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I'm on a bit of a break from
Dune novels, but am reading another science fiction novel I am finding nearly as hard to put down:
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm over halfway through it already and I only started it eight days ago. Granted it's only 315 pages.
I still have
Dune to thank for finding it. It was because of
Dune that I went searching for lists of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, and found a great such list by
Esquire here: "The 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time." Be warned about that link: it has tons of embedded images and all items on the list are on the one page, which means it's slow to load, and prone to errors when trying to load it on a mobile device.
But, it's still a great list. It ranks Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein at #1 (spoiler!), which is hard to refute, even with
Dune ranked #2. I'm alos good with them ranking Ray Bradbury's wonderful
The Martian Chronicles—which Gabriel once gave mre as a gift, decades ago—at #3. Anyway,
The Left Hand of Darkness is #6, and I am deeply fascinated by the premise: an intergalactic envoy visits a planet of humans whose society is defined by their ambisexuality, the "sex" of each individual on the planet being the same. Fascinatingly, there
is a duality of sex during what they call "kemmer," a time in a lunar cycle when they become capable of sexual reproduction, and one assumes a female role and the other a male. But, no one has any control over which role the body takes when it's time, nor is it ever fixed for any individual over many cycles of a lifetime: one person can have fathered or mothered multiple children, which it is being just as random as the sex our children on Earth may have at birth.
There's a lot of context to reading such a book, punlished in 1969, in 2025, when we have vocabulary regarding intersex or nonbinary genders readily available. All people on the planet Gethen are referred to as "he" or "him" in this book, presumably because historically the rules of English stated that when sex or gender is hypothetical then the male forms are used for generalizations. The curious result as I read the novel, however, is to think of a race of people with homogenous gender that is all
male, even though it is made clear that is not what it is, and that any pregnancy occurs with men who can get pregnant. It's just the effect of consistently male versions of words, including ones like "fellow." It's even more fascinating to consider this given the author was a woman.
Regardless, the book is packed with provocative implications for what exists in our own world as social constructs ascribed to perceptions of sex and gender, particularly when contrasted with the planet Gethen (or "Winter," as is its apparently informal name among observers from off-world—noting though that, so far at least, the "Envoy" is the one alien on the world, regarded by many as a "pervert" precisely because of his fixed sexuality).
The Left Hand of Darkness is short on actual science and so qualifies more as "speculative fiction." But, there are interstellar alliances and space ships and such, at least referred to in conversation, which alone lands it firmly in the science fiction genre. It's the implications that make it such a great read, though. I'm really enjoying it.
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As for last night, there is not much to report. Shobhit picked me up at work, and we went to Costco, to return two things we recently bought without realizing we already had them at home. We did some light shopping there. Then we drove home.
We made bagel sandwiches for dinner, with fried portabello mushrooms and eggs and sliced tomato in the center; I added a slice of aged cheddar cheese. It was delicious.
We ate while watching the back half of the four episodes of
Adolescence on Netflix. Laney sent me
this piece by feminist writer Rebecca Solnit, which provided a lot of critical food for thought. I read it while in the car, some of it while shopping, and it had valid criticisms which also did not really make me any less impressed with the show. I wil concede, though, that it would have been even better had they had any women writers working on it. A critical examination of toxic masculinity is never going to be as fleshed out as possible if only examined by men who themselves cannot escape the effects of patriarchy, misogyny and toxic masculinity.
I will say I found the first two episodes more gripping than the last two to watch. That doesn't mean the last two aren't as good, though.
Anyway, after that was done, I washed the dishes, and then I went to the bedroom to watch an episode of
Everybody's Live with John Mulaney, which I keep on wanting to really like but, just like with its first season, I am finding lacks enough entertainment value to justify its self-conscious weirdness. It's honestly kind of dull.
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[posted 12:31pm]
