The Left Hand of Darkness Summary: Le Guin's Winter Planet and Its Lone Envoy
What it is about
The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, published in 1969. It belongs to her Hainish Cycle, a loose series of novels and stories set in a shared universe that she introduced in the 1964 short story "The Dowry of Angyar". In writing order it was the fourth Hainish novel, coming after City of Illusions and before The Word for World Is Forest. Its success established Le Guin as a major figure in the genre.
The story follows Genly Ai, a human from Terra, sent alone as the "first mobile" envoy to the planet Gethen. His job is to persuade Gethen to join the Ekumen, a loose coalition of humanoid worlds. His starship waits in solar orbit with his companions in stasis. Like all Ekumen envoys, Ai can mindspeak, a form of quasi-telepathic speech that Gethenians are capable of without knowing it.
Gethen is a frozen world, which is why its inhabitants call it Winter. Its people are ambisexual, with no fixed sex, and that fact shapes everything about their culture. Ai arrives in the kingdom of Karhide and spends two years failing to make headway. The book opens the day before he finally gets an audience with Argaven Harge, the king. Karhide society runs on shifgrethor, an intricate code of unspoken rules and formal courtesy that Ai cannot read. He mistakes manners for motives and allies for enemies, and the mission begins to come apart.
From Karhide, Ai travels to a Fastness belonging to the Handdarata, one of the planet's two major religions, and pays for a foretelling, an art practised to prove the "perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question". He then crosses into Orgoreyn, Karhide's rival nation, where the politicians are friendlier and the ground is far less solid. Rumours circulate of the Sarf, a secret police that really runs the country.
The main characters
Genly Ai is the narrator for much of the book and the reader's way in, which is part of the problem. He is lonely, rootless and confident in judgements he has no business making. He reads Estraven's manner as effeminate and shifty, and that misreading costs him.
Estraven is prime minister of Karhide when the novel opens, and the one Gethenian who seems to believe in the Ekumen. Accused of treason over a conciliatory handling of a border dispute with Orgoreyn, Estraven is exiled. The relationship between these two, across a gulf of biology, language and trust, is the spine of the book.
Around them are Argaven Harge, the king who rejects Ai's invitation, and the Orgota councillors Shusgis, Obsle and Yegey, members of an "Open Trade" faction who want the conflict with Karhide ended. Estraven's dead sibling and lover Arek matters more to the story than their absence suggests.
The themes
The Left Hand of Darkness is among the first books in what is now called feminist science fiction, and it is often described as the most famous examination of androgyny in the genre. The central question is what sex and gender do to a culture: what war, politics, family and friendship look like on a world where nobody is permanently male or female. When the book appeared, its handling of the Gethenians set off a feminist debate that has never fully settled.
Running alongside that is a study of loyalty. Ai and Estraven each have to decide what the other is owed, and the answer keeps changing. Le Guin also sets the two nations' religions against each other, the Handdarata of Karhide beside the faith of Orgoreyn, and uses the contrast to say something about how societies handle certainty.
How it ends (spoilers)
In Orgoreyn, Ai ignores both Estraven's warnings and his own unease. He is arrested at night, interrogated, and sent to a far-northern labour camp, where cold, forced labour and debilitating drugs leave him close to death. Estraven, still distrusted, breaks him out, spending the last of his money on supplies and then stealing more, which violates his own moral code. The two cross the northern ice sheet on an eighty-day trek back to Karhide. Estraven's reasoning is political: Karhide will want the honour of signing the Ekumen treaty before Orgoreyn does. On the ice they learn to trust each other, and Ai teaches Estraven mindspeech. Estraven hears Ai's thoughts in the voice of Arek.
They reach Karhide and Ai signals his ship. Betrayed by a friend they had trusted to hide them, Estraven attempts to cross back into Orgoreyn and is shot by border guards. Ai is captured. Estraven's prediction holds: Ai's reappearance collapses the governments of both nations, Karhide joins the Ekumen and Orgoreyn follows. Ai, grieving, asks the king to clear Estraven's name and travels to Estraven's hometown to meet the elderly father and the grown child Estraven had with Arek.
Why it still matters
The novel won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1970, voted by fans and by writers respectively. It has been reprinted more than thirty times. Harold Bloom wrote that "Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time", and the scholar Donna White called it a seminal work of science fiction, comparing its influence to that of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
It suits readers who want ideas carried by character rather than hardware, and who do not mind a narrator who is wrong. The ice journey alone has kept the book in print. The questions it raises about gender arrived decades before the conversation caught up.
