Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
As I've said, I know nothing at all about the genre, so I'm sure that Left Hand represented a seismic shift and that many other works reflect its influence, but I'm clueless.
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In high school I was starting to read a lot of science fiction, and I joined the Science Fiction Book Club (Doubleday) as I was starting college. The first monthly selection I received was The Left Hand of Darkness, and it was quite a shock to me at that time
. I'd been reading Heinlein, Asimov, Blish and the like. In the same year - 1969 - Samuel R. Delany's Nova came out, and these novels represented something different in sci-fi; the posibility of something more than space opera.
It's noteworthy that
Ursula Le Guin was openly female; the few female sci-fi writers then widely published used ambigious names or initials (Andre Norton, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett). Science fiction was then something of a boys club; (and still is).
In The Left Hand of Darkness, you have a book written by a woman - eek; presenting a world of sexually ambigious humans - The Horror! When I was in grade school and high school, society was at that time extremely hostile to the concept of gender ambiguity. The costume bar was possibly more rigid than the colour bar. Women were still fighting to get out of dresses. I can remember my sisters' clothing. They had pants that had zippers at the back and were referred to as "slacks", never trousers. They had shirts that buttoned at the back and could only be referred to as blouses. At my high school the dress code specified dresses or skirts for girls; they only time they were allowed to wear pants to school was during blizzards, and then they still had to change to skirts as soon as they entered the building. Every little detail denied the possibility of anything other than a rigid separation of gender.
So the book represented something of at least a tremor, although I think that we still have a very long way to go for a seismic shift. It says something for the sci-fi community of the time that the book did win both major sci-fi awards; in some ways the 60's were more intellectually open than the times we have gone through since.