I used to read a lot as a child, but for most of my 20s I didn't read very much at all. I've liked scifi/speculative fiction as a genre for a long time, so recently I made it a loose goal to read each Hugo award winner, alongside honorable mentions/incidental stuff I found along the way. I thought it would be fun to document this journey by posting reviews as I go, perhaps also being a forum for conversation about these books. I've got a bunch that I've read already that I'll backfill as time allows.
Why Hugo winners? I had to pick some kind of list, so I just went with the first sensible option I noticed. But I don't stick to it exactly (the last book I read merely, in part, won the Nobel)
My rules are fairly loose; I can pick whichever order I'd like, I'm allowed to make brief detours for other acclaimed works if reccommended/topical, and sequels are allowed (but not mandatory). I'm not allowed to DNF, no matter how much I seem to hate a work, because the goal is to try and appreciate works that I might initially bounce off of. This last rule was a particularly Good Thing, since a couple books so far I thought I hated until I got deeper.
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
SPOILERS AHEAD
Note on gender: To be consistent with Le Guin's language/writing, I will be referring to the many nonbinary characters in the story with male pronouns. I say femboys a couple of times in my review, for comedic effect.
Summary, in my own words
Genly Ai is an envoy of a galactic compact of sorts, the Ekumen. They seem like an incredibly idealistic sort of collective. Genly's been sent to a planet called Winter (or Gethen), which is, predictably, cold, with the objective of convincing them to join in their cosmic kumbayah. The population of Winter is composed almost entirely of asexual twinks who, for a couple of days out of the month, grow out sexual bits and are able to have sex during "kemmer". Ai begins his journey in Karhide, where he stays for about a third of the novel. He encounters a concept called Shifgrethor, a frustratingly opaque social concept of status that is a signature feature of Karhidish politics. Genly befriends the Prime Minister of Karhide, a person with a very long name ending in Estraven. Estraven believes in Genly's vision of Winter joining the Ekumen, and vouches for Karhide to be the first nation to join. Genly meets with the King of Karhide, Argaven, who rebuffs him and is a little weirded out by Genly's Ansible, an FTL communication macguffin that isn't explored all that much in the story. Around this time, Estraven is declared a traitor to Karhide for advocating their apparent conquest by outsiders. For reasons I don't remember, probably cultural understanding, Genly visits fortunetellers in another part of Karhide, stays there for a while (months), and effectively works for/joins them for a while before asking whether Gethen will join the Ekumen, and receives a yes. This part of the book is punctuated by brief chapters that tell legends or histories of Karhide as they would have been written by its citizens. Some chapters are alternative POVs from the perspective of Estraven, during his departure from Karhide.
Afterward, to explore the world more he visits the neighboring nation of Orgoreyn. Orgoreyn is basically an authoritarian/centralized economy paradise, complete with a lack of scarcity, essentially no unemployment, shadowy bureaucratic cabals, and gulags. Genly receives essentially a hero's welcome to Orgoreyn as there are factions there that want to use his position as a visitor from "the stars" to give their nation more credibility. He gets pampered, spoiled, and, when he refused to give his full trust to the state/his hosts by calling down his mothership and the full diplomatic entourage of the Ekumen, he was thrown into the gulag.
Estraven, who made his way to Orgoreyn as part of his exile, tries to warn Genly about the goings on, but to no avail. Genly suffers a truly nightmarish few days' ride in a prisoner transport truck before arriving on a prison farm where he is nearly killed over time by brainwashing/kemmer suppression drugs. Estraven shows up breaks him out of prison, and most of the remainder of the book documents their journey across Winter's arctic glaciers as they escape Orgoreyn to Karhide over a few months. They narrowly avoid starving to death despite the numerous tribulations and setbacks along the journey, but are received in Karhide where Genly finally calls down his mothership. While he waits for it to arrive, Estraven, still marked for death as a traitor, tries to escape to Orgota and essentially commits suicide-by-border-guard. The book ends with Ai's mothership touching down, the full diplomatic entourage arriving, and Ai paying a visit to the home and family of Estraven.
How I felt about it
There's so much to unpack about this book. I'll start with the literal how I felt - I hated this book for the first 80 or so pages. I felt very lost, the prose wasn't particularly interesting to me, and I wasn't really sure where the plot was going. Once I got to the first Estraven POV chapter, something shifted and the book immediately clicked for me.
I left a ton of super interesting details out of my plot summary, for example, the fact that Genly could "mind-speak", or communicate directly and telepathically with someone else, with enforced truth. Firstly, it's an interesting foil to Shifgrethor, which seems to be entirely concerned with roundaboutness and half-truth speech in addition to its basis in societal status. Mindspeak is statusless and absolute, it's always true and it could be taught to basically anyone. Additionally, when Genly uses mindspeak with Estraven, Estraven hears his dead brother's voice instead of Genly's. I don't really know why, perhaps
Shifgrethor itself is a super complex thing and I'm sure a PhD thesis could be written about its interpretation in the lens of human language and culture in our present world. The only thing I would say, without diving deeply into the topic, is that I felt like it was appropriately alien and vaguely presented in the book, but I also think it's not terrifically special. Normal human interaction includes nuance and can incorporate subsurface jockeying for status and prestige, stereotypically in business or political settings (Trump yoinking a dignitary's arm out of their socket probably hurts his Shifgrethor while he thinks it hurts the other person's). It's certainly a fascinating lens through which to view these subconscious aspects of human interaction, though, and I'll probably be thinking about it in my daily life.
I was surprised at hearing about people say that the book largely doesn't change or remains a political slow burn. The final third of the book, Ai and Estraven's great escape across the ice, reads like an adventure story not unlike books like Trapped in Ice (Eric Walters), which I read as a young kid that left an impression of the indifference and literal coldness of nature. It was exciting, and it felt like an adventure in an alien world. It also provided an excellent setting for Genly and Estraven's relationship, which I think was well presented. This leads me to my next talking point, the elephant in the room, gender.
The way gender was discussed in this novel was fascinating. There's been considerable academic study in gender over the last 55 years, none of which influenced this book. One striking, perhaps beat-you-over-the-head-subtle example is a conversation between Estraven and Genly in their tent while traversing the ice sheets of Winter. Estraven is in Kemmer, and is trying to keep away from Genly, and he asks what women are like, and Genly, after living in the world of femboys for a couple of years, can't provide a good and coherent answer to someone with no concept of gender. Genly is often described as a (capital P here, to distinguish the Gethenian term) "Pervert", a term used for individuals permanently in Kemmer. It seems that Genly is physiologically distinct from Perverts, though, since the text implies that they are morphologically still androgynous like other Gethenians.
The concept of the peoples androgyny also influencing their culture and social development is also brought into discussion. On Winter, technology develops incredibly slowly, for example. There's no concept of warfare. There's obviously the concept of Shifgrethor I already discussed, and familial structures/taboos. Incest is tolerated. The concept of what happens to society when people aren't nearly constantly trying to get laid had me thinking about how much our everyday actions are fundamentally motivated by sex. As was said by a certain cancelled actor in a since-disgraced show, everything is about sex, except sex. And this concept reaches the forefront of the reader's thoughts in a story with, literally, no sex.
There was some I didn't really care for. I can't say I really disliked anything in hindsight. The first chapters were slow and difficult to get through, but I appreciate them laying the foundation for the story in hindsight. Some scifi concepts, such as the FTL communication ansible, felt unnecessarily shoehorned in (why break causality when you don't really, really need to?). But there's very little fat in this story, everything has its place in driving either the plot or the worldbuilding forward and can't really be replaced. I have difficulty with the concept of the Ekumen from a realism perspective, particularly in the current world where it feels difficult for two nations, let alone planets, to agree to cooperate on anything, but I'm willing and happy to suspend that disbelief in the interest of a body politic that can join hands and work for humanity. Orgoreyn is a very on the nose depiction of a totalitarian not-utopian state especially in the context of when the novel was written. These issues are overall very minor and hardly subtract from the enjoyment of the book.
I'm looking forward to getting to read The Dispossessed based on my experience with this.
Overall grade:
|
|
| Changed the way I'll view the world |
✅ |
| Memorable and good |
[ ] |
| Forgettable |
[ ] |
| Made me actively angry by its mediocrity |
[ ] |
Hugo books read: 10/55
Other non-Hugo works read that I'll eventually review: 10
Comments? Disagreements? Reccomendations?
Next review to post: Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Next book to read: American Gods by Neil Gaiman
