Ursula K. (Kroeber) Le Guin – Monday 21 October 1929 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Not sure how I came across Ursula K. Le Guin, but I first read The Left Hand of Darkness (spoiler alert) in college. Though-provoking presentation of changing gender reality. What would be the ramifications here if one could switch back and forth from one gender to the other? Self-perception?


Dedication in The Left Hand of Darkness

“For Charles, sine quo non"

Excerpt from the Introduction in The Left Hand of Darkness

“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find-if it is a good novel-that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changes a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”

Excerpt from A Parade in Erhenrang in The Left Hand of Darkness

“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact my fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.

The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.

It starts on the 44th diurnal of the Year 1491, which on the planet Winter in the nation Karhide was Odharhahad Tuwa or the twenty-second day of the third month of spring in the Year One. It is always the Year One here. Only the dating of every past and future year changes each New Year’s Day, as one counts backwards or forwards from the unitary Now. So it was spring of the Year One in Erhenrang, capital city of Karhide, and I was in peril of my life, and did not know it.”


Yesterday’s writer – Madeleine L’Engle
Tomorrow’s writer – Anne McCaffrey

Source: Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. Ace Books, 1976. ISBN 0-441-47812-3. Excerpt from A Parade in Erhenrang: pages 1-2

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Left Hand of Darkness

Center: Ursula K. Le Guin from the website ursulakleguin.com