The Left Hand Of Darkness - Blog Posts

If you like you can read [this book], and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the Second World War; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.  The purpose of a thought experiment, as the term was used by the [physicists], is not to predict the future [...] but to describe reality, the present  world.  Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like - what's going on- what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies. [...]  They may use all kind of facts to support their tissue of lies.They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which was really fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane- bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voice, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. [...]  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's a good novel- that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard t say just what we learned, how we were changed.  The artist deals with what cannot be said in word.

Ursula Le Guin, Introduction,The Left Hand of Darkness, 1976. 

reading tlhod in every language I know

well, my Portuguese is not that good (yet), but I'll try

not now tho, I'm reading stuff for school now🥲

ok so one of my Hungarian faves has released this new song today and their songs are always very spiritual and philosophical

so I was listening to it and I almost exploded because of this lyrics (translation mine and wonky)

Nothing is turning you

You are the wheel

And you are turning yourself

well. guess who came to mind

that neuron activation feeling I get when Gethen is mentioned in a work of UKLG

just read Solitude, I need to cry and think

should I do a TLHOD reread where I read the original and the Hungarian translation simultaneously? (and tbh The Dispossessed too, I haven't finished the Hungarian edition yet)

I am literally about to start uklgposting bc of coming of age in karhide

why was I procrastinating reading these short stories...

when I saw the words *Praise then Darkness*, I almost screamed back *AND CREATION UNFINISHED!!!!*

what am I doing to myself again

anyway, back to reading 💖💖💖

it’s 2025 and I am reading about my good friends estrogen and generative ai

Tumblr please make this post go viral. This needs to happen.

Where's that post about how Carlos Diehz should play Estraven

Make that man fuck with gender again

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness //The X-Files, 1x17

How does one hate a country, or love one? […] I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?

— Ursula K. Le Guin – The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, p. 212)

more e.

If I had a coin for every time I read The Left Hand of Darkness, I'd have one coin. And that is because of self-preservation.

Illustrations by David Lupton from the Folio Society edition of The Left Hand of Darkness.