Masculinism in Science Fiction: Le Guin vs. Haldeman

Introduction: Gender and the Science Fiction Tradition

Science fiction has always been a masculine genre, no matter that Mary Shelley invented it with her novel Frankenstein. Until fairly recent times, most science fiction writers were men, and they dealt with subjects like technology, power, and space battles, featuring male heroes, explorers, and adventurers. In film, science fiction has been a perfect vehicle for ultra-masculine actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, although Lieutenant Ripley in the Alien trilogy proved that women could be masculine heroes as well — and very effective at destroying hostile creatures that threaten humanity.

Joe Haldeman's novel Forever Peace certainly fits within this conventional masculine narrative. The story is narrated by Sergeant Julian Class, an alienated soldier of the First World who opposes his own government and society. He is the archetypal disillusioned male hero who nonetheless hopes that the world can achieve peace and prosperity through the better use of technology. Even though it was written thirty years earlier, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is a radical departure from these themes and characters. It takes place on an underdeveloped planet called Gethen, far in the future, where permanent genders do not exist: the natives are all bisexual and hermaphroditic, remaining neuter for most of the month except for a brief period when they can become either male or female. Even characters who appear purely male in personality and appearance are equally female, while the male narrator from Earth, Genly Ai, is the outsider who must struggle for years before he can truly understand this society.

Le Guin's Gethen: A World Without Fixed Gender

Ursula Le Guin was one of the first women science fiction writers of the contemporary era, and her themes, settings, and characters frequently bent the traditional rules about gender and sexuality. In The Left Hand of Darkness, the inhabitants of Gethen (also called Winter) have no fixed gender, at least as Earth people would understand the term. They are neuter most of the time, except for a few days each month when they undergo a change called kemmer, during which they may become either male or female. All of them are hermaphroditic and bisexual, and all are capable of bearing children. In this world, the Earth envoy Genly Ai is considered strange, suspicious, or even perverted because he is male one hundred percent of the time.

The novel is set at least two thousand years in the future. Although the Gethens know nothing of their true origins or even of flight, the Earth people suspect they have been genetically engineered for survival in a very harsh environment. Bisexuality and gender-bending were quite radical and risky subjects when the novel was first published in 1969, and Le Guin was undeniably a pioneer in this type of science fiction — although feminists later criticized her for making most of her main characters essentially male in speech, behavior, and appearance.

Narrative Voice, Character, and Masculine Language in Le Guin

Le Guin was brilliant at imagining alternative worlds with radically different cultures and societies. Despite the bisexual and gender-bending nature of life on Gethen, however, the novel's narrators are mostly male, as are its main characters. Ong tot Oppong is the only significant female narrator, and she barely appears. Le Guin also used purely masculine terms — "he," "him," "man," and "mankind" — to refer to both genders, which was standard practice in 1967. The English language itself often makes it difficult to convey non-binary identity in a single noun or pronoun, and this tension runs throughout the novel.

Genly Ai is a purely masculine figure who represents the Ekumen, a federation of Earth worlds, and has served as a diplomat on many planets. He has been sent to Gethen to invite the planet to join this federation, but with little success. At the time of his arrival, Gethen is in the midst of an Ice Age, and tensions are growing between the two major powers, Karhide and Orgoreyn. During his two years on the planet, he visits both nations and receives only suspicious and hostile treatment from virtually every Gethen he encounters. Part of the reason is his unusual appearance — he is tall and dark-skinned while they are short and brown — and he is unable to change his male gender. All of this makes him seem like a dangerous mutant to the natives, who do not even believe in space travel or civilizations on other planets. They are content in their belief that Gethen is unique and at the center of the universe, even though in reality it is a very remote and isolated world.

Haldeman's Forever Peace: Masculine Militarism and Technology

Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace is a far more traditional type of science fiction than The Left Hand of Darkness. It features a conventional male hero, Sergeant Julian Class, who teams up with his lover Amelia "Blaze" Harding to save the world from technology run amok. Even though it was written thirty years later than Le Guin's novel, it does not question or alter gender roles and sexuality nearly to the same degree. Forever Peace is set on Earth in 2043 and depicts society and the global system in ways that are not all that different from the present. Just as today, the First World is always fighting some war for control of resources in the Second and Third Worlds, deploying its most advanced technology against armies of peasant guerillas, insurgents, and so-called terrorists.

Haldeman fought in Vietnam and was wounded there, and he has returned to similar themes many times in his writing, including The Forever War and Forever Free. Julian is the narrator of Forever Peace, and the story is told from his point of view — not from that of the victims of imperialism, but from that of a disillusioned cog in the military machine. All of Haldeman's novels feature male characters forced into wars against their will, and Julian is no exception: he is a draftee, as Haldeman himself was in Vietnam.

Julian also has the luxury of being a part-time soldier because wars in 2043 are fought at a distance, using drones and robots. First World soldiers are all "jacked" into computers in underground bases so they never come into direct contact with the enemies they are destroying — not entirely unlike the drone strikes used in Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent decades. They are not entirely safe, however, since the enemy can sometimes jack into their systems, and the technology can damage their brains. In fact, the "death and disability rate is higher than the regular infantry. It's not bullets that got us, though; it's our own brains and veins" (Haldeman 4). The soldiers describe themselves as "mechanics" rather than soldiers, since they simply sit in pods and operate machinery through brain interfaces.

Conclusion: Two Visions of Redemption

For a novel written so long ago, Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness was indeed a striking departure from the normal science fiction fare of heavily masculine themes, plots, and characters. It stands out as distinctive and unusual even when compared to novels written decades later, such as Forever Peace. Unlike masculine narratives that offer redemption through victory in war or the mastery of advanced technology, Le Guin's Genly Ai is redeemed by learning to understand a very different culture on a planet that seems "backward" and underdeveloped compared to Earth. In particular, he is redeemed by his friendship with Estraven — especially when he witnesses Estraven's transformation into a woman. Only then is he truly able to comprehend this culture and successfully complete his mission.

This entire journey of cross-gender empathy and cultural understanding would have been beyond the imaginative reach of Julian Class, the male hero of Forever Peace, and simply outside his mental and emotional universe. Where Le Guin imagines redemption as the dissolution of rigid identity categories, Haldeman imagines it as the correct application of superior technology — a distinction that reveals just how differently the two authors conceive of what science fiction's masculine hero might ultimately need to overcome.

Works Cited

Haldeman, Joe. Forever Peace. New York: Ace Books, 1997.

LeGuin, Ursula. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books, 1967, 1987.