Interplanetary Utopias ALL EDITIONS

• Published in: Newsday
• Main Author: Shulman, Polly
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Long Island, N.Y Newsday LLC 24.09.2000
• Edition: Combined editions
• Subjects: Le Guin, Ursula K (1929-2018)

Back then, she dreamed up a structure that gave her a free hand with allegory. In the universe of the Hainish books, various races populate far- flung planets; everyone is a descendant of the original humans - the inhabitants of the planet Hain. Over the millennia the planets lost contact and forgot about one another. But recently (in the last few dozen lifetimes or so), an interplanetary UN, the Ekumen of Planets, has formed, devoted to peacefully sharing culture and technology. The Ekumen sends out light-speed starships staffed with diplomats, observers on secret fact-finding missions, then Envoys who try to persuade the newly discovered people to join the Ekumen. Thus [Ursula K. Le Guin] provides herself with strangers in strange lands, narrative foils from Earthlike homelands (often Earth itself) eager to ponder a new world. They make gaffes, marvel at revelations, compare the new societies with the ones back home and generally act as eager recipients of what might otherwise sound like a lot of unnatural exposition. It's a perfect vehicle for exploring aspects of our own society by building what-if worlds that exaggerate or contradict those aspects. In her most famous Hainish novel, "The Left Hand of Darkness," Le Guin imagined a hermaphroditic people living on a frozen planet. Sexless for most of the month, they went into heat - "kemmer" - every 26 days, turning into a man or a woman for a week or so. The same person could father some children and give birth to others. Since "The Left Hand of Darkness" was published in 1969, when feminism was just beginning to come out of its half-century-long hibernation, the story's exploration of sexual politics seems rather restrained today. Still, it was revolutionary at the time. Other Hainish novels questioned other principles of social organization. In "Planet of Exile" Le Guin compared anarchist and socialist utopias; in "Rocannon's World" she imagined a race of telepaths.