legs, two arms, two eyes and so forth, though sometimes with certain modifications. The Hain introduced those changes, perhaps to adapt a group more fully to its particular environment, but sometimes apparently on no more than a whim – “let’s try this model here”.

So Genly Ai, a native of Earth, is on a planet being contacted for the first time by the Ekumen: Gethen. He is alone, because mobiles – those whose role it is to travel to other planets, as opposed to stabiles who stay behind and manage communications with the mobiles and the associated worlds – always go alone onto a new planet.

The first news from the Ekumen on any world is spoken by one voice, one man present in the flesh, present and alone. He may be killed… yet the practice is kept, because it works. One voice speaking truth is a greater force that fleets of armies, given time; plenty of time; but time is the thing that the Ekumen has plenty of…

However, Genly Ai hasn’t simply made contact with Gethen. He has made contact with just one of the nations of Gethen – unlike so many science fiction novels, where planets speak with one voice, Gethen is still in that primitive state of development where it is divided into nations competing for primacy. So Genly is visiting Karhide, one of the two most powerful nations of the planet. It is run on something like feudal lines, with a king and nobles though far more technologically advanced than feudalism was on Earth. Karhide is the rival of Orgoreyn, the other major power among the many nations of this strange world, in turn run on collectivist lines by a government with seriously autocratic leanings.

But Genly describes the world as strange. Part of that strangeness lies in something else he said – that it was in its Ice Age. Indeed, those who first identified the planet nicknamed it ‘Winter’. Life is only possible in a narrow strip on either side of the Equator; north and south of it, ice extending from the poles presses down threateningly on the peoples making their living in the cold.

Nor is the climate the only strangeness. For Winter was one of those planets where the Hain indulged their taste for playfulness. Gethenians have no gender most of the time; only for a short period each month do they become fertile and, as result, each member of a couple will develop opposite sexual organs allowing procreation – with no rule governing which will adopt which sex. This means than any individual Gethenian can be man or woman at different times, and can father children or give birth to them.

The tragedy of the king of Karhide, for instance, is that while he has fathered heirs, he has never been a mother – he has no heir of his own body.

Karhide, Orgoreyn and above all the ice, which has a major role to play in The Left Hand of Darkness, provide the setting for a gripping, truthful, insightful novel even though it is a fantasy creation, a work of science fiction. And the unusual bi-sexual population, where personality inevitably has no gender-specific features, provides a mesmerising cast of characters to populate it.

Why do I talk about all this now? Because The Left Hand of Darkness is an extraordinary work that shows how much finer science fiction or fantasy can be than many critics allow. As Margaret Atwood, herself a towering figure among today’s writers, it is the creation of “one of the literary greats of the 20th century”. Alongside, among many others, outstanding books such as The Dispossessed, Four Ways to Forgiveness or the series aimed at children but eminently readable by adults, the Earthsea novels.

Just a few of her outstanding novels

Their creator, Ursual le Guin, died on 22 January at the age of 88. She leaves an immense gap in the world of fine and compelling novels, as did Terry Pratchett when he went. The idea that we shall have nothing more from her pen is painful, just as painful as my realisation that I would no longer have my autumn brightened up each year by the arrival of a new Pratchett novel.

Those of us who know her work will miss her. And if you don’t know her work, well, remember it isn’t just me telling you – even Margaret Atwood thinks Le Guin’s outstanding. So, what are you waiting for?