The Desert Mermaid

So I finished Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness yesterday, and hey—let’s hear it for thoughtful science fiction!

I was most impressed at the way she incorporated her worldbuilding into the story—she had a good focus on a smallish area on one planet, and explored it in great depth. I liked the detail, the believability, the different psychology (often “different culture” has people still thinking the same, with material differences—basically the author puts a funny hat on a character and says, “Different culture!”), and the feeling that this was a whole world we were seeing was good. She does get pompous about it at times—I’m always suspicious of a book that treats itself as such SRS BZNS.

Her design principles for this world seemed, to me, mostly subtractive, like she was taking away more than adding. The building seems minimalist in a way. Consider:

• Small inhabitable area makes for less of a spread of humanity, thus more communication.
• The removal of differing genders, while it does add a few things to the culture we don’t have, seems to mostly be about removing an extra layer of cultural meaning—she postulates that sex taboos wouldn’t exist, notes that rape is sort of impossible with their particular biological setup, sexism doesn’t exist (see? Subtraction isn’t always bad!), and even goes out on a limb and suggests that war on this planet doesn’t exist on a large scale because they lack a concept of duality.
• Technology is overall about 20^th-Century level, with a few things taken away (TV, flight)
• Fewer species on the planet to inspire stories and culture—off the top of my head I remember there being no large herd animals, no birds (or anything that flies—which the main character figures is why they’ve never invented airplanes), no insects.

On the one hand, I understand that it’s sort of ridiculous to say that more stuff = more culture, like saying Americans have “more” culture than the !Kung.  But the portrait we get in this book seems cumulatively subtractive, even with the concepts she does add (shifgrethor, Foretelling, the ins and outs of mating, the psychology). The stark environment around them bleeds into the starkness of the cultures themselves—but then, that might be partially because it’s impossible to really paint the nuances of a culture.

I also give her props for her language-building for two reasons:

1. She’s actually given it some thought, has differences in the two languages we see in the story, and has sound systems that I’m not sure about but looks at least sorta cohesive.
2. This is hands-down the ugliest language system I have ever seen.

She even beat out Tolkien* and Láadan in that latter category, far and away. It’s spectacularly ugly, cumulatively ugly, ugly piled on ugly.  The words were so awful—so nasty—that I gave serious thought to stopping the book just to get the hell away from having to read names and words like “Therem Harth rem ir Estraven,” “Gethen,” “kemmer,” “shifgrethor” (pardon me, I just gagged), “Harhahad,” “Ockre,”*** “Handdara,” “nusuth,” “Ehrenrang,” “kyorremy,” “Karhide.” Was she trying for ugly as the hind-end of a dog? Or is this just one of my own aesthetic sensibilities?

Despite the language, though, I kept going, and I’m glad I did.  At least now I can say I've read it.

*You can all kill me now.  If it makes you feel better, I am only comparing these two on the plane of sheer ugliness—Láadan can't touch Tolkien's language families in any other way.**

**And for those of you who may possibly like Láadan, let me just state that everybody has their own opinion, and yours is wrong.

***This one worries me. Why is there a “ck” blend—how is it different from “c” or “k”?  I’m much less suspicious of the double letters, and she may be able to make a case for her haphazard-looking use of “y,” but “ck”?  Really?