Sexuality and justice have little if anything in common. Love and friendship and conscience and kindness and obstinacy find ways to make the unfair arrangement work, though not without anxiety, not without anguish, and not always.
Ursula K. LeGuin, “Paradises Lost”, The Birthday of the World
On one level, LeGuin is the bard of polymorphic perversity (quite literally so in the case of the periodic hermaphroditism on Gethen, first introduced in The Left Hand of Darkness). In this collection of nine stories, she explores the romantic and reproductive strategies of a wide range of human (or at least human-like) societies: complex foursomes on the planet O, equilibrium-oriented reproduction on a generation-spanning starship, gender imbalance on Seggri, radical introversion on Eleven-Soro, the multi-part God-marriage of siblings in an Inca-like society, and a kemmerhouse on Gethen. But these stories aren’t told in a prurient fashion, though there are hints of eroticism throughout; nor in a clinically anthropological way, though the stories suggest a deep back story worthy of an anthropologist’s field notes. Through her attention to character, her care with language, and her strong moral and ethical sense, LeGuin brings these strange cultures and people to life and makes our own arrangements seem just as odd.
The O stories–”Unchosen Love” and “Mountain Ways”–have the most carefully thought out customs. On O, a marriage (”sedoretu”) contains four people of two genders and two “moieties” (in this case, matrilineal descent groups), consisting of two homosexual, two heterosexual, and two chaste relationships. LeGuin plays with this complex arrangement by further complicating her characters’ lives: “Unchosen Love” places an outsider into an isolated fishing community, complete with legends and ghosts (I imagined something like the island communities of Maine and Nova Scotia); “Mountain Ways” is a comedy of manners, a sort of Jane-Austen-meets-alien-love tale in a remote mountain village.
“The Matter of Seggri” starts as a thought experiment: it posits an extreme gender imbalance, with many more women than men, and explores gender inequality in a way that turns our own patterns upside down (and yet mirrors them uncannily). “Seggri” is a formally ambitious tale: it combines anthropological reports, fiction and metafiction, and memoir to form a rounded portrait of Seggri’s culture.
Perhaps most intriguing is the culture of the spaceship “Discovery”, the subject of “Paradises Lost”. LeGuin explores the implications of a six-generation-long journey from Earth to an unknown world: the modes of thought required of the middle generations who will never know life on a planet, the ethical challenges of maintaining equilibrium inside a closed system, the things that are lost and gained on such a long voyage. The religious turn that many of the passengers take is a fascinating one, a reification of the mid-voyage experience; and just as fascinating are those who don’t make that turn.
LeGuin’s science fiction isn’t the ray gun and (at least outside “Paradises Lost”) spaceship kind; it’s speculative but grounded in things we know and the ways we know them, scientific in the truest sense. And as such it is wonderfully strange, disorienting, and enlightening all at once.
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