“No Word for War”

This essay reads The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) in the context of anthropology and anarchist traditions. Like many science fiction writers of the 1960s and 1970s, Ursula K. Le Guin relies on formal techniques derived from ethnography, namely “thick description.” In using what I term “thick narration” to describe the world of Gethen and its two primary social groups, the novel slowly builds a mutually exclusive choice between war and civilization. Genly’s journey, as well as his dialogues with Estraven, construct a narrative in which a people who have never known the eradicating force of war consciously choose civilization instead.