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My debut Southern Dark Fantasy novel BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is officially OUT!
It’s available literally everywhere books are sold. Want my recs?
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Project Progress:
I’ve made a little more progress on book 2! I’m at around 80%.
Photo of the Mississippi Delta hardwood forests in Yazoo County, as seen from a box stand. Photo by the author.
Recent Fascinations | The Fiction Books that Made Me #9: THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS
Want to understand what this series is? Go Here
“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
I’ve never found it quite so difficult to find a starting place when discussing a book as I have with Ursula K. LeGuinn’s THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. I think on some level, that is appropriate for such a layered, heartfelt book. To find it hard to put into words must mean, at least I hope it does, that I have internalized and am still processing this book, even though I last read it a little under a decade ago.
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS is one of the landmark science fiction stories that veers more toward the soft, thoughtful, introspective side of the genre instead of the “Hard Scifi” territory of those like Heinlein. The story follows an anthropologist from a far-future human society that goes to a distant planet where the biological sex of the native inhabitants is, literally, fluid. This book, which came out in 1969, does not approach this fluidity from any lens that could be perceived as modern or “post-modern” within our current framework. Instead, it uses it to deconstruct the literal, anthropological structure of patriarchy and explore the ways a society might be different if it did not exist in that particular cultural system. Somehow, it does all of this while remaining, at least from the external perspective, non judgemental about either system.
In other words, to speak academically and be a little pretentious-minded, it is a book that entirely rejects the concepts of ethnocentrism.
When I first listened to LEFT HAND OF DARKESS, it was 2016 and I was in a difficult period of my life where I was attempting to explore and redefine what I wanted to study in college, having dropped out of my mass communications program just a few months earlier. This story, its exploration of culture and identity from a unique outsider (at least to a rural redneck from South Mississippi), put into motion my eventual decision to study History and Anthropology.
This is a book, I think, that readers will react differently to depending on the place they approach it from. For me, as I’ve aged and become more educated and, I hope, a little wiser, it is a story that shows that the structures do not really matter, but instead it is the people that must lie at the center of our perceptions..
At the end of the day, regardless of background or beliefs, we are all just trying to get by. We’re trying to fall in love, to stay alive, to protect what we see is most important to us. THE LEFT HAND OF DARKESS sings to me most clearly when I feel the most cynical about the world around me. It says that evil is not grand and conspiring, but banal to the point of disappointment. It says that the world, no matter how dire, is made up of people just trying to get by, and the most important thing we can do is to be kind to one another when it matters.
What could be more beautiful than that?
Thanks for Reading.
