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Originally Posted by gmw
It seems to me that The Left Hand of Darkness fits very well with the styling of sci-fi in the 50s, 60s and 70s. I think that including gender as a theme is really the main thing, perhaps the only thing, that makes this book stand out from the crowd. I always thought Le Guin wrote well, I liked her voice, and so I generally enjoyed reading her books, but her stories have failed to be memorable for me.
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Thank you. When I was first reading this, I had to go back and check the date of publication as I was getting a distinct 50s/Cold War vibe from it and I was surprised in a way that it was as late as 1969, but then it made perfect sense. A book from the 50s wouldn't have raised the issues of gender, race or even indiscriminate sexual coupling, or at least it wouldn't have gone mainstream and won prizes. Society had caught up with the concepts and more than anything, this was a high concept book. Anyone remember
The Harrad Experiment? That was published in 1967.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Estraven does say early on, "I’m not anyone’s servant. A man must cast his own shadow....". Later we have the legend of Getheren who in the end says, "Tell them at Shath that I take back my name and my shadow." There is a very similar line during the foretelling chapter.
It's obviously all related to the creation legend in chapter 17: "Each of the children born to them had a piece of darkness that followed him about wherever he went by daylight."
Which is all very neat and tidy, I quite like it, but doesn't actually reveal much about how shifgrethor works as a system of honour.
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I suppose it's heresy, but I was willing to accept
shifgrethor as a thing without worrying too much about it. In part because it ties back to my sense of the book as having a 50s sensibility as well as a 60s one. I suspect I was trying too hard, but shifgrethor seemed to tie in with an analysis of post-war retributuion I read by Ian Buruma, which differentiated between guilt, which is internal, and shame, which is how one is perceived. Buruma, of course, was forced out of his position last fall as editor of the New York Review of Books after only a year, after publishing a piece seen at odds with the #MeToo movement. Everything comes around!