Skip to main content

Week Ten: The Fiction of Ideas - The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuinn (# 5 points)



The story is science fiction that unfolds with the people who don’t live on Earth, but I think <The Left Hand of Darkness> tells about humans, ourselves. Many emotional exchanges take place and narratives unfold in this story. 


Ursula K. LeGuinn’s <The Left Hand of Darkness> was quite difficult to read at first. It’s a total of 20 chapters, and each chapter is a mixture of the story in first-person and in the third person. Even in the first-person story, the speaker ‘I’ is Genly Ai, and in some cases it was Estraven, so it took some time to figure out who this was. For example, ‘I’ in Chapters 1, 3, 5, and 8 is Genly Ai, but ‘I’ in Chapters 6 and 10 is Estraven. The report, written by an investigator in Ekumen’s research team, explained the characteristics of the people on the Winter planet, and helped me to understand the overall framework. 


The Gethenians in the novel have no sex. Their sex changes every 26 days. The protagonist boy Genly Ai visits Gethen alone to join the Space Union that seeks the peace of mankind, but Genly who has a man’s appearance continuously is seen as a pervert in Gethenians’ eyes. Due to the severe cold as well as cultural differences, Genly faces several difficulties. The main story of this book is thinking about how to achieve peace and communication while overcoming these difficulties. Genly himself as well, experiences confusion by encountering Gethenians. Since the Gethenians have no sex, Genly had no idea how he should treat them as a woman or a man. Furthermore, the feelings toward them were very hard to determine whether it was friendship or love. 


At the end of the story, Genly encounters an unfamiliar feeling and new confusion. He began to question the way he was in the world whether he had to share a gender. And this question is something that the readers can ask together. 


Genly Ai came to the Winter planet alone, to understand each other through a personal relationship between individuals. The story makes me think about what we have to do to understand and accept each other, who is very different and unique. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week Eleven: Cyberpunk and Steampunk - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (# 6 points)

  The shock of using VR devices for the first time is still unforgettable. It’s still a little closer to the virtual side than to the real one, but it was still amazing. Since then, I have been interested in virtual reality and augmented reality, and have started to read related articles and books. It was difficult to fully understand, but I was convinced that the technology would gradually focus on making virtual realities more realistic. VR appeared in the mid-2010s, but there was someone who came up with this concept 20 years before this. It’s Neal Stephenson, the writer of ‘Snow Crash’, and the novel ’Snow Crash’ is a book that enables us to approach the world of virtual reality more easily.  Considering this book was published in 1992, I’m really surprised that the story described in this novel is almost close to the world right now, where a lot of Internet-related technologies have made remarkable development. ‘Metaverse’ the virtual place that the comput...
1 comment
Read more

Week 3_1: Confessions by Kanae Minato (#5 points)

   The main background of ‘Confessions’ is a normal school. The homeroom teacher, Yuko, says her four-year-old daughter is murdered by her class at the school where she works. The story begins with the teacher confessing this murder case like a speech in front of her students on the day of the closing ceremony. Yuko is the parent who lost her daughter and couldn’t protect her daughter, and at the same time, she is a teacher who has a duty to guide her students in the right way. She confesses about the law and order, ethics, and moral ideas in a calm and grim tone, in front of the criminals in her class who killed her daughter. Everyone is quietly holding their breath.  The incident begins with the death of Yuko's only four-year-old daughter, Manami. Manami was found drowned in the pool, but in fact, it was done by Yuko's students Naoki and Shuya. Shuya wanted to get his mother's attention by killing Manami, and Naoki pushed Manami into the pool to show Shuya, who i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week Fourteen: Speculative Satire - Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (# 6 points)

  A huge joke on a cosmic scale!  I think if I define Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one sentence, it seems like this can be said. The book is full of humor and jokes. The author is expressing his ingenious imagination regardless of any form and authority. In this book, things like the logical rationale and the probability of the story are not important. Unlike hard Science Fiction, which elaborately unfolds a story based on scientific theory, the charm of this book lies in the writer’s imagination and humor. As we can see from the setting that the Earth is a supercomputer designed by a super-intelligent race, the book shows the adventure of countless unique people and events between space and Earth, and prehistoric times and 5.6 trillion years later.    Even the most entertaining jokes can get tired after hours of listening. To keep laughing and induce fun, we need a narrative device that will arouse the readers’ curiosity and tension...
Post a Comment
Read more