The Left Hand of Darkness

Background

Le Guin giving a reading in 2008

Le Guin's father Alfred Louis Kroeber and mother Theodora Kroeber were scholars, and exposure to their anthropological work considerably influenced Le Guin's writing.[12][13] The protagonists of many of Le Guin's novels, such as The Left Hand of Darkness and Rocannon's World, are also anthropologists or social investigators of some kind.[14] Le Guin used the term Ekumen for her fictional alliance of worlds, a term coined by her father, who derived it from the Greek oikoumene to refer to Eurasian cultures that shared a common origin.[15]

Le Guin's interest in Taoism influenced much of her science fiction work. According to academic Douglas Barbour, the fiction of the Hainish universe (the setting for several of Le Guin's works) contain a theme of balance between light and darkness, a central theme of Taoism.[16] She was also influenced by her early interest in mythology, and her exposure to cultural diversity as a child. Her protagonists are frequently interested in the cultures they are investigating, and are motivated to preserve them rather than conquer them.[17] Authors who influenced Le Guin include Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, and Lao Tzu.[18]

Le Guin identified with feminism, and was interested in non-violence and ecological awareness. She participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons. These sympathies can be seen in several of her works of fiction, including those in the Hainish universe.[18] The novels of the Hainish cycle frequently explore the effects of differing social and political systems, although according to lecturer Suzanne Reid, Le Guin displayed a preference for a "society that governs by consensus, a communal cooperation without external government".[19] Her fiction also frequently challenges accepted depictions of race and gender.[19]

The original 1969 edition of The Left Hand of Darkness did not contain an introduction. After reflecting on her work, Le Guin wrote in the 1976 edition that the genre of science fiction was not as "rationalist and simplistic" as simple extrapolation. Instead, she called it a "thought experiment" which presupposes some changes to the world, and probes their consequences.[20] The purpose of the thought experiment[20] is not to predict the future, but to "describe reality, the present world".[20] In this case, her thought experiment explores a society without men or women, where individuals share the biological and emotional makeup of both sexes.[19] Le Guin has also said that the genre in general allows exploration of the "real" world through metaphors and complex stories, and that science fiction can use imaginary situations to comment on human behaviors and relationships.[18]

In her new introduction to the Library of America reprint in 2017, the author wrote:

Up until 1968 I had no literary agent, submitting all my work myself. I sent The Left Hand of Darkness to Terry Carr, a brilliant editor newly in charge of an upscale Ace paperback line. His (appropriately) androgynous name led me to address him as Dear Miss Carr. He held no grudge about that and bought the book. That startled me. But it gave me the courage to ask the agent Virginia Kidd, who had praised one of my earlier books, if she’d consider trying to place The Left Hand of Darkness as a hardcover. She snapped it up like a cat with a kibble and asked to represent me thenceforth. She also promptly sold the novel in that format. I wondered seriously about their judgment. Left Hand looked to me like a natural flop. Its style is not the journalistic one that was then standard in science fiction, its structure is complex, it moves slowly, and even if everybody in it is called he, it is not about men. That's a big dose of "hard lit," heresy, and chutzpah, for a genre novel by a nobody in 1968.[21]


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