Having recently gone for another experimental visit to a book club, this time to listen in on a discussion of Ursula LeGuin’s sci-fi The Left Hand of Darkness, I’ve been thinking about women sci-fi writers, and LeGuin herself.
There was a period a long time ago when I was reading a fair amount of sci-fi, and also fantasy, by women authors, especially what I call gender s.f., when the premise/subject is sex/gender. I’d bought one or two little s.f. reference books, which was a good starting point. I read some of the early writers, including when women s.f. writers hid their own gender, like C. L. Moore (short stories, including one of her medieval fantasy stories about Jirel of Joiry) and James Tiptree. I read some Joanna Russ, whom I didn’t like. I read some books by Doris Egan because I met her through a self-defense class. And that eventually included LeGuin.
I read at least a half-dozen of LeGuin’s books, more or less chronologically. With her background of anthropologist parents, she has interesting set-ups. I can just imagine her musing, “What if…?” The underlying idea of The Left Hand of Darkness struck me as so completely original that it stayed with me forever: A planet where the inhabitants have no gender most of the time, but cycle into sexual stages where they can’t predict whether they’ll be male or female. The idea of no fixed gender is kind of mind-blowing when you think about how our society is so based on that distinction.
But the peculiar thing now was that as I was re-reading it yet again, I suddenly realized that I admired it, but never really loved it. I loved that idea, but not the book. She’s a fine writer, but even a couple of people at the book club opined that much of it was a tedious slog. And she’s not much on humor.
Then I accidentally read something else. I was facing some major transit rides, and discovered that I had forgotten to bring something to read, so I grabbed something short from the library, another LeGuin, since she was on my mind. There were a couple of short, amusing things that seemed un-LeGuin like, and a couple that seemed tedious, which I skipped. But I tackled one long one, “The Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” which is mostly a long meandering story of someone growing up (in that society, marriage involves four people) for forty pages until she suddenly snaps in to the point of the story for the last dozen pages. I’d never thought of her analytically before, but then it suddenly hit me: She’s just not much interested in plot. Which is okay. But that’s why I can’t really fall for her. Her clever ideas should be enough (and some are genuinely haunting), plus the interesting details often just casually tossed off in passing, but for me, they just aren’t.
(I'd wanted to post one of her stories here, but the internet has made that kind of thing more and more inaccessible.)