Several years ago, while wading through stacks of rain-damaged and tattered paperbacks at the Sunday Book Market in Hyderabad, I came across a copy of The Left Hand of Darkness , the Hugo and Nebula Awards-winning title by Ursula Le Guin. It was priced at less than ₹30 and I immediately added it to my haul.
Within a week, between insipid coffees, the science fiction tale had consumed me whole. The Left Hand of Darkness is set on Gethen, a planet inhabited by ambisexual people who don’t subscribe to conventional sex and gender norms.
The protagonist, Genly Ai from earth, has to convince the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, a confederation of planets, while navigating the bureaucracies and cultural mores of its two main warring nations. It is a gripping and deeply moving book.
Le Guin, that extraordinary lexical mage, died on January 22 at the age of 88, after decades of being a rebel and firebrand in the world of science fiction. She was the rare author who transcended genre labels and won literary accolades across the board.
Le Guin’s fiction is timeless because she didn’t confine the books’ social, political, economic, cultural, racial and gender debates to the era she belonged to. In The Left Hand of Darkness , the lead character Genly Ai is black.
No chosen one
The rest of the ambisexual characters who inhabit Gethen are brown. Ai forges an emotional and physical connection with a character that transcends his earlier reservations about gender roles on the planet.
While much of classic sci-fi venerates the male hero and his inevitable brandishing of power against evil, Le Guin’s work centred on ordinary protagonists and eschewed ‘chosen one’ narratives. Its ingenuities lay not in space technology but in excavating refined political ideas through her characters.
Before I discovered Le Guin, science fiction for me (admittedly a sporadic reader of it) largely consisted of entering white imaginations. I enjoyed Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, ignoring the colonial tropes, oriental fantasies, and tales of Caucasian subjugation.
It was only after reading Le Guin that all their works seemed to pale in comparison, lacking not just racial and gender diversity but Le Guin’s endless reservoir of humanity.
Le Guin rarely glorified war as the means to her end at a time when a lot of science fiction revelled in the Vietnam war imagery. Le Guin pushed against seeing battle as the normal course of things. She was deeply influenced by Taoist and Buddhist teachings. As a result, her protagonists aren’t as driven to vanquish evil as they are to journey home and find a sense of inner balance.
Le Guin was the daughter of anthropologists and spent most of her summers at a ranch in Napa Valley where her parents entertained guests, most of them academics and people of various cultures.
That Le Guin spent much of her childhood interacting with people outside her white bubble of privilege is why her stories have such an easy familiarity with cultural fluidity, even with the made-up worlds, cultures and tongues of her works.
Audacious drive
Over the years, as I read more of Le Guin, I also realised she wasn’t infallible. A short story ‘The White Donkey’, set in an imagined India is not particularly insightful or culturally accurate.
The genuine colour blindness of her universes is refreshing but as an author she was ill-equipped to deal with race the way other greats like Octavia E. Butler did with her Xenogenesis trilogy. Yet, it was the indelible impact of Le Guin’s futuristic visions that made me seek out more diverse science fiction.
Le Guin expanded the notion of sc-fi, even as she bristled at being called a sci-fi writer, because she felt perceptions of the genre and its immense ability for political critique pigeonholed her work. As she notes in a foreword to Tales of Earthsea , part of her bestselling young adult series (and the more racially diverse predecessor to ‘The Boy Who Lived’), “Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises... Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe.”
In one of her striking short stories, the darkly funny, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, Le Guin undercuts the idea of a non-violent society by recounting a summer festival in Omelas, a city whose continued prosperity depends on the enslavement of a single child. Everyone is aware that this is the source of their happiness but only a few choose to walk away from this paradise.
It was this audacious drive to penetrate human natures — What kind of world did we want to live in? What kind of people would we be in those worlds? — that makes Le Guin’s words, unlike crumbling paperbacks and collapsing utopias, stand the test of time.
The author is a writer and editor based in Chennai. He is the winner of the Likho Award for Excellence in Media, 2017.
