The Left Hand of Darkness

The other day I came across a video of Hank Green comparing Ursula Le Guin’s Ekumen civilization to Iain Banks’ Culture one. (I discussed the Culture a few weeks ago). It reminded me that I had never gotten around to reading Le Guin’s classic Hugo Award winning book: The Left Hand of Darkness. I decided to rectify that this week.

For reference, here’s the video. (It’s about twenty minutes, but you don’t have to watch it to understand the post.)

Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle books are set in what appears to be a shared universe. Le Guin cautioned that, strictly speaking, they aren’t really a cycle or saga, or even necessarily a coherent history. But maybe without being too particular about the details, they do seem to be in similar universes, if not exactly the same one.

In the Hainish Cycle, humanity didn’t evolve on Earth, but originated on a planet called Hain, and from there colonized over eighty worlds, including Earth. On some of these planets, the Hainish engaged in genetic engineering, altering the basic human phenotype in a number of ways. The result is range of humanity both culturally and physically.

At some point communication between the Hainish colonies collapsed, with many of them, like Earth, forgetting their origins. In the centuries before the books, Hain begins reestablishing communication with these worlds. In the early books, the new arrangement is called the League of Worlds, but in later ones, after some reportedly interesting history, the Ekumen.

Although the Ekumen isn’t really an empire, government, or federation, but more of a coordinating body for trade and cultural exchange, at least as presented by its representative in The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai. Ai is on a mission to a planet called Gethen. Gethen is nicknamed “Winter” by the Ekumen’s first discovery team because it’s in an ice age. Ai’s goal is to convince the inhabitants to join the Ekumen. He calls himself the “first mobile”, although the inhabitants call him “the Envoy”.

On Gethen, the ancestors were engineered so that their sexuality is dormant most of the time. For most of the month, they are sexless. For a few days each month, a period called “kemmer”, they exhibit either male or female characteristics, with no control over which one they’ll be for that month, although there is some mechanism that ensures sexual partners are on opposite sides. So every Gethen native has been both male and female, and commonly they have both fathered and been pregnant with children.

The result is a genderless society, that is, one that doesn’t divide the population into different categories with specific social, psychological, and behavioral expectations. Strangely enough as I read the book, I didn’t find the society that strange. But I was reading it in 2025 in a very different world from the one the novel was originally published in, at least here in the US. In 1969 gender roles were much more rigid and constrained, with the strictures just beginning to thaw. I suspect the society presented came across much more radical back then, and the relatively mild impression today can be seen as a success of the feminist movement.

The book is a product of its time in other ways. The story includes paranormal phenomena like telepathy, which apparently all, or at least most humans are capable of being taught. And a form of group prescience or precognition. These were still widely seen as valid science fiction in 1969 (it was only a few years after Dune), but for me today, it gives a fantasy feel to the story.

Which actually fits with Le Guin’s writing style. She writes much more in a fantasy form than the typical science fiction one, with a lyrical flow of words. It feels right since all the action takes place on the surface of the planet, with no actual space scenes. Or we could call it a planetary romance in the sense of the John Carter books. We could even maybe think of it as sort of steampunk (icepunk?), since the technology on Gethen seems roughly equivalent to 19th or early 20th century Earth.

The story is told in first person from two viewpoints, with most chapters narrated by Ai, but some by his native ally, Estraven. This is an unusual choice. Most multi-viewpoint stories are either told in third person, where it’s easier to quickly signal who the viewpoint character is, or with chapter headings telling the reader who it is. Le Guin manages without that convention. She is careful to quickly signal on the first switch whose viewpoint we’re now in, but after that leaves the reader to figure it out from context. It works better than I would have expected, although there was one chapter where it took a page or two for me to suss it out.

Interspersed with these chapters are ones conveying ethnographic reports of oral stories in Gethen history. Most of these were interesting, although there was one I found a bit tedious. But overall it provided interesting background to the story.

The first half of the book is mostly political intrigue, and the second half, after things go sideways for Ai, adventure. It’s an interesting story. I enjoyed and recommend it.

But to Green’s comparison between the Ekumen and the Culture, don’t expect to see much about the Ekumen, at least not in this book. Le Guin keeps it strictly in the background. Her focus is on Gethen society. From what I’ve seen from the beginning of her earlier story: Rocannon’s World, that’s her approach. She seems more interested in exploring the space of possible human cultures. The Ekumen appears to only be a frame, a way to introduce an outsider perspective through which we can experience the society.

I think that’s one reason she doesn’t have faster than light travel in her interstellar society, at least not for humans. It keeps each world more isolated, and so retains a greater cultural contrast. She weakens it a little with the ansible, a device that can communicate instantly with distant worlds, but it appears to be limited to text only communication.

And Le Guin in an author note explicitly shuns the idea that she’s writing anything predictive. So the Ekumen isn’t her vision of the future, just a convenient story mechanism. But a lot of Green’s other remarks seem on point. Iain Banks is far more bullish on the benefits of technological progress than Le Guin. I think it’s fair to say that one of Banks’ major points is how much technology obviates many social strictures, which seems very different from what Le Guin implies.

Le Guin is a master storyteller. I plan to read some of her other books. And I think she makes valid and important points about the evils of colonialism. But I’ll go where Green wouldn’t and say I prefer Banks’ vision. The Ekumen celebrates cultural diversity, but the Culture enables and celebrates individual diversity. And frequently the societies that Banks contrasts it with have unique cultures, but ones that oppress many of their constituents. And where Le Guin explores a genderless society, one engineered that way in the distant past, Banks explores a post-gender one, where people can and do change sex at will, and where fear, pain, and death are optional.

Not that Banks is any more predictive than Le Guin. The Culture needs magic technologies, like faster than light travel and communications, for the stories he wants to tell. But I agree with him that technology makes a difference. Condoms and other forms of birth control allow us to move beyond the sexual mores of the 19th century. The industrial revolution made slavery obsolete. And a high skill economy puts women on a much more even playing field with men. Future technologies will demonstrate that many things we still take to be eternal truths are actually contingent on current limitations.

Of course Le Guin’s vision remains fascinating. Have you read The Left Hand of Darkness, or any of her other books? If so, what did you think? And which vision do you prefer?