Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969
This novel tells a story of a human envoy from a confederation of planets called the Ekumen as he visits an alien planet to make first contact. The author explores themes such as gender, loyalty and honour.
It took me a few chapters to really get into this story, but I once I did, I enjoyed thinking about the ideas that Le Guin explores in it. I think that the things I disliked were more aesthetic and related to the time when this book was published, and less related to the writing or story itself. Some of these aesthetic choices echo Frank Herbert's Dune, which had been published 4 years earlier in 1965:
- Humans everywhere
- Dumps reader into lore and vocabulary with no exposition
- inhospitable climate (Arctic hellscape instead of Desert hellscape)
I enjoyed how this story highlighted the social issues of making First Contact with a new civilzation more than technical ones: rapid language learning was taken for granted, physiology was similar enough. Genly and the Ekumen struggle with overcoming the distrust of the Gethenians, and the delicate politics of the feudal and self-interested people of Karhide and the socialist society of Orgoreyn. This is not to say that there is no discussion of technical topics; this is after all science fiction. I appreciated that Le Guin addresses the effects of relativity and time dilation on how the Ekumen interacts with other planets, and how she explored the development of technology on Gethen. For example the Gethenians do not have aircraft because there are no birds or flying insects on their planet, so they had no inspiration.
The core idea that Le Guin invites us to consider in this novel is gender, and how a society that wasn't divided between 'men' and 'women' might look and feel. I won't dive too deeply into this because I think there are other people who explore that topic more deeply than I do, but I will say that I enjoyed this exercise. The kemmer cycle, the politics, and the relationships between Gethenians are all interesting to consider. Even though Gethenians appear somewhat androgynous, they have both male and female personality types: so gender is not absent, but rather it is not divided.
This exchange between Genly Ai and Estraven from rather early in the book really stuck with me:
"If by patriotism you don’t mean the love of one’s homeland, for that I do know."
"No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other."
Estraven is trying to explain the posture of the Karhidish king (and I suppose, also the heads of state in the other Gethenian country of Orgoreyn) towards each other, and towards the interplanetary Ekumen that Genly represents.
In summary, I found this book to be a fresh take on a "first contact" story. Furthermore, if you are into survival literature, there is a really cool section where two characters are forced to survive in extremely harsh elements, which made me glad of my warm apartment and comfortable chair 🙂
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