The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
I enjoyed Swancon on Friday and spent most of the rest of Easter reading or rereading books mentioned in the panels I attended.
In the "Looking Beyond the Left Hand: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary SF" panel, someone mentioned that Le Guin had made a big mistake in using the pronoun "he" for the androgynous Gethenians.
I reread it with that in mind and came to the conclusion that the reason the book works so well for me is that it uses "he". The use of a masculine pronoun for Estraven lets me read it as a m/m love story with some extra elements, rather than as what it's actually supposed to be. If Le Guin had used "she", as she herself stated later she should have, or a gender-neutral pronoun, I'd probably only have been mildly interested. A correctly-worded exploration of gender just doesn't do it for me the way m/m does.
Genly and Estraven have to come so far in understanding each other that their eventual deep rapport is extremely satisfying. One of my biggest issues with a lot of fanfic is that the misunderstanding that forms the basis for the story is so trivial it could be resolved in a thirty-second conversation (I recently read a 276,000 word story that turned out to be founded on such a minor issue I'm still getting over what a let-down that was!). Genly and Estraven - literally aliens to each other - have real cultural reasons for not being in accord. They can't connect until Estraven realises that Genly can only understand him if he disregards "shifgrethor" and speaks plainly, and Genly lets go of his standards of masculinity.
Genly seems young and underprepared for his mission and it's surprising the Ekumen let him be their representative, unless volunteers to timejump to such distant planets are few and far between. After two years on Gethen he admits "I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, to a woman who was a man."
Genly tells us in the first chapter "I don't trust Estraven, whose motives are forever obscure; I don't like him." Not far into their journey on the ice, and before they're even on a first-name basis, he acknowledges that he loves him and that he doesn't know whether he made the right decision in choosing not to have sex with him. A wonderful progression!
I'm not sure his rationale for the no-sex decision stands up:
For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from difference, that the love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right.
If the love sprang from difference, why would exploring that difference further hurt it? And how could difference be "the only bridge" in the face of so much shared hardship and experience?
It's odd that we're told nothing about Genly's sexual preferences or behaviours. He doesn't react positively to either the men or women of his ship when they land on the planet: It was strange to hear a woman's voice, after so long. ... They all looked strange to me, men and women, well as I knew them. Their voices sounded strange: too deep, too shrill. They were like a troupe of great, strange animals, of two different species...
There are only 14 English-language stories on A03 for this novel and only four Genly/Estraven - a strange shortage! I'd like one that goes AU before the penultimate chapter and envisages a plausible future from that point.
In the "Looking Beyond the Left Hand: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary SF" panel, someone mentioned that Le Guin had made a big mistake in using the pronoun "he" for the androgynous Gethenians.
I reread it with that in mind and came to the conclusion that the reason the book works so well for me is that it uses "he". The use of a masculine pronoun for Estraven lets me read it as a m/m love story with some extra elements, rather than as what it's actually supposed to be. If Le Guin had used "she", as she herself stated later she should have, or a gender-neutral pronoun, I'd probably only have been mildly interested. A correctly-worded exploration of gender just doesn't do it for me the way m/m does.
Genly and Estraven have to come so far in understanding each other that their eventual deep rapport is extremely satisfying. One of my biggest issues with a lot of fanfic is that the misunderstanding that forms the basis for the story is so trivial it could be resolved in a thirty-second conversation (I recently read a 276,000 word story that turned out to be founded on such a minor issue I'm still getting over what a let-down that was!). Genly and Estraven - literally aliens to each other - have real cultural reasons for not being in accord. They can't connect until Estraven realises that Genly can only understand him if he disregards "shifgrethor" and speaks plainly, and Genly lets go of his standards of masculinity.
Genly seems young and underprepared for his mission and it's surprising the Ekumen let him be their representative, unless volunteers to timejump to such distant planets are few and far between. After two years on Gethen he admits "I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, to a woman who was a man."
Genly tells us in the first chapter "I don't trust Estraven, whose motives are forever obscure; I don't like him." Not far into their journey on the ice, and before they're even on a first-name basis, he acknowledges that he loves him and that he doesn't know whether he made the right decision in choosing not to have sex with him. A wonderful progression!
I'm not sure his rationale for the no-sex decision stands up:
For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from difference, that the love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right.
If the love sprang from difference, why would exploring that difference further hurt it? And how could difference be "the only bridge" in the face of so much shared hardship and experience?
It's odd that we're told nothing about Genly's sexual preferences or behaviours. He doesn't react positively to either the men or women of his ship when they land on the planet: It was strange to hear a woman's voice, after so long. ... They all looked strange to me, men and women, well as I knew them. Their voices sounded strange: too deep, too shrill. They were like a troupe of great, strange animals, of two different species...
There are only 14 English-language stories on A03 for this novel and only four Genly/Estraven - a strange shortage! I'd like one that goes AU before the penultimate chapter and envisages a plausible future from that point.