At Michael Paget's recommendation I have been reading Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Sci-fi has never been my bag, but it has to be said that some fairly amazing working out of the themes of human existence occurs in sci-fi writing. Think of Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale, or Bladerunner (based on Philip K Dick's work), or William Gibson's Necromancer.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, a lone emissary from Earth travels to the planet 'Winter' on which people exist who have no gender except at certain regular time, the kemmering, in which they can be either male or female.
...Anyone can turn his hand to anything This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable...Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the smae risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else. ...There is no unconsenting sex, and no rape....there is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.
It is not quite a recipe for utopia, however. The narrator-envoy finds himself in a labor camp where prisoner's are chemically castrated. He observes:
They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.
9 comments:
"William Gibson's NeUromancer."
Ta. And oops.
I considered making some comment about Necromancer, his little known sequel, but... I don't think I can bluff THAT well.
Have you read Dune (the original, although the rest are a bit interesting too)?
It's got an interesting take on religion, with the Orange Catholic Bible, that basically amalgamates all religions into one big man-made mess (not the point of the story, but it does show the futility of inventing your own religion...).
Also, the Fremen are pretty much Muslim (although in the far, far future), with some interesting ideas there too.
Worth a read if you haven't already.
I never read Dune, partly because the movie was responsible for one of the more spectacularly bad dates of my teenage years... I am deeply scared. It was no Breakfast Club, let's put it that way.
The book is much, much better than the movie :)
(Trying to explain the Bene Gesserit and their attempts at creating the Quizatz Haderach in a minute or so just doesn't work, and that's essential to understanding the book).
Does no humanity without shame or desire make desire necessarily a bad thing? Sounds a little Dantesque?!?
"Some fairly amazing working out of the themes of human existence occurs in sci-fi writing"
...And there's nothing like 8 weeks on cyberpunk fiction with year 9s to stir the beginnings of an existential crisis or two!
Now THAT's Christian education.
Glad you're enjoying Left Hand, Michael. I read it at a friend's recommendation last year as well. Le Guin writes so well and the world she creates is "chilling" ;-)
Hey Michael. Your friend gave you a good recommendation: if one's going to read only a single Le Guin novel, I think it needs to be The Left Hand of Darkness. For a speculative take on the human condition --- deliberately changing some things, and then following them through --- it's remarkably disciplined, and sane. Le Guin is tone-deaf on the physical sciences, and pretty bad on technical consistency more generally, but even as a teenage science brat that didn't bother me: the human element convinces. You believe that she's writing about real people, and real societies.
Given your cultural interests you might be interested in some of the later novels, written after her 1975--80-ish feminist conversion. Like some other fans I've never reconciled myself to them, and think they're a declension from the earlier work: specifically, stories and characters in her secondary worlds now (often) seem to be making a "point" about our world, and often a tendentious one. The earlier work, which was quite free of this sort of thing, helped form my sensibility, and I find I can't make the change. But I'll admit that as time has gone on, the newer work has become more "lived-in", and of course she still writes well. (Tehanu excepted.) Since you're not squeamish about polemic, and are new to Le Guin, you might approach the new novels with less baggage than I do.
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