Aliens crash in a cornfield and set out to conquer Earth…
The aliens are petrifying in their strangeness…
Humans resist with tanks and planes…
That’s a typical sci-fi story — the kind you’d get in pulp magazines from the 1950s: Fantastic Science Fiction or Amazing Stories.
Ursula K. Le Guin read those titles as a girl. And she wrote for them as a young woman. The magazines were how she learnt the conventions of the genre — and gave her a place to begin her subversion.
Those first few stories of Le Guin’s introduced settings she’d revisit throughout her life: the world of Earthsea and the Hainish universe. Her resistance to same-old sci-fi had begun.
In her second novel — The Left Hand of Darkness — the tropes are inverted: a human touched down on Gethen. He was an emissary from an intergalactic society that approached planets with an invitation: Join us.
Already, that was two strikes against standard storytelling. In Le Guin’s vision, humans were the intergalactic interlopers — not Martians. And their mission was diplomatic and devout, rather than mad and military.
Strike three came next because, throughout the story, the human was the oddity. His biology was fixed, unlike the people on Gethen. Theirs was an ambisexual society.
Le Guin had great fun describing it — with lines like:
The king was pregnant.
And:
No physiological habit is established, and the mother of several children may be the father of several more.
The emissary could not change from male to female, nor go through long periods of sexlessness, which made him — in the eyes of almost everyone he met — perverted.
The Left Hand of Darkness was itself an oddity. Was it a travelogue? A feminist tract? A philosophical thought-experiment? Le Guin herself had to admit:
Left Hand looked to me like a natural flop. Its style is not the journalistic one that was then standard in science fiction, its structure is complex, it moves slowly, and even if everybody in it is called he, it is not about men.
But whatever else it was, it was a masterpiece. The Left Hand of Darkness won the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for best novel. Le Guin became the first woman to hold those awards. And she won by playing a different game to most authors:
The ‘hard’ science-fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry.
Biology, sociology, anthropology — that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am.
I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology.
When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.
Le Guin took inspiration from anthropology, Taoism, feminism, gender studies, Carl Jung… She checked out books few sci-fi authors would touch.
Those unusual reading habits fed unusual stories — stories that smashed tropes like a UFO burning through the neat lines of farmer’s field. Their publication was a kind of ‘first contact’, destined to change the genre.
It was as if Le Guin was issuing an invitation to her readers: Listen. It might be hard to believe, but there’s a whole universe of ideas out there — beyond physics and technology. See for yourself. Join us.
Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.
