The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,1

of Tierra del Fuego – the usual duration of ice ages and what the temperature averages are during an ice age – how much two of Scott’s men could haul per day on a sledge across an ice sheet – and so on. All to do with the wintriness of winter, nothing to do with gender. Other notes were imagined, preliminaries to writing the novel: discussions of the geography, flora and fauna of Gethen, the settlement of the planet eons years earlier by the Hainish, and sketches of the technology and history of the two civilisations, Orgoreyn and Karhide. I found outlines of a plot for the story, in places quite close to the plot of the published novel. In all this material, the Gethenians are spoken of as ‘men’ and ‘women’.

And there comes a gap in the notes. A silence.

Then, suddenly, the notes are brief and much scribblier, having to do with plot details and speculations and reminders not to forget to put such-and-such in Chapter 3. I was writing the story. And every character in it, except the man from Earth, was sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, and most often neither.

How did I leap that gap? How did I work through that silence to find the book’s voice? My memory of the process, after forty years, is vague, and I don’t wholly trust it. This is what happened as I well as I can reconstruct it:

The story as planned was promising, but it hadn’t come alive. I couldn’t get started. I knew some key element was missing. At some point, I saw that the missing key was the gender physiology of the Gethenians. I don’t think it was an aha! moment, a revelation. My recollection is that it dawned on me gradually. As I said, I am a slow learner.

Of this I am certain: it dawned on me because I had cleared the way for it – by deciding that my wintry world was to be unique in one aspect, it was to be a world that had never had a war. The Gethenians would have the full complement of human aggressiveness; they’d have feuds, forays, squabbles, murders, all that – but they would not organise their aggression. They would have no armies and no wars.

My mind, trying to imagine a world without war, arrived at a world without men – without men as such – without men who had always to be, to prove themselves, men …

So, could they sometimes be women?

And vice versa?

That is more or less the thought process I went through. I know I resisted altering the nature of gender for a while – that I was reluctant to admit it as a working idea, an essential element of my story.

It was, after all, in 1968, a pretty damn strange notion.

It was daunting, also, to me as a novelist. To invent a radically different sexual physiology and behaviour, not just as a speculation, but embodied in a novel, a story about people – people who most of the time were quite sexless but went into heat once a month, one time as a woman another time as a man? To get into the hearts and minds of such strange beings, bring them to being as characters – that would take some skill, not to mention chutzpah.

On the other hand, I know this question was in my mind all through the writing: are they really so different from us? Is our sexuality really so all-consuming, is our gender really so clearly determined and so all-determining?

Along with the work-in-progress plot scribbles in the old file-folder, I found a few more factual notes, all having to do with oestrus in animals and human sexual physiology. I was reading up on what I was inventing as I invented it. These notes are scanty. I remember my frustration at finding so few facts, let alone speculations, about actual gender differences and variations. In half an hour, now, you could Google up a hundred times as much information as I could find on the subject, then, in two libraries. I had to wing it. The times have changed, and we with them. My book was one of the elements and factors of that particular change.

How successful I was in imagining the society of my Gethenians, and in portraying their psychology, I am content to leave to my readers to judge. I see a lot of missed opportunities, things I’d do differently now … but ‘now’ is after the change.