For one second all I know, everything is made of snow

[sovay]

I was just informed that there will be a television adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).

If the Gethenian characters are not cast with genderqueer actors, I will feel someone is missing the point.

Comments

[kore]

Well, it tells you how minutely Genly genders even ostensibly neutral activities like arithmetic.

//scowls more at Genly Remember when he tells Estraven "Women tend to eat less"? YEAH, AROUND MEN, YOU SCHMUCK ....ahem.

I had a reaction to Genly that I realized years later was akin to my reaction to Gentlemen's Agreement (1947)—while I like and sympathize with him as a narrator, there were ways in which his familiar lens felt stranger to me than the alien world I was supposed to see through him—only Le Guin knew exactly what she was doing with that kind of double vision and I'm really not sure Kazan's movie did.

Oh, that's very good! I like that a lot. Le Guin said in her written and rewritten annotated essay on writing Left Hand that she thought men kind of approved of the book more than women -- that it gave them this journey into androgyny and back out again. But the female readers wanted more, they pushed harder. But she does play with it -- Genly's a privileged man, from a sweeping interstellar alliance, but he's also very solitary and disbelieved, and he's not white, altho I think race doesn't really come up on Gethen. Estraven thinks at one point he blends in too well, that's why they don't believe him, IIRC.

when I read the book as a teenager I was so upset I wrote fix-it fic in my head where Estraven barely survived but he did and Genly nursed him back to health &c &c. fannish before I knew what fandom was