clach na ben

We're all dealing with lockdown/winter in our own way:

I dealt with it by writing 37k in under four weeks, and re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness for the one thousandth time. It's a good book to read at winter time - all the yearning and nearly freezing to death in the snow. I hadn't reread it in a couple years, but a year or so ago I went to The Second Shelf, which is a rare bookstore for books by women, and spent the most I've ever spent on a single book to buy a rare-ish (not very rare! I'm not rich. Just a little rare) copy of it, so I finally have a paper copy and I very carefully read my expensive copy and finished a couple days ago. I've also been listening to Meg Myers' cover of Running Up That Hill constantly.

Everyone who follows me on twitter knows I've basically only been talking about LHoD and the fic I've been writing for several days. The fic is done and getting read by other people to confirm it's not completely unhinged and will get posted soon! I'm currently experiencing a lot of existential dread about picking a title for it. It's post-canon Witcher 3 (game, not show) Geralt/Emhyr fic with ghost stories and a mystery and lots of talking about grief and past lives etc. I've really enjoyed writing it and hope people like it too!

Left Hand of Darkness is still amazing - it still pulls me in absolutely and completely. Leguin really could imagine such complete and alien worlds, and Genly is so lovely as a character. You feel so attached and connected to him, his loneliness, his struggle to understand Gethen, his stuggle to make himself understood. It's such a familiar feeling, but also so located in the alien world he's in. You feel so close and attached to him, especially as he's so vulnerable.

Also SO MUCH weird stuff happens in the book that everyone FORGETS ABOUT because of the space gender distraction. Eyeball licking!! Telepathy!! Incest! Mystical space religion! Literally actually seeing the future! Rereading it is always an exercise in "well I'd completely forgotten that happened".

The ice journey that is the last third or so of the book is so, I don't know, powerful and all-encompassing, and both practical and mystical all at once. All of the book is good but that's the really the killer part. Leguin goes for the jugular there. Obviously I've never lived somewhere that cold, but it made me miss home, the way the sky will be totally bright and blue, completely empty and cloudless, and the air viciously bitingly cold. It doesn't get properly cold here, or ever properly empty of people, and there is this part of me that misses it so desperately.

This time I was really struck by the back and forth between Estraven and Genly's POVs. The bit when Genly talks about trying not to cry and later Estraven notices how Genly always looks away when he cries, and it must be shameful in his culture. God, bullseye. Estraven is such a wonderful character, so understandable and yet with this complete backstory to their life, fully realised. They're so bitten by grief, so defined by being an exile, from their home, from their country, from their dead lover, and maybe that's why they're so read and willing to accept the Ekumen and other worlds. They've been an exile so much, what is it to be an alien as well?

I had kind of forgotten how incomprehensible the book is about women. There's a scene where Estraven asks Genly to describe women and Genly actually cannot come up with anything sensible. Urusla Leguin, 0 faith in men's ability to relate to women, even in her utopian space federation future. Obviously, thinking about how the thinking behind the book has changed over time is really interesting too. Comparing it to its "successors", like Ammonite by Nicola Griffith, or Ancillary Justice, which take really different approaches to science-fictional gender, and I like seeing fic take different approches too.

I've skimmed big chunks of the Left Hand of Darkness tag and enjoyed these:
( left hand of darkness recs )

This is an open call to please tell me your thoughts and opinions about Left Hand of Darkness (and any other related ~science fiction gender books!) because I could happily talk about it forever and I unfortunately live with two people absolutely fundamentally disinterested in science fiction, which is killing me.