What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  Normally in science fiction, faster than light has a speed that has nothing to do with Einstein and everything to do with self-referentiality and the way other science fiction has done it—faster-than-light ships go at the speed of sailing ships, taking months to go between stars. There are wormholes or Jump or something letting them go faster than light, but it takes months of the crew’s real time. And when they get there, they can’t land on planets, any more than sailing ships can (outside of Dunsany) sail on land, they need space stations to be their ports, and they need dedicated career sailors and officers.

  There’s nothing wrong with doing the Napoleonic Wars in space, as Honor Harrington does, and the Midshipman’s Hope books, and perhaps Dread Empire’s Fall too. And if that’s what you’re doing, it’s reasonable that your ships work that way. But there are a lot of books where there isn’t an explicit analogy, where the ships aren’t even naval vessels but commercial shipping. Cherryh’s Union-Alliance and Chanur, Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War books and her Aunts in Space series, Larry Niven’s Known Space, George R. R. Martin’s Dying of the Light universe. That’s a lot of really different kinds of books that have this kind of “standard” FTL.

  I don’t know where it comes from. Was there some ur-novel that did it at this speed and everyone copied it? If so, what? Was it Citizen of the Galaxy? Or was it from the influential role-playing game Traveller, or even the influence of Star Trek?

  And what’s the appeal? Is it that it gives you lots of time in space, in a contained environment where adventures can happen, coming to planets as ports at usefully specified intervals? Because I can see how it’s plot-useful, but there isn’t any natural law saying that this is how FTL will work.

  There are a few books with notably slow FTL. Ken MacLeod’s Cosmonaut Keep series, and David Zindell’s Neverness series, but it’s very unusual. And then there’s the ever brilliant Vernor Vinge who always thinks about what he’s doing, with a whole range of speeds of faster than light in A Fire Upon the Deep, and “nearly as fast as light, plus coldsleep” in A Deepness in the Sky.

  I think at this point, if you’re writing anything with FTL, it would be worth considering other models than the sailing ship. Delany did long car-trip distances. We could also consider commercial planes, getting us around North America in a few hours, and across the world in half a day. And there are always trains, either long distance or commuter rail—and how about freighters as long-haul trucks? I don’t mean copy them slavishly, just take the internalised emotional truth of the way they work and try it on a larger scale. Never mind leaving Earth and putting in at Madeira’s Star for water in a month’s time, how about leaving Earth and spending seven hours in cramped seats eating awful food and ending up in Andromeda. It doesn’t mean people would do it all the time, how often do you cross the Atlantic, after all, and anyway, a universe where people did it all the time would be an interestingly different universe. Best of all, how about something that isn’t an Earth model, something that will make me look up from the book and say, “Wow, wow, you’ll never believe the way they did faster than light in this one!”

  JUNE 8, 2009

  57. Gender and glaciers: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

  The Left Hand of Darkness is one of those books that changed the world, so that reading it now, in the world it helped grow, it isn’t possible to have the same experience as reading it in the world it was written in and for. The Left Hand of Darkness didn’t just change science fiction—it changed feminism, and it was part of the process of change of the concept of what it was to be a man or a woman. The battle may not be over. What I mean is that thanks in part to this book we’re standing in a very different place from the combatants of 1969. Almost all books that do this kind of historic changing are important afterwards as historical artifacts, but not as stories, and they get left behind by the tide and end up looking quaint. Ninety percent of the discussion I’ve seen of The Left Hand of Darkness is about the gender issue, about the Gethenians and their interesting states of kemmer (of either gender for a few days a month) and somer (neuter for the majority of the time). But what makes it a book that continues to be great and enjoyable to read, rather than a historical curiosity, is that it’s a terrific story set in a fascinating culture, and the gender stuff is only part of that.

  The Left Hand of Darkness is the story of how the Terran Genly Ai comes to the planet Gethen to persuade Gethen to enter the Ekumen, the community of worlds. And it’s the story of the Gethenian Therem Harth rem i’r Estraven who recognises something larger than the horizons he grew up with. And it’s the story of the journey these two people take together. The book is written in such a way that you have Estraven’s journals written at the time and Genly’s report written later and various poems and folktales and stories of Gethen inserted in the text at appropriate points, so that the world is not only a character but one of the most important characters. I love the world, I love Karhide at least, the country and the people and how different it is from its government, and the religions. The planet is in an ice age, and the adaptations to the climate have shaped the cultures of the planet at least as much as the gender thing has. They’re like real cultures, with real oddities, and the way the story is told enhances that. If you haven’t read it, and if you’ve always seen it mentioned as a worthy feminist classic with weirdly gendered aliens, you might be surprised by this interesting story of the discovery of a planet and a journey across the ice. It is a living breathing story that happened to change the world, not a dry text with a message.

  The book is set in the same universe as a number of Le Guin’s other books, many written much earlier. It has the same furniture, the ansible, the Nearly as Fast as Light ships, the long ago Hainish experimental colonization of planets with tweaked humans—were they trying to make their own aliens? The previously worked out background doesn’t give the book any problems, it makes it seem more solidly rooted.

  We don’t see any of the other planets, the book is firmly focused on Gethen, also known as “Winter.” There is one narrative voice from an earlier report on the planet that’s a woman from Chiffewar, but the non-Gethenian we are given to identify with is Genly Ai, a black man from Earth. We’re not given his cultural context on Earth, though his dark skin, darker than most Gethenians, is mentioned. Neither “Genly” nor “Ai” are names I’m familiar with. A quick Google search finds me a town called Genly in Belgium, a factory in China, and people in the Philippines, China and India—Ai is regrettably unsearchable. Rene Walling suggests that it’s the French “Jean-Louis” with the Japanese surname Ai, and he’s from Montreal. In any case, whatever his ethnic background, Genly is our “normal” character, our filter, the one who is a gender we recognise and from a planet we’re familiar with. He’s our “unmarked” character, if you like. I think that’s cool, even though we don’t hear anything from him that makes his ethnicity other than “Terran.” His sexual preference—heterosexuality—is mentioned, and his gender essentialism is very much dated from the world the book was written in, not the world in which it is now read.

  The character I’m ridiculously fond of is Estraven. I’ve loved him since I was a teenager. He’s not a man or a woman, he’s in exile always and everywhere, and he always sees the big picture and tries to do what he can. He tries to be as good a person as he can, in difficult circumstances. He’s one of my favourite characters in all of fiction, and when people play that “who would you invite to dinner” game, I almost always choose him, immediately throwing all hope of gender balance out of the window. I cry when he dies, and at the end of the book, every time. I don’t know if I’d react so strongly to Estraven if I read the book for the first time now. His backstory, which is revealed so beautifully slowly, is one of the beauties of the book. His name reflects the levels of culture we have in Karhide, friends and hearth-brothers call him Therem, acquaintances call him Harth, and Estraven is his landname, which would be used where we u
se a title—yet when he learns mindspeech, up on the glacier, it is as Therem that he manages to hear it, and he hears it in his dead brother’s voice—the dead brother with whom he had a child. Poor Estraven, so tragic, so clear-sighted, so perfectly and essentially of his world and culture!

  It’s a commonplace of SF for planets to have only one country and culture. Le Guin should be commended for mentioning four or five on Gethen and showing us two. However, there’s a Cold War legacy in the way Karhide and Orgereyn are opposed, and Orgereyn is totalitarian, with its units and digits and work camps. I feel Orgereyn only really exists to give Genly and Estraven something to escape from, but I love their escape so much that I don’t care. I think it’s done pretty well, certainly Genly’s subjective experience of it, but I don’t think Orgereyn is as developed or as well thought through as Karhide.

  The “tamed hunch” of the fastnesses, and the “mindspeech” of the Ekumen are both dealt with science fictionally rather than fantastically, but are “psi powers” of a kind rather unfashionable these days. Le Guin writes about them believably and interestingly, and I think they enhance the book by being there and providing more strangeness.

  The heart of the book is the journey across the glacier, two people, from different worlds, manhauling a sledge across vast distances. There are echoes of Scott’s Antarctic expeditions—for me, echoes the other way around, because I read The Left Hand of Darkness first. She took these quintessentially useless and particularly masculine endeavours and made them over into something else entirely. She was clearly fascinated with polar exploration—she has a short story in The Compass Rose about women from South America getting to the South Pole first and not marking it or telling anyone. Here there’s a reason for the winter journey. So that’s another gender subversion.

  The Gethenians have a concept they call “shifgrethor,” which is like pride. You waive shifgrethor for someone to tell you something directly, otherwise you sidle around to avoid offending them. This is notably different from Earth notions of offending pride only in how conscious they are of it, of what is sayable and unsayable, of having a mechanism for waiving it. I think it’s one of the more interesting gender things—much more interesting than that they don’t fight wars—that they have this set of shifting privileges and offendable pride and that they’re aware of it. They’re touchy in a very alien way, and I think that’s really effective.

  Le Guin has written essays since about the assumptions she made in writing the book. She also wrote the story “The Winter King” where she uses “she” as the pronoun for all Gethenians, rather than “he” as she does in the book, and the later story “Coming of Age in Karhide.” Both of these explicitly feminise the Gethenians. They’re interesting, as are her writings about the book, but they’re afterthoughts from a different world.

  It is light that is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the left hand of light, as in the yin-yang symbol, in which dualities are united. The Left Hand of Darkness is a book about making whole. It’s also a book about what it means to be a good person and where gender is significant in that. But mostly it’s about the joy of pulling a sledge over a glacier between two worlds.

  JUNE 10, 2009

  58. Licensed to sell weasels and jade earrings: The short stories of Lord Dunsany

  The first time I ever heard of Lord Dunsany was when my friend Jez Green read his story “Idle Days on the Yann” at one of my story parties. Although I’d never read it before, hearing it was like hearing something I’d read as a child, or before I was born, and the process of discovery was like a process of rediscovery. I’ve never felt that with any other writer—they were always new when they were new, but not Dunsany. And when I do re-read him, it’s recursive. In Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle” he talks about going into distances that continue to hold their charm as distance and never become mere surroundings, and that’s the best description of reading Dunsany I can think of.

  Dunsany wrote in the early part of the twentieth century. When I tried to find more Dunsany in the early nineties he was about as out of print as it is possible for anything to be. His short stories had been reissued in Ballantine editions by Lin Carter in the seventies, and I eventually managed to get hold of these secondhand in one of those little bookshops that you just know wouldn’t be there if you ever went back to it. Fortunately, this situation has improved, and right now tons of Dunsany is available. Time and the Gods is an excellent big collection from Gollancz, and Wonder Tales and In the Land of Time are also in print. Besides these, there are a number of e-editions, and lots of his early stories are available free on Project Gutenberg. So right now it’s easy to get hold of Dunsany. But why would you want to?

  Lord Dunsany wasn’t writing fantasy, because what he was writing was defining the space in which fantasy could later happen. He was influential on Lovecraft and Tolkien. There’s a whole strand of fantasy—the Leiber/Moorcock/Gaiman strand—that’s a direct descendant of his. But though he has always had a small enthusiastic fan base, it was possible for me to miss him entirely until the early nineties, and for lots of other people to miss him for even longer. I think this may be because he didn’t write many novels, and the novels he did write aren’t his best work. His acknowledged masterpiece novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, is probably best described as good but odd. He isn’t at his best writing characters, which gets peculiar at novel length. What he could do, what he did better than anyone, was to take poetic images and airy tissues of imagination and weight them down at the corners with perfect details to craft a net to catch dreams in. It’s not surprising he couldn’t make this work for whole novels, when as far as I know, nobody else has ever quite made it work in prose. If it is prose. It’s some of the most poetic prose ever written, quite enough to get anyone drunk on words.

  Take this for example:

  He opened a little, old, dark door in the wall through which I went, and he wheezed and shut the door. The back of the shop was of incredible age. I saw in antique characters upon a mouldering board, “Licensed to sell weasels and jade earrings.” The sun was setting now and shone on little golden spires that gleamed along the roof which had long ago been thatched and with a wonderful straw. I saw that the whole of Go-by Street had the same strange appearance when looked at from behind. The pavement was the same as the pavement of which I was weary and of which so many thousand miles lay the other side of those houses, but the street was of most pure untrampled grass with such marvellous flowers in it that they lured downward from great heights the flocks of butterflies as they traveled by, going I know not whence. The other side of the street there was pavement again but no houses of any kind, and what there was in place of them I did not stop to see, for I turned to my right and walked along the back of Go-by Street till I came to the open fields and the gardens of the cottages that I sought. Huge flowers went up out of these gardens like slow rockets and burst into purple blooms and stood there huge and radiant on six-foot stalks and softly sang strange songs. Others came up beside them and bloomed and began singing too. A very old witch came out of her cottage by the back door and into the garden in which I stood. (from “The Shop in Go-By Street”)

  It’s the weasels and the jade earrings that make it real and fantastical at once. It’s whimsy, but it isn’t ever empty whimsy. Or here again:

  In a wood older than record, a foster brother of the hills, stood the village of Allathurion; and there was peace between the people of that village and all the folk who walked in the dark ways of the wood, whether they were human or of the tribes of the beasts or of the race of the fairies and the elves and the little sacred spirits of trees and streams. Moreover, the village people had peace among themselves and between them and their lord, Lorendiac. In front of the village was a wide and grassy space, and beyond this the great wood again, but at the back the trees came right up to the houses, which, with their great beams and wooden framework and thatched roofs, green with moss, seemed almost to be a part of the forest. (from “
The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth”)

  Sacnoth is a magic sword. It’s the moss on the roofs and the tribes of the beasts that anchor this, and all of it looks forward to the actual fantasy it prefigures. And here:

  The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again. (from “The Sword of Welleran”)

  It’s the “well-known” and the prosaic different cellars—I think you have to read a whole story to fully appreciate what he was doing, but these paragraphs are enough to give you a taste of the style and the form.

  He really isn’t like anyone else at all—the closest in my opinion is Cordwainer Smith, who was writing SF, but who did the same sort of thing with assumptions and details and a long perspective.

  Dunsany was a contemporary of Wells’s, but when we read Wells now we can see what he was writing was actual science fiction, like the science fiction we write now. You can’t do that with Dunsany and fantasy, but in a way that makes him even more interesting. He isn’t a father of fantasy but a grandfather or a fairy godfather. I tend to read, or even re-read, one Dunsany story at a time, but the images in them stick with me forever, which is how I know I didn’t really read them as a child, because I couldn’t have possibly forgotten them.