Still, there is evidence that Le Guin herself fell short of her ideal, and may have helped encourage a two-sexed interpretation of her novel. The most obvious example is the fact that she chose to use male pronouns throughout when referring to the inhabitants of Winter. While the male pronoun is generally accepted to be the more generic pronoun in English, it still conveys a sense of sexual identity, and the reader begins to visualize Winter as a world of men rather than a world of androgynous hermaphrodites.
In her own analysis of the book, Le Guin points out that this was a deliberate choice on her part. Using “he” and “him” was preferable to the attempt to invent a new pronoun.
Still, the novel itself reinforces this all-male interpretation of Winter. This is most apparent through Ai’s counterpart, Estraven—one of the androgynous natives of Winter. Despite Le Guin’s attempt to incorporate aspects of both sexes into the natives, Estraven tends to take on masculine roles to the exclusion of feminine ones. He engages in strenuous physical activities, hiking across miles of frozen glacier. He is a powerful political figure. He helps break Ai out of prison.
Le Guin admits that she did this because “I was privately delighted at watching, not a man, but a manwoman, do all these things…. But, for the reader, I left out too much. One does not see Estraven … in any role that we automatically perceive as ‘female’: and therefore, we tend to see him as a man.” But even had Le Guin been able to perfectly balance Estraven’s male and female activities, one must wonder if her efforts would have been successful.
Even as she analyzes the flaws that handicapped her “thought-experiment,” Le Guin still refers to “male” and “female” activities. She still writes from a two-sex, two-gender perspective. She also conflates sex and gender—the way to portray someone as being of both sexes is to portray them in activities of both genders. The result is a people who are not truly androgynous, but instead seem more like an artificial conglomeration of male and female, man and woman.
This is not to say that Le Guin’s efforts are futile. Indeed, she does a remarkable job of exploring sexual issues. For the most part, she is the most successful of the three authors examined. Whereas Heinlein eventually undermines himself and reinforces traditional sexual norms, Le Guin remains consistent throughout the book. Within the limited success of the overall experiment, she often challenges more specific assumptions of sexuality. For instance, because sex in kemmer is inconsistent, monogamy is not a viable option. Likewise, by creating the institution of the kemmer-house, Le Guin brings sex out of the home and into a more publicly acceptable forum. She explores Rubin’s outer limits of sexuality in a more effective manner than Heinlein, and she does it almost as an afterthought.
Similarly, whereas Anthony’s portrayal of alien sexuality was a relatively transparent projection of human sex, Le Guin’s world was much more complex, and the shortcomings more subtle. By ignoring the temptation to create “true aliens,” and instead limiting herself to modified humans, Le Guin was able to focus more specifically on human sexuality. It is only by deconstructing the underlying assumptions of the book that one is able to see where the cultural context of the author/reader erode the effectiveness of Le Guin’s experiment.
Conclusion
A theme that unifies these three novels is their attempt to experiment with sexuality. On a slightly deeper level, they are connected through the fact that all three fall short in their own ways: one simply places a mask of “alienness” over traditional human sexuality, another undercuts itself, and the third is limited by the context of both the readers and the author.
So what have these novels accomplished? What is the result of these thought-experiments? It is a common assumption that science fiction tries to predict the future. While this may be the case in some works, it is by no means universal. In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin argues that she is not attempting to predict the future, but instead to describe the present. She is “merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are [androgynous].”
Connect this quote to the fact that the least successful of these three experiments was the one which tried the hardest to escape the bounds of “humanness.” Anthony attempted to create genuine aliens, and the result was strongly human. Le Guin and Heinlein worked with humans. Their results, paradoxically enough, were more effective in breaking the conventions of traditional sexual thinking.
For even though all three novels ultimately fell short of their goals, they still produced interesting results, particularly in the case of Heinlein and Le Guin. The former explored several alternate systems of sexuality. Though these systems were ultimately shunned, their very existence forces the reader to question the assumptions of sexuality. Heinlein may believe in society’s rules, but in Friday, he makes it quite clear that they are simply rules, arbitrary and breakable.
Likewise, Le Guin uses The Left Hand of Darkness to question the idea of binary, oppositional sexes. Even though her portrayal falls short of her goal, the question itself leads the reader to question as well. Throughout this article, I have claimed that the context of the author and reader was one of the problems this book faced, that the sexual nature of our society filters and distorts our reading of Le Guin’s society. But isn’t it possible that this is simultaneously working in the reverse? Because we can read Le Guin’s fictional society through the lens of our own, it makes sense that after we put the book aside, that fictional society will in some way affect the lens through which we see our own society.
It seems that science fiction is trapped. Any attempt to explore sexuality is ultimately bound by our own context. Yet within those bounds, it is possible to raise fascinating questions, to challenge assumptions, and ultimately, perhaps to loosen up those very boundaries, making more room for the next writer to explore. The goal is not to answer the question, but instead to simply ask the question. And as those questions are asked and the boundaries continue to loosen, it will be interesting to see the directions that science fiction will follow.
Jim C. Hines lives in Lansing, Michigan. He writes both fiction and non-fiction as the mood strikes. His favorite genre to write is light fantasy, and his least favorite would have to be author bios. His work is featured in Writers of the Future XV and Book Of All Flesh. For more about him, visit his Web site.
Works Cited
Anthony, Piers. Cluster. New York: Avon, 1977.
Heinlein, Robert A. Friday. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Walker and Company, 1969.
—. “Is Gender Necessary? Redux.” Dancing at the Edge of the World. Ed. Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Grove Press, 1989. 7-16.
Richter, David H., ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford, 1998.
Rubin, Gayle S. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, and David H. Halperin eds. New York: Routledge, 1993. 3-44.
The Wonder and Limits of Science: An Evening with Freeman Dyson
By Greg Beatty
12/31/01
Freeman Dyson was born in England in 1923 and came to the United States after World War II. He has since spent close to fifty years researching physics, and studied with J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. Dyson was involved with the Orion Project, which attempted to send manned spacecraft to Mars. He has written a variety of works interpreting science for the general public, including Origins of Life, Imagined Worlds, Weapons and Hope, Disturbing the Universe, and From Eros to Gaia. As the titles of his books suggest, Dyson’s writing is poetic, his interests far-ranging, his fundamental attitude one of profound optimism. Through the course of his career Dyson has received a long list of honors, including a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship to study physics (1947), a Wolf Prize for accomplishments in physics (1981), and the 1996 Lewis Thomas Prize, an award honoring scientists for their artistic achievements. Wired magazine has called Dyson “our deepest and most trustworthy futurist.”
I was excited when I heard Freeman Dyson was coming to town, but frankly, I expected to be alone in that. I was wrong. There was a quiet but perceptible buzz in the weeks before Dyson came to town, and a bit of tension between Western Washington University, which was sponsoring his appearance as part of their Distinguished Lecture Series, and Bellingham, Washington, the surrounding town. Series organizers made sure students had access to tickets first, and released only a limited number of these (free) tickets to the general public; apparently, in the past, townspeople had snapped up all the tickets, leaving no room for the university students to attend.