In this book, Le Guin has come home, using as her central location the Napa Valley, where she has spent the summer for fifty of her fifty-four years. It has been a long homecoming. Of all her novels, this will be one of the few that takes place on Earth.
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin has been writing stories ever since an older brother taught her to write. In the past twenty years, she has published fourteen novels, three books of short stories, a book of essays and two books of poems; she has collaborated on two screenplays and has written a television script of her novel The Lathe of Heaven. She has won four Hugo awards, three Nebula awards, a Newbery Honor Book Citation and a National Book Award. She is considered by many critics and readers to be the best writer of fantasy and science fiction in America today. But science fiction, at least as we have known it and although she has often passionately defended the genre, is not quite what Le Guin does. “I write science fiction because that is what publishers call my books,” she once wrote. “Left to myself, I should call them novels.”
The appeal of science fiction lies in its subject: the “Other”—the alien world, the stuff of dreams, the raw material from the unconscious. Because these things are contained in a story with a beginning, a middle and end, they are less terrifying than they might be if we met them on the street or in our nightmares. But what most American science fiction did before the late 1950s, when Le Guin’s generation of science fiction writers began to publish, was to present the Other and then immediately defeat it: the aliens always got theirs in the end; the lean, square-jawed space captain shot his way through the swarm of bug-eyed monsters (with the dumb blonde clinging to his muscular arm); and the whole galaxy was made safe for free enterprise. Probably more than any other writing, science fiction reflected the mood of America: if it’s different, kill it.
To this world, Le Guin has brought, well, first she has brought women: a black lawyer in The Lathe of Heaven; a marine biologist in The Dispossessed; a grocery clerk in The Beginning Place. Her aliens tend to be bewildered, obsessive, or just plain tired. In The Lathe of Heaven, her alien lives over a bicycle repair shop in Portland and runs a tacky secondhand store that sells, among other things, old Beatles records. Le Guin has introduced themes risky in any American noveclass="underline" anarchism as social and economic alternative, socialism, feminism, Taoism, environmentalism, love and suffering. In one wonderful story, she swept up the male image of a spaceship and sex-changed it: “Intracom” is about a small space vessel that finds it has an alien onboard. The alien? A fetus. The ship, a pregnant woman.
In her novels, the human scale is always kept intact; all other things are measured against it. No fantastic technology takes the place of a human hand or heart: “Community is the best we can hope for,” Le Guin wrote in her essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” “and community for most people means touch: the touch of your hand against the other’s hand, the job done together, the sledge hauled together, the dance danced together, the child conceived together. We have only one body apiece, and two hands.”
Last summer, I spent three days in Portland talking to Le Guin: on the small deck of the house overlooking the river, over dinner at Jake’s (a wood-paneled restaurant famous for its crawfish), in the middle of a demonstration on Hiroshima Day, and standing ankle-deep in the Columbia River watching the wash from a ship. We were joined often by her husband, Charles, a professor of French history at Portland State University, a generous Southern man to whom she has dedicated two of her books. “For Charles,” she wrote in The Left Hand of Darkness, “sine quo non”—without whom, nothing.
Le Guin is a smallish person with large intelligent eyes, her gray hair cut into a neat cap. On the first day we talked, she was wearing a purple silk blouse, a raw silk skirt and delicate shoes. She has a low, direct voice and while there is about her an air of grave authority, she is also likely to burst into the accents of a French professor, a Cockney maid, a Scottish cook. At a speech she gave in London, she wore a formal black velvet suit and a propeller beanie. She has described herself as “a petty-bourgeois anarchist,” “an unconsistent Taoist and consistent unChristian.” What is morality, I asked her once, and she replied: “Something you grope after when a situation comes up in which it’s needed.”
The Left Hand of Darkness, which won both the Hugo and Nebula science-fiction awards, is set in another galaxy, but it is about two very human problems: betrayal and fidelity. (When asked once what the most constant theme in her novels was, she replied, without stopping to think twice, “Marriage.”)
The book grew out of Le Guin’s increasing involvement in feminism. “Along about 1967, I began to feel a certain unease, a need to step on a little farther, perhaps, on my own,” she wrote in her essay “Is Gender Necessary?” “I began to want to define and understand the meaning of sexuality and the meaning of gender, in my life and in our society. Much had been gathered in the unconscious—both personal and collective—which must either be brought up into consciousness, or else turn destructive. It was the same need, I think, that had led Beauvoir to write The Second Sex, and Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique; and that was, at the same time, leading Kate Millett and others to write their books, and to create the new feminism. But I was not a theoretician, a political thinker or activist, or a sociologist. I was and am a fiction writer. The way I did my thinking was to write a novel. That novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, is the record of my consciousness, the process of my thinking.”
At the center of her thinking the question became: What would a planet be like if it didn’t have any wars? How would the people differ from us? What would they have or lack? Over time, she began to realize that the people of her book would be neither male nor female, but both. Thus the “Gethenians” were born: sexual androgynes, bisexuals, sexual possibles. Once a month, like other animals, they enter into a kind of heat, when their bodies change and polarize, become male or female. No one knows which he/she will be. If conception occurs, the female remains female and bears a child. If not, she returns to androgyny. The mother of one child could be the father of several others. (Le Guin says she never really knew whether this was actually physiologically possible in humans until she gave the completed manuscript to her pediatrician, a Frenchman, to read. “It is perfectly possible,” he told her, “but it is disgusting.”)
There is no rape on Gethen, no division of labor between “weak women” and “strong men,” and since at any time one may bear and raise a child, no males quite so free as males elsewhere. There are also no wars. There are skirmishes, raids, quarrels over territory, but no huge troop movements over continents. A pregnant person does not a general make.