Dualism and Humanity

Ursula LeGuin's motivation for writing The Left Hand of Darkness is in keeping with this course's theme of science fiction being a literature of "cognitive estrangement." By eliminating the concept of a strict gender divide for one of fluidity determined by whether the individual is in a state of kemmer or not LeGuin sought to eliminate the issues of gender association and view the individuals for their underlying humanity. This is in no way following the strain of science fiction being a literature of probable or advanced future technologies. As she states in the Introduction, "science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive." In her view the business of science fiction is to take a topic in the present and stretch it to far beyond its reasonable reach. In this sense the role of the science fiction author is to challenge the reader's set way of thinking about a topic through a metaphor that focuses on issues of the present without taking on a role reliant on predicting possible future crises.

LeGuin initially moved away from accepting the claim that she set out to challenge the reader's settled way of viewing the world by taking on gender as her central topic. She denied being a feminist writer. In her own words The Left Hand of Darkness is "a book about betrayal and fidelity" rather than issues of gender specifically. However, this topic is unavoidable as by removing gender she calls all the more attention to its presence in our daily lives. In her revision of "Is Gender Necessary Redux" she says,  ["The fact," is however, that there are other aspects to the book, which are involved with its sex/gender aspects quite inextricably] (LeGuin, 8). Thus she acknowledges the unavoidability of facing the issues of sexuality and gender which she initially downplayed for fear of being considered a feminist author.

Indeed, she claims that, "[At the very inception of the whole book, I was interested in writing a novel about people in a society that had never had a war. That came first. The androgyny came second. (Cause and effect? Effect and cause?)]" (LeGuin, 10). For LeGuin diffusion of gender followed from the conception of a world without conflict on the scale of war. This lack of gender duality, one of several lacks including a continuity in seasons, causes a sort of fluidity in form among the Gethens not found in the people of Earth and the larger Ekumen empire.

Genly finds his hosts on Gethen to be androgynous and not clearly indicative of either gender. This is apparent in his encounter with Estraven early on, "yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness, of imposture" (LHoD, page 12). This mirrors LeGuin's later lamenting of her own inability to separate her view of a gender neutral people by insisting upon using a masculine pronoun.

LeGuin's inability at the time of writing the novel to divest herself of this preoccupation with the gendered, male-dominated pronoun shows how she is bound in to the system of expression. That is to say, that her not recognizing the issue with the use of the word "he" indicates how she viewed the words that make up our world in a way that was not tied to gender inequalities, which appears naive. Her opinion on the use of a male instead of a neuter pronoun changes from believing that they don't matter to, [If I had realized how the pronouns I used shaped, directed, controlled my own thinking, I might have been "cleverer"] (LeGuin, page 15).  Through the use of gendered pronouns LeGuin appealed to the mainly male science fiction audience.

Her choice of a firmly male character also establishes the concept that the world is viewed through a male lense. As demonstrated by her choice of pronouns this extends as far as to the author's choice of how to identify the characters. This raises the question of how far our societal reliance on masculinity extends– considering that LeGuin is a woman.

Suspension of Disbelief

One aspect of The Time Machine that interests me in comparison to other science fiction novels is its preoccupation with scientific accuracy. From the very beginning, the premise of the book is laid out in specific, scientific terms. “I do not ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it” (1) says the narrator on the very first page. The statement is addressed to the dinner party regarding the time machine itself, but it may as well be directly aimed at the reader. Wells at first does not at first ask that the reader make any huge leap. He presents what seems to be a fairly reasonable case for the existence of time as a fourth dimension, and the methodical, logical progression that is presented as to how the machine itself could exist, if not the specifics of how it works, are presented straightforwardly. In the first few pages at least, the novel would appear to be what Atwood categorizes as speculative, rather than science fiction.

Of course, the very conceit of science fiction is that the reader must accept a great many things without entirely reasonable grounds. Suspension of disbelief makes the entire genre possible. The narrator does nod toward the suspension of disbelief in his recounting of the story to the dinner party. He asks for the suspension of criticism, in favor of simply being allowed to tell his story: “I will tell you the story as it happened to me, if you like, but you must refrain from interruptions,” (19) he says. Then, soon after he states “Most of it will sound like lying. So be it! It’s true,” (19) now explicitly asking for the suspension of disbelief, and curiously abandoning the logical arguments he relied on so heavily in the first few pages. Now we are just meant to believe it, and not worry about the messy explanations.

But, then again, the narrator’s preoccupation with the explanation of his fantastic situation arises in his adventures in 800,000 AD. He offers several explanations for the changes in human civilization he sees, and constantly updates the reader with new explanations for the changes with each discovery. First there is the explanation of a sort of advanced communist society becoming the peaceful Eloi, and then a class dichotomy becoming the vast physical difference between the Eloi and Morlocks, and various other explanations for whatever phenomena he encounters in the future. It seems that Wells and the narrator are trying their hardest to make us forget our own suspension of disbelief.

What interests me is the dichotomy between these two approaches to science/speculative fiction present side by side in the same novel. They seem to create a confusion within the reader, in which several simple, yet compelling arguments are made as to how the future could evolve, and then a ridiculous and fantastic fictional scenarios that arise from these speculations. Like I said, it seems that Wells is trying to make us forget that he has asked us to abandon logic (this is fiction after all), and I’m curious as to how much anybody else bought it. Of course, it is not a very believable story, but did you ever catch yourself being swept up in the logical-ness of the narrator’s explanations? Was having segments in the format of scientific debate enough to make the novel seem more legitimate? And why does that sense of legitimacy matter in science fiction?