Ursula LeGuin - The Left Hand Of Darkness

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K.Leguin The Ekumen 04

WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD AND THE NEBULA AWARD FOR BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL OF THE YEAR 1969

URSULA KROEBER LE GUIN, daughter of A. L. Kroeber (anthropologist) and Theodora Kroeber (author), was born in Berkeley, California in 1929. She attended college at Radcliffe and Columbia, and married C. A. LeGuin in Paris in 1951. The LeGuins and their three children live in Portland, Oregon.

Ursula LeGuin's previous novels include ROCANNON'S WORLD, PLANET OF EXILE and CITY OF ILLUSIONS, and THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, all published by Ace Books. Like THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, each novel is complete in itself, but they are all part of a greater, growing mosaic of far-future history that is consistent from novel to novel.

NOTE:This universe is now known asThe Ekumen, andThe Left Hand of Darknessnow can be listed asThe Ekumen 04 -formatting updated, missing pages scanned and restored, the whole compared to the 14th ACE print run of June, 1977 by MollyKate for #bookz, October 26, 2002

With the awarding of the 1975 Hugo and Nebula awards to The Dispossessed [The Ekumen 05], Ursula K. Le Guin became the first author to win both awardstwice for novels.

ACE BOOKS

A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y.

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS Copyright (c)1969, by Ursula K. Le Guin Introduction Copyright (c) 1976, by Ursula K. Le Guin An Ace Book. All Rights Reserved.

Printed in U.S.A.

Converted to reader format by Kelzan Dedication:

For Charles,sine quo non CONTENTS

Introduction - added in 1976

1. A Parade in Erhenrang

2. The Place Inside the Blizzard

3. The Mad King

4. The Nineteenth Day

5. The Domestication of Hunch

6. One Way into Orgoreyn

7. The Question of Sex

8. Another Way into Orgoreyn

9. Estraven the Traitor

10. Conversations in Mishnory

11. Soliloquies in Mishnory

12. On Time and Darkness

13. Down on the Farm

14. The Escape

15. To the Ice

16. Between Drumner and Dremegole

17. An Orgota Creation Myth

18. On the Ice

19. Homecoming

20. A Fool's Errand

The Gethenian Calendar and Clock Introduction

SCIENCE FICTION ISoften described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A

prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as 'escapist,' but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because 'it's so depressing.'

Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic. Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn't the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer's or the reader's. Variables are the spice of life.

This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future-indeed Schrodinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the 'future,' on the quantum level,cannot be predicted-but to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like-what's going on-what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

"The truth against the world!"-Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane-bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?

But our society, being troubled and bewildered, seeking guidance, sometimes puts an entirely mistaken trust in its artists, using them as prophets and futurologists.

I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that theawen cannot come upon them, and the god speak through them. Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? if they did notknow it happens, because, they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands? Maybe only once, once in their lives. But once is enough.

Nor would I say that the artist alone is so burdened and so privileged. The scientist is another who prepares, who makes ready, working day and night, sleeping and awake, for inspiration. As Pythagoras knew, the god may speak in the forms of geometry as well as in the shapes of dreams; in the harmony of pure thought as well as in the harmony of sounds; in numbers as well as in words.