2019 is my year of reading Le Guin, and so far I'm on track, having covered nearly the whole of the first two volumes of the Library of America's four Le Guin books. Two topics of special interest have arisen in the course of my reading: 1. affective labour of simultaneities and 2. performative mapping of feats of physical endurance.
The first topic, affective labour in relation to Le Guin's SF novum of instantaneous (i.e. FTL to the extent that no time passes between being in point A and arriving at point B), was explored in great depth in "The Shobies’ Story", "Dancing to Ganam", and "Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea". The phenomenology of instantaneous travel across vast interstellar distances of space is treated metaphorically as a kind of initially seemingly insurmountable layering of images of points A (origin) and B (destination) within the minds of the individuals involved in the travel. These individuals are acclimated to a group setting subject to careful selection and crafting well prior to the travel in question, the reason for which is that the 'layering' problem, and its associated disorientation can only be overcome by a kind of collective will or decision-making process.
Thus, Le Guin, in these three stories especially, enacts a kind of dialectic of individual-collective the emotional labour of which is part and parcel of both performance of cognitive estrangement in the work of fiction; and of the the development of the (fictional) technology that itself instantiates its novum. Affective or emotional labour associated with long-term and spatial dislocations of Le Guin's protagonists is often intense and/or protracted due to the nature of the work being carried out. Often the main character is an ethnographer of some kind. This is the case for Left Hand of Darkness; The Word for World is Forest; and The Telling. In these novels, and the shorter stories mentioned above, the work of processing emotions within the dialectically intensional individual/group setting is mostly performed by women because men are often not quite capable of rising to the task. Or they are simply not part of the society being explored. In a couple of the stories male society has been expelled and women maintain the dominant or hegemonic position within the societal structure, choosing with whom to mate, when, and for how long.
These alternative, fictional, counter-narratives challenge, in turn, dominant notions produced by a patriarchal science fiction community that, until the so-called New Wave, seemingly dominated the genre. Le Guin played a big role (alongside others like Russ and Delany) in changing all of that, and perhaps (more speculatively) in the survival of the genre in its present form as something more universally acceptable (i.e. not just for socially awkward white males). It may be apparent in this observation that I've been interweaving my Le Guin reading with some of the Cambridge History of Science Fiction.
The second topic, performative mapping of feats of physical endurance, arose after I had submitted the previous one to a conference from which I had subsequently to withdraw. Both might become papers. I noticed that physical endurance complements the mental/emotional endurance noted above, to the extent that you get the feeling Le Guin had read accounts of explorers journeys to the poles, with quite detailed descriptions of the amount of food carried and consumed forming part of the fictional world, for example, of Left Hand of Darkness. The latter part of that work is the account of an escape from the totalitarian/communistic society of Orgoreyn, to return back to the more anarchic Karhide. This escape can only be effectuated through passage by way of a massive ice/mountain field that takes several weeks to cross. The bodies of the ambivalent 'men' (one of whom is actually two-gendered) and the changes that take places within them are described very effectively. The novum of two-gendered beings comes down quite firmly here on the male-dominant (in our world) side of a kind of taoistic blurring of the boundaries of what it means to be a gendered human, and how blurry the lines between those genders can be. But Le Guin (as she notes in a preface) caught flack for her (allegedly male-centric) treatment of gender, as epitomised in part by the language (specifically pronouns) she used in reference to it.
This is all tied, I think, to how Le Guin sees the mental and the physical in relation to social constructions of the male and female genders. Each of the dichotomies is proven, in the fictional treatment, to be false, almost binary, in construction, and this I would posit, this breaking down of dichotomies, especially in relation to both gender and to physicality, is the primary impetus for Le Guin's work as a whole. I don't think what I'm referring to counts as novum specifically, because I feel it is much bigger than that, to the extent that I might call it a novum-assemblage that amounts to a kind of speculative anthropological philosophy. If I have time I'm going to try to develop both of these points into a paper (or two?)....
