Speed is God

In a book that starts with the most epic pizza delivery ever, speed is critical. The energy of the opening scene is finger-bitingly frenetic, as the time ticks down and Hiro’s car zooms to its final resting place in a Burbclave swimming pool. Everything rockets along, and some things move too quickly for their motion to even register. This reminded me of the limited flicker-fusion rate (the speed with which our eyes perceive) of the human eye, which makes what happens very quickly either very vague or totally invisible. To us, hummingbirds’ wings are just an indistinct blur and fluorescent lights do not drive us all insane because we cannot see them flickering. With a higher flicker-fusion threshold, we would actually see each distinct beat of the hummingbird’s wings.

For all the technology zooming around in Snow Crash, we are still limited by the range of our senses. For example, besides Hiro and Y.T., no one has ever seen a Rat Thing because they move too fast (94). A few pages later, Y.T. is perplexed by the appearance of a Mafia Town Car: “How do they do it? You see these Town Cars everywhere, but you never see them move, never see them get anyplace. She’s not even sure they have engines in them” (100). The omnipresent yet insidious Mafia manages to elude perception with ease. Even with all of Lagos’ technological enhancements—he can see visual light, infrared, radar, and ultrasound simultaneously—he still ends up getting “slit open like a salmon” (138).

In addition to the ability of the senses to gather information, speed is also crucial in transferring information digitally and connecting to the Metaverse. Many of us can remember the infuriatingly slow dial-up internet connections of days of yore and even today, e-mailing large attachments can be a time-consuming process. In Snow Crash, a fiberoptic cable enables a transfer of information swift enough to create a detailed, high-resolution experience of the Metaverse. The richness and complexity of the digital world in Snow Crash offers a striking contrast to the minimalism and comparatively low-fi vibe of LamdaMOO in “A Rape in Cyberspace.” The speed with which events unfold in LamdaMOO are on par with our flicker-fusion rates, while Snow Crash flies by at an almost supersonic speed, like a hummingbird on steroids.

The virtual reality of LamdaMOO is, as far as I can tell from the article, solely text-based—no flashy graphics or life-like avatars yet. This simplicity permits a great deal of freedom among the users. In the colorful Metaverse of Snow Crash, where the most carefully crafted avatars look just like real people, it is far more difficult to envision the living human being behind the overwhelmingly realistic avatar. But in LamdaMOO, nothing is “real” in the sense that it could be mistaken for real life. It’s just words on a screen. For example, the fact that evangeline describes her room as “infinite in expanse and fluid in form” does not stop the writer of the article from feeling that her room is “claustrophobic” instead, “dank and overheated by virtual bodies, pressing against your skin” (8). Given a text, we are all free to envision it however we wish. But as technology advances, the transfer of information becomes ever swifter and we gain greater and greater control over how our digital selves are presented, leaving less to the imagination. I know nothing about what virtual reality or avatars look like today, but based on animation in movies and commercials for video games, the digital can be incredibly real. Our senses are all too fallible, and can easily be seduced by technology into, if not mistaking the virtual for the real, than into preferring digital perfection to real imperfection.

Reading Faces

When Tyÿ first reads her Tarot cards, Katin mentions how they are based on “symbols and mythical images that have recurred and reverberated through forty-five centuries of human history” (113). This reminded me of Jospeph Campbell’s monomyth, and all that comparative studies have shown of how certain stories, symbols, and narrative structures recur in the myths and legends of different peoples all over the world. Certain symbols are universal, appearing, in some form or another, in almost all cultures. Similarly, facial expressions are often spoken of as a universal language. A smile in one part of the world means the same thing everywhere. The importance of faces is referred to several times in Nova. According to Lorq, “In the face the lines of a man’s fate mapped are” (111) and Katin states, “the subject of the novel is what happens between people’s faces when they talk to one another” (179).

Reading faces is an integral part of communication. As long as the universality of facial expressions holds true, faces should not be impossible to read—but we see in the novel that this is not always the case. Lorq’s scar makes it incredibly difficult to see how he feels or to gauge his reactions. He laughs when others expect him to be angry (114), his puzzlement “looks like rage” (115), and “concern appeared a grin” (121). The people around him are constantly misinterpreting Lorq’s expressions. Even Harvard-educated Katin needs a few moments to “interpret the wrecked face’s agony” (152). At one point, Katin’s attempt at interpretation fails completely. He “tried to translate his visage” but it “was indecipherable” (165).

Scars aside, no one can perfectly control the information communicated by their facial expressions. This applies both to hiding emotions and trying to send subtle messages. When Katin tries to look “reservedly doubtful,” the “expression was too complicated and came out blank” (167). Our facial expressions are not something we think about all the time—that would take constant, unsustainable vigilance. Just in the moment between exchanges in a conversation, there is enough time “for a handful of expressions to subsume the Mouse’s face” (137). Mouse’s face is subsumed by expressions—he does not consciously choose to go through this series of expressions. It happens naturally, without his thinking about.

There are numerous ways this natural form of communication can be disrupted—most obviously, with masks like the ones worn at Prince Red’s party in Paris. Also, when Ruby appears on Vorpis, she is wearing a mist-mask (169) and she puts the mask on again when she attacks Lorq with the nets (172). But machines also play a role in the communication breakdown associated with the inability to read faces. It was Prince’s mechanical hand that scarred Lorq’s face, making it so indecipherable. The sockets are also a factor that divides people. Katin is shocked to learn that a whole group of people on earth, the gypsies, live without sockets. Not having sockets, or even getting them late as Mouse did, sets the gypsies apart from everyone else. This relates to Kai’s post on how technology can alienate people from their own human-ness. Facial expressions are universal, but technology has the potential to create a new Tower of Babel, resulting in misreadings and misunderstandings.

Speech Sounds: Interior World and Radio Imagination

In Speech Sounds I was particularly interested by Rye's description of the new world's hierarchy: "The least impaired people tended to do this--stand back unless they were physically threatened and let those with less control scream and jump around. It was as though they felt it beneath them to be as touchy as the less comprehending. This was an attitude of superiority." In this diseased society communication has seriously deteriorated, and I found it interesting that the new basis for a class hierarchy here was based on ability to communicate. Also, the violence that came out of this seems crucial--the higher classes (those with more ability to communicate and understand) were able to contain themselves and not react with violence to the lower classes (the more impaired). In a society that is largely a society of interior existence, as these people have trouble understanding and communicating with each other, people turn to violence. Then, it seems that people can only rely on violence as a means of communication, and everyone is out only for himself or herself. Is this human nature on its most basic level, when the confines of society and codified means of communication are destroyed?
In this story, I was very aware of Butler's 'Radio Imagination.' In the 1997 interview she describes how characters often live in her head, have voices, motivations and are created without any real sense of a physical presence. In Speech Sounds, I definitely noticed this, as each character, especially Rye, has an extremely evolved inner life, and virtually no physically descriptive presence. In fact, the main focus of the story for me was on how people cope with their own interiors, and looking at the human interior through the lens of a disease that has severely impaired the interior and ability to communicate in a lot of ways, is an excellent way to do this. Ultimately, it comes down to violence and basic human emotions: jealousy, lust, greed, anger, fear. I found the world that Butler constructs here to be very much a reflection of her 'radio imagination' and an interesting lens to look at basic human nature. It seems that Rye has a major advantage, as she is less impaired than most, and I would honestly have liked a glimpse into the mind of the people with more severe impairments. For example, the man who kills the woman at the end. I think it would have been incredible to hear the thoughts (however basic) going on in his mind as he murdered his wife and the stranger (Obsidian) who attempted to save her. On the other hand, the moment in the car when Rye and Obsidian reveal to each other their strengths is a fantastic insight into this. Watching them both experience and suppress a wave of bloodthirsty jealousy explains a lot about how Butler imagines the human interior.

Show and Tell

I’m interested in Butler's portrayal of sight, particularly in Bloodchild and The Evening and the Morning and the Night, in connection with her description of her own “radio imagination.” In both stories, the trauma of characters seeing, particularly seeing their own futures, seems to gesture toward representation problems. Gan has long been prepared for what awaits him with stories, diagrams and drawings, but he does not really understand it until he witnesses Bram Lomas’ horrific birth experience. In The Evening and the Morning and the Night, Lynn does not fully understand DGD until she comes face to face with patients in the ward, and Alan develops a more complicated perspective on Dilg, despite having read copious literature on what to expect, once he actually looks around there. Since seeing is so crucial for to each character's understanding of the world, I’m interested in why Butler often obscures the vision of her own readers. How are we to really understand if we cannot see?

Like Ellen, I initially imagined Lynn as a man (perhaps because I was overcompensating for assuming Gan was a woman until he revealed that he wasn’t). Furthermore, even when physical descriptions were provided, they did not always help me. For example, I could never quite conceptualize what T’Gatoi looked like. Butler provides a meditation, if not an answer, in her description of her own “radio imagination,” casting physical appearance almost as an afterthought in her work. She has never thought first in terms of what her characters looked like. This connection between not seeing and representing comes into play with Naomi Chi’s art. Having gouged out her own eyes, she works as a sculptor, representing what she can feel and, at least in Lynn’s assessment, representing it well – “in a way that seemed impossible for a blind sculptress” (56).

I feel, then, like there are conflicting messages on the need to see. In some ways, in the acts of representation that Butler and Naomi perform, it appears words and imagination are sufficient. Maybe the key is feeling, not necessarily in the tactile sense, although that’s where Naomi’s inspiration comes from. As I said, I couldn’t see the characters, but when they described the awful spectacles that had made them understand the truth far more vividly than words could, I could conjure up a sense of what they saw. Not necessarily an image, but a feeling, an understanding of the disgust of being exposed to the violence of bodily destruction.*

I’m left grappling with Gan and T’Gatoi’s discussion of seeing at the end of Bloodchild. T’Gatoi concludes that “humans should be protected from seeing,” but Gan argues instead for being “shown.” I don’t think Butler's exclusion of physical descriptions is meant to protect her readers. She shows us the truth in other ways, and reveals that vision in terms of feelings can be just as strong as vision in terms of sight. Even Gan couches his argument for showing in terms of the tactile, explaining that all Terrans see of birth is “pain and terror and maybe death” (29). I feel like I’m left struggling to put my understanding of vision in Butler’s world to words, but I guess that’s appropriate.

*Of course, I imagine I couldn’t feel it as strongly as the character could, since my main exposure to such drastic bodily harm still comes in the form of representation, though visual representation. I was impressed that Gan’s description of the birth scene could produce such a visceral reaction in me, but also wondered if I would have shuddered so much if I couldn’t produce some vision in my mind, a mixture of medical TV shows (the documentaries and the fictionalized) and, most recently, the disturbing imagery in Black Swan.

Body Language

One theme I noticed throughout several of Octavia Butler’s short stories was the importance of the body in communication. This theme is the most blatant in “Speech Sounds”, which is set in a dystopian world where an unspecified illness has robbed most of the remaining population of their ability to speak and understand language. Throughout the story, we see the extent to which body language has come to compensate for any verbal or written communication, expressing both aggression and love at different points in the story. In “Bloodchild”, although dialogue is informative, most meaningful interaction is physical. While the reader instinctively shies away from the idea of giant centipede-like creatures holding a position of power within a human household, the way T’Gatoi cradles Gan and his mother, adored but “caged”, illustrates the dynamic of the family unit more effectively than could pages of conversation. Butler’s shockingly visceral depictions of the conception and birth of the worms, paired with the clear indication that this arrangement operates under the consent of the human host, are similarly demonstrative of the complex relationship between Terran (human) and Tlic.

As Alexandra suggested in her post, much of the key “body language” in “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” is tied up in the violent, generally self-destructive behavior of the DGD victims as they attempt to literally dig themselves out of their own bodies. Given Butler’s use of the body as an expressive tool, this characterization of the disease is particularly telling, as it implies that those with the disease are, through the act of self-mutilation, removing themselves from society in a wholly physical way, destroying their own methods of communication—their bodies. In keeping with this theme, DGD victims are only judged to be members of society again when they regain the ability to create and express themselves with their bodies, through acts such as painting, molding clay, or building inventions. Alan’s mother, a DGD victim who destroyed her own eyes, signals her relative freedom from the effects of the disease by running her fingers over Alan and Lynn’s faces. With Beatrice’s guidance, she even manages to hug her son—a symbol of acceptance and affection that needs no words.

When asked about her emphasis on the body in her interview with Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating, Butler replies, “the body is all we really know that we have. We can say that there’re always other things that are wonderful. And some are. But all we really know that we have is the flesh” (59). Given this presentation of the body as a sort of fundamental truth, combined with the essentiality of the body and body language in her writing (as described above and as Mehaffy describes in the interview), I was surprised at Butler’s seeming unwillingness to describe her protagonists. In none of the three of the stories I mentioned do we receive a physical description of the protagonists, and in two out of the three (“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” and “Speech Sounds”) I found myself drastically altering my perceptions of the main characters partway through the story, as Butler withholds basic demographic information for several pages—far longer than the norm for such brief works. (I had initially imagined Lynn to be male, which was not really refuted until Alan’s introduction, and I had imagined Rye to be quite young.) Similarly, race is generally ignored in Butler’s works, despite the enormous role it played in the author’s own life. Given that most authors seem to slip in basic descriptive information at the very beginning of their stories (albeit subtly), I can only assume that this is purposeful on Butler’s part—perhaps as a way of generalizing the experiences of her characters across a spectrum of physical traits.

Edit: I somehow missed Kai's post when writing this, so I'd like to make a belated acknowledgment to his exploration of the same theme I discussed above.

Coping with Disaster

One thing that fascinated me about Octavia Butler's stories were their in-depth and frank discussion of human reactions to our baser fears. Whether the feared disaster are the diseases in "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" and "Speech Sounds," or the forced but necessary condition in "Bloodchild," the result is that the characters must cope with some disruptive change with what we as the readers see as a normal life. The interesting thing is that the revulsion we feel for the described situations is not solely biological, but rather socially constructed. All three stories deal not with a true apocalypse, but rather with a situation arising from a loss of control. We as social and sapient beings fear both biological and social disasters yet it is interesting in that the latter both affects and is created by a purely arbitrary construct. To summarize, there is no "instinct" for crafting a society.

The titular story in the collection deals with two fundamental human fears: that of parasitic (non-human) life growing within us (a purely primal fear) and that of loss of control to a non-human or human-defined entity. The latter is a far more interesting case to discuss, as it deals not with a biological impulse but rather with a social one. Over the past few thousand years, humans have adapted to be the rulers of the planet with no serious rival. However, in "Bloodchild" that principle is turned on its head as humans appear to be little more than 'pets with rights' for the Tlic. While the Tlic may seem worried for their humans at times (see page 18), it still remains that humans live on a "preserve" and that there is only a limited timespan in which grubs can be safely removed from their host before the latter is fatally injured/eaten (as almost happened to Lomas).

A Worst-Case Scenario, and One That We Fundamentally Fear

Fortunately for us, Butler does not restrict herself in her portrayal of humans' reactions to this situation. Gan's family shows the full range of emotions related to the biologically parasitic arrangement: the mother's passive-agressive fear, Qui's agressive disgust, Xuan Hoa's adoration, and Gan's hesitation yet decision to "sacrifice" himself to save his sister. As would be expected, he majority fear this situation in which they lack dominant power. However, I think it was an excellent creative choice on the author's part to show the whole spectrum of reactions rather than simply the two extremes. Humans must often deal in a "grey area" and I think "Bloodchild" does a good job of addressing our fears of change and lack of control.

While I don't have enough space here to give "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" and "Speech Sounds" a proper analysis in this manner, I do hope to touch upon their focal points. The former somewhat parallels "Bloodchild" in that it deals with humans losing control to some degree. Once more, the fear addressed is not solely biological as we also fear both a lack of self-control as well as ostracism from society. However, this disease does not affect everyone so the majority continue with their lives. In "Speech Sounds," society collapses after an epidemic (mostly) wipes out speech and apparently heightens agression. Once more, the fear is social in that we would either suddenly lack the means for effective communication, lose control of our baser impulses, or be ostracized because we were in the minority who were affected in a different manner. Nevertheless, some manage to persevere and the very fact that a bus still runs is testament to that.

Even Without Easy Communication, Transportation is Still Valued

In summary (and I apologize for a long post), Butler addresses our baser fears that aren't necessarily rooted in evolution or instinct. Nonetheless, we seem to fear these situations equally as we have developed beyond our own baser impulses and have moved into the realm of human-constructed reactions, desires, and fears.

Body Language and Body Knowledge

In the interview with Octavia Butler, Mehaffy mentions that for Butler, “the body is the central communicator. Spoken or written language is frequently insufficient for communication,” (p. 59) reflecting the importance of the body as a “discursive entity” in Butler’s works. “Speech Sounds” takes this idea one step further, as Butler imagines a society in which people lose the ability to speak, read and write, and spoken and written language becomes entirely ineffective as means of connecting. Yet communication happens nevertheless: intimidation attempts, accusations of promiscuity and sexual propositions all happen through gestures and body language. This is certainly in line with Butler’s view that even when the spoken and written word are inadequate, “the flesh knows” (p. 59) how to get the message across. Similarly, because Gan and T’Gatoi never verbally discuss their relationship until near the end of the story, our understanding of the relationship between Gan and T’Gatoi comes primarily through their physical interactions, as evidenced by Gan’s willingness to lie against T’Gatoi’s “long, velvet underside” (p. 3), and how he finds it comfortable being caged by T’Gatoi’s limbs, whereas the rest of his family dislikes it. Again, this reflects the importance of the body as a central communicator in Butler’s works.

Closely related to this last idea is the point raised in the interview regarding sociobiology. Specifically, Butler suggests that “body-knowledge could possibly de-hierarchize, or maybe re-hierarchize, social and political relations” (p. 59), and that if correctly applied, sociobiology might potentially decrease gender inequality. This idea is present in “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” as well, where the DGD carriers form an ostracized population, and are treated as mental patients in government-run wards, with no attempt made to find a way to control their self-mutilating impulses. By contrast, DGD patients in Dilg, the retreat run by Beatrice, are able to “channel their energies… to create” (p. 51), due to Beatrice’s understanding of how to use the pheromones she secretes to subdue her charges’ violent tendencies. Thus her scientific understanding of the Duryea-Gode disease enables Beatrices to help her patients become more productive members of society, reflecting Butler’s point that correctly applied, sociobiology can be used to address social inequalities and differences.

Interestingly enough, by depicting Lynn and Beatrice as the pheromone-secreting “queen-bees”, Butler appears to be engaging in a mild form of countercolonial feminist utopia, in that the strong female protagonist Lynn is depicted as having the ability to influence the thoughts of Alan, her male partner, and Beatrice is able to do the same to those under her charge at the DGD home. While Lynn’s influence certainly extends to females as well, it is telling that we see the effects manifested on Alan alone, as none of Lynn’s other housemates are mentioned in the story, and that Alan’s response to finding out that he is being influenced by the pheromone is that of outrage (“I won’t be a puppet. I won’t be controlled… by a goddamn smell!”). Supposedly, Alan is angry because he does not want to be influenced to stay and work at Dilg for the rest of his life, but could the real reason for his anger be something baser than that, such as his humiliation at finding out that Lynn was the dominant partner in their relationship all along, instead of him?

By Any Other Name...

I’m interested in the influence of gendered language, and the difficulty of conveying an idea when you don’t have to words for it. I was surprised that Bill Marcellino, as a student of rhetoric, didn’t focus more on the basics of gender as it is connected to language in his article. I read Le Guin’s article before I read the book, and even though she talked about her use of masculine words and pronouns, I was still surprised by how much they impacted my vision of Gethenians as I was reading. Of course, it is important to consider that the use of terms like “man” and “mankind” may have seemed at least slightly less gendered when the book was originally written. While I’m no expert on the linguistic history of “mankind," I know from changed song lyrics and the like that over time "man" has been replaced with words like "person." Regardless, words like “man” or “him" don't automatically call up images of someone with feminine qualities.

I was particularly struck by the fact that Estraven used words like “mankind” until I realized that it was an issue of translation. Estraven wasn’t saying “mankind.” Genly was, in retelling his story for us. The novel abounds with translation and communication problems, between narrator and reader, author and reader, and characters. In dealing with gendered words especially, I was reminded of the Whorfian hypothesis that I learned about in Psychology 101, the idea that language can constrain or influence our way of thinking. For example, when bilingual people who spoke English and Spanish were asked to describe a key, they used traditionally feminine adjectives. When English speakers who also spoke German instead of Spanish described a key, they used masculine adjectives. The word for key is feminine in Spanish and masculine in German. At first glance it might seem that, aside from the pronoun problems, English is better suited for a story about genderless people because we have mostly genderless words.

But that’s not entirely true. Though the Whorfian hypothesis is controversial, I think it’s interesting to wonder about how the words we use influence how we think when it comes to matters of communicating with others. Perhaps because I was primed to think in terms of gender while reading, I was struck by the use of the word patriotism, and the way Gethenians, or at least Estraven, connected it to fear. I would never have thought of patriotism in terms of fear of the other, but do think of it in terms of gender. The word it comes from in Latin, patria, is feminine, something I only remembered because it struck me as bizarre when I learned it – why would a “fatherland” be feminine? Of course other words with the same root have even stronger masculine connotations – think patriarch.

What’s interesting for me, then, is that Le Guin uses this word’s definition within the world of the Gethenians to describe some communication problems in general. This idea of fear of the other comes into play in the inability to conceptualize the world as “others” do – certain words of the Gethenians, particularly "shifgrethor," are untranslatable. And they avoid our system of gendered language because it isn’t a concept they understand. But because there are no words for it, it’s hard to imagine what is really meant. Even in the most intimate act of conversation, mindspeech, Genly has to speak Estraven’s language, explaining, “you don't know mine” (253). I think this provides a key example of the limitations of Le Guin’s own storytelling capability. She could only conceptualize so far within the bounds of the English language. So even though reading is a form of mindspeech, sending words from her heads to ours, they have to be words in our language, and so it is difficult to get past some of our preconceived notions of gender.

War, Technology, and their Reasons

While I'm sure that many of my classmates will write on gender dualities in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, I thought I might approach the topic on a different trajectory. Two facets of Gethenian society fascinate me: their apparent lack of war (until the time of Genly Ai's arrival) and lack of significant technology despite it being far enough into the future that our people (Terrans) have developed Nearly as Fast as Light (NAFAL) ships. Gethen is defined by it's expansive Arctic and Antarctic tundras and a generally cooler-than-Terra climate. However, despite this environment, the native Gethenians seem at best hesitant to adopt technology that would improve their quality of life.

"Gethen is defined by it's expansive Arctic and Antarctic tundras and a generally cooler-than-Terra climate"

While they have heating technology, advanced fabrics, and "excellent and economical" stove/heater/lamp units, ground vehicles are few (and usually reserved for snails-pace winter travel while air vehicles are nonexistent. Similarly, radio is widespread yet television is unknown. Thus it begs the question of why Gethenians, who are clearly technologically advanced in mechanics, chemistry, and fabrics, have failed to develop something such as the airplane. However, in their own words, why would Gethenians develop a flying machine if there was nothing on Gethen that would suggest that they could leave the ground (as there are no birds, etc...)? Similarly (but undiscussed in the book), why would they develop television if radio works just fine?

"I am skeptical that there was never a Gethenian who dreamed of flying"

The first point that these questions raise is "what is nature of human curiosity?" Throughout history, human curiosity has spawned the various branches of science, mathematics, art, literature, and engineering. Solitary inventors/artists/scholars work to understand or express our world and universe, and subsequently generate either physical products or knowledge which advance humanity. Using the aforementioned case of the Airplane, humans observed creatures flying and sought to emulate them. On Gethen though, there are no birds and thus this inspiration is lacking. Nonetheless, I am skeptical that there was never a Gethenian who dreamed of flying. More broadly, there is definitely not a lack of art, mythos, religion, or scientific understanding on Gethen. What then, has caused the technological rift between Terrans and Gethenians?

There is something to be said about technological advancement though, and that is that it is inexorably tied to military conquest and conflict. On Gethen, wars are nonexistent and the only conflicts (at least until Tibe becomes Prime Minister of Karhide) are between individuals and clans. On our Earth, pieces of technology have advanced beyond the prototype stage because we have sought newer and more efficient ways to either kill each other or to communicate our success and/or propaganda. Continuing our example, the airplane was not perfected until it was tested in the fires of two World Wars. On Gethen, the lack of conflict is hypothesized by Ai to be a byproduct of natives' androgyny, preventing a saturation of male-related aggressiveness, territoriality, and sex drive. In an androgynous society, there is not impetus for global conflict and thus no pressing need to further develop technology that lacks a clear survival purpose.

"They are vastly outclassed technologically by the Ekumen"

In this respect, I believe Le Guin sought to praise Gethenian society for its "Nobel Savage" like purity because its society is not dominated by the agressive male stereotype that has seemingly built humanity a dangerous and divisive world. However, there is a certain irony to this claim. While indeed Gethenians live in a simple, noble, and peaceful world, they are vastly outclassed technologically by the Ekumen who have presumably developed along lines derived from our (Terrans') present course. Fortunately for the Gethenians, the Ekuman simply prioritize the exchange of culture and information, something which the former, like all forms of humanity, possess to an inordinate degree.