On blueprints (pt. i)

In the post On process, I talked about how one of the strategies I’ve developed for this novel project is to critically engage with stories I find really meaningful—basically, to break them down so I can understand how they did it and then borrow whatever tools are useful for myself.

So today I want to talk in more detail about a few of these blueprint stories. Why are they so compelling? Where do they overlap or diverge from each other in terms of craft, theme, form? What specific tools am I taking away from them?

But first, two housekeeping notes:

All right! On to the thoughts.

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin, novel, 1969

The original blueprint! The blueprint of all blueprints. It’s the story of a human, Genly Ai, who has come to the planet Gethen (Winter) to convince the planet’s people to join a galactic alliance of related worlds. Gethenians are descended from the same galactic ancestor as humans, but they’re ambisexual: they spend most of their time with no sex characteristics, except for a brief period each month where their sex expression is dependent on the partner they choose.

I read this book for the first time in fall 2014 on a pdf on my phone where I had to zoom in on every page, and it altered my trajectory like I was a meteor NASA had just shot a rocket into. I’m far from alone in this reaction: Left Hand is one of the foundational works of science fiction as a genre, and it (along with much of Le Guin’s other work) has influenced many fantastic artists of all kinds.

But what about it, exactly, do I want to use as a model for my own work?

Personal <-> planetary

Like all good histories, Left Hand emphasizes that our decisions cast shadows, and some shadows are longer than others. Genly and Estraven, the two central characters, come to a point where their actions arise from a place of profound mutual love and understanding—a very personal, microcosmic little nexus—but affect the fates of everyone else on the planet.

This is something I want to emulate for two reasons. One, this is how I understand our world, and writing fiction is a way for me to enhance that understanding. How do you weigh personal needs and desires against public responsibilities? Two, humans are ridiculously deep-feeling creatures. Our subjective realities are so inextricably tied to what we feel. To have a story tie a character’s decision to genuinely massive stakes feels like an honest way to match the emotional stakes we often feel in our own lives.

Worldbuilding

Le Guin used scifi the way I described in On weirdness (i.e. as a way to reflect on the real and current world); her own term for this was “thought experiment,” where she took one question—in this case, what does society look like if everyone is the same gender?—and explored its ramifications. What blows my mind about Left Hand is how thoroughly those threads are followed, how many threads there are, and how clearly the fabric of the story depends on each and all of them.

It’s an insane amount of information to conceive and convey, and Le Guin does it so naturally that the alien becomes familiar and the familiar becomes alien. That’s the kind of thing I’m aiming to pull off with my own “thought experiment.”

A story that knows it’s a story

In the very first sentences of Left Hand, Genly tells you that what you’re about to read is a deliberately constructed story that includes voices beyond his own. Chapters of his first-person narration are interspersed with excerpts from Estraven’s diary, anthropological notes, origin myths, religious writings, you name it.

I’m very interested in stories that do this—that remind you that what you’re experiencing is not a simple, clear, immersive truth, but rather the object result of a series of choices being made by other thinking, feeling beings. Again, this mirrors how I understand the real world to work. But there’s something even more compelling to me about that. Done well, it can turn the story into a kind of living thing on its own. And then what happens is a unique and powerful collaboration between you (the audience), the storyteller(s), and the story.

Which is so cool.

Queerness

The Left Hand of Darkness was published the same year humans landed on the moon. It would take me a week or more of nonstop talking to touch on all the ways I know queer people experienced marginalization at that time—and that would be just scraping the surface, because I was neither alive then nor am I an expert now.

I bring this up to point out both how radical the book was for its time, and to gesture at how much has changed in the intervening half-century. Throughout her life, Le Guin herself evolved her thoughts on the book’s use of pronouns, its attitude towards homosexuality, and other complications. However, I read Left Hand as a genuine, open-hearted attempt to question how we relate to each other and to ourselves in terms of gender and sexuality—and in my view, that’s queerness if anything is.

The queer questions I’m exploring in my novel project are different from Left Hand’s; they’re arising from a different context and a different life. But I hope readers feel they’re just as inextricable from the story as Left Hand’s questions are from it—because, after all, that’s how they feel to me.

Until next time, friends.

—Rachel/on the sofa/Tucson AZ/October 15, 2022