Reading

     Over the last week, I reread Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.   I always fret my way through the last part, when Estraven and Genly Ai make a daring escape through a daunting environment; somehow she wrote it in such a way that the outcome still feels in doubt, no matter how many times I read the book.

     On one level, it's the story of not-quite First Contact with not-quite aliens* on their home planet; on another, it's a tale of intrigue that weaves its way through two governments, one an all-encompassing bureaucratic state akin to the old Soviet Union, gulags and all, and the other a messy European-style monarchy with a strong Parliament and a very loose sense of national unity.  She is not a huge fan of either, though the first clearly comes through as the worst: they're not even good cooks!  On yet another level, it's a story of nearly incredible derring-do against terrible odds by a pair of unlikely allies.  It's also a chance for her to illustrate the remarkable uselessness of having accurate answers to the wrong questions.  And it's recursive; the telling, mostly in the first person by the protagonists, ends with one of them preparing to tell the story again, much as he (and others) have just told it to the reader.

     Le Guin was not the kind of writer who sits down and works out character, background and plot in excruciating detail before writing.  She tended to make it up as she went along, discovering in the first draft who these people were and what they were about.  It worked for her, thanks to a wide-ranging intellect and keen sense for character: she wrote about people, first and foremost, and for all that you can read much of her work as allegory, in her mature work, she never loses sight of the essential humanity of those she writes about.

     Stories are about people, about people to whom things happen and who make things happen.  All the rest of it is just decoration.
_______________________
* In the universe where much of her science fiction is set, the original human race is not from Earth.  The Hain have been around far, far longer humans have lived on Earth.  While their present civilization is portrayed as wise, gentle and driven by regret (and sometimes annoyingly superior about it), their starfaring culture has risen and fallen many times.  Some incarnations of it were heartlessly willing to employ genetic modifications on the people established in the colonies they left on planets all over the galaxy.  Now all those varied peoples are finding one another once again and it's not a smooth process.