Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness is kind of a unique story for this collection. It's what's usually called sci-fi, a loose tale on Romantic premises set on another planet. There's an odd weave of loose resemblances between The Ekumen and Euro-American colonizations, though the dark side of that seems to have mysteriously evaporated.

The plot dominates the social comparisons, which are many but loose.

Basically, here goes. Genly Ai has arrived at Karhide, a banana-republic style kingdom on Winter, a very cold planet. Genly carries an offer of alliance from The Ekumen, a loose federation of 84-odd planets of remarkably similar hominids who can't even really visit each other effectively because of the distances involved, but manage to communicate and travel a bit because of presumed time-distortions of relativity, physics' signal contribution to plot-contrivances.

Ai finds Karhiders' overly polite and indirect, gets booted out of the country by the king, a jealous king, who would have no other kings before him. He then gets busted by the cartoon-totalitarian country-across-the-way until his supposedly dishonest and disloyal original adviser, now in exile, busts him out and leads him across the local midwinter Siberia back into Karhide, to call the space ship and make another attempt at truce.

Entering Karhide, Ai's chum rides past the guards and deliberately gets shot to death. One might imagine that he does so because it's somehow diplomatically convenient for Genly, though that makes little sense, considering that Genly is a rather recognizable alien, and goes immediately to mourn his friend's corpse.

Poe Notes

The Adventure of Hans Pfaall

A strange balloon arrives at Rotterdam -- with a note from recently disappeared Hans Pfaall. Hans relates the construction of a balloon. He intends to go to the moon to escape his creditors. An explosion leaves him hanging beneath the balloon.

It's sci-fi, and some of the phrases are astonishingly familiar from various pop efforts, but it's got a lot of faux-technical detail, and qreminds one in some ways of magical realism, despite the extreme difference in tone from Garcia Marquez or Rulfo or Kafka. He does not appear to have checked the details in any depth, since much of his folderol could have been corrected by an astronomer of the time. He goes through a big highly imaginative spiel about fixing the pressure problem that's bursting his ears by bleeding himself, so he has less blood pushing out. The feathers, further from the ground, plummet rather than float.

Heavy reliance on figures to give a sense of precision.

I suppose at this time, his prior examples would have been narratives of exploration, Robinson Crusoe, and the like. His patient description of Pfaall's fanciful trials and his aping of a diary at one point.

Also perhaps some glance back at Washington Irving or somesuch -- he finishes by making it apparent it's presumably all a fib, and makes a big footnote about similar stories that probably puts the author in the same light as his focalizer-narrator.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I found Gilman a mixed bag. Her story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is admirably trim. She uses the unreliable narrator to full effect, and the tracing of progressive insanity through the descriptions of the wallpaper pattern works wonderfully. Moreover, the so-called cure that the narrator's subjected to -- the so-called rest cure, what a horror! -- stands marvelously as metonym for the mistreatment and misappraisal of women in western society in general, and in the bourgeois classes from the victorian eras into the 1970's in particular. And also, actually, much of the mistreatment of other outwardly pampered and domesticated groups of society -- all the recipients of the mushroom treatment. In this story, Gilman leads the reader through the ideas non-didactically, one at a time, almost one clipped paragraph per idea. It's a masterwork.

Herland, sadly, does not approach the same level. The plot feels like a cross between kinky femdom and The Planet of the Apes. But to discuss Herland on its own terms is to ignore its flaws as fiction and discuss Gilman's ideas of women and men in society. This can better done in conjunction with her Women and Economics.

Gilman, like many reformers inflamed by new problems and opportunities afforded by industry, wanted to socialize the family unit. She confused the effects of democracy witht hose of industry and abjured any idea that women should naturally raise their own children. (The idea that men should raise their own children doesn't come up, but this is not likely Gilman's fault.) Her explanations are very broadly based on a Darwinist positivistic determinism that plays fast and loose with distinctions between "instinct" and "desire" and socially influenced traits.

She finds thus:

Women are dependent on men whereas men are not dependent on women. In this she confines herself to economic dependency, but traces its many effects, mostly the loss to society of healthy, hardy and productive women. Her analysis also deals primarily with proletarian and bourgeois gender economy, leaving other possibilities to analogy.

Women have no particular ability to raise their own children. She regards formal education as key, individual love as unreliable and inadequate. Sex is something that males are over-occupied with, to the detriment of all concerned. Women waste considerable time and suffering in seduction and barter that would be better avoided were they economically equipped to just ignore male desire. Proper understanding of the love of society or mankind or something like that is or will be better. Accordingly, childcare should be hired out to a few pros.

Her suicide note may be as personally revealing as anything she wrote. Obviously retaining her intellectual capacities and her faith in science and objectivity as a basis.

"when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one."