THE
PEOPLE
THE
PEOPLE
When you find a Gethenian for the first time it may be slightly confusing. And believe, the first time this particular Gethenian sees you, they will feel the same. It will be strange for either party. That's because a Gethenian does not look like a woman or a man, they are both. — And in return, you are just one or the other.
Gethenians are cyclical. Lunar. Only displaying female or male attributes once a month. And this period is known as Kemmer — when they become mature and fit for sexual exchange. — And Somer, for the remaining neutral days of the month. But never consider them as neutral people! On Gethen they respect people just like the humans they are.
GETHENIANs
--- THEREM HARTH REM IR ESTRAVEN, THE EAR OF THE KING OF KARHIDE
The typical Gethenian you would encounter on the Great Continent (on Karhide's bond with Orgoreyn) would have their compact stature, more cold-prepared, with narrow legs and arms. A design made for a better heat preservation, which gives them their high resistance to cold. You could be freezing, and next to you would have a Gethenian all sweaty by the insipid sun rising among the clouds. The solid layer of subcutaneous fat offers them more thermal insulation, also giving them a chubby appearance. Their hands and feet are delicate, small, with broad thighs, and deep chest. With breasts slightly more developed than in Terran men. Their skin is ruddy-brown or yellow-brown generally, also many with dark skin. With black fine hair, in a broad, cheekbones pronounced, face with small features. Which to us would resemble the isolated Terran groups living in very high altitudes or Arctic areas.
The complexity of human organisms has small changes outside Terra — disregarding some planets, the hilfs of S or the winged hominids of Rokanan. But in Gethen, evolution seemed to choose a different path for them. Or how indicated the first Investigators sent to Winter: the facts can also point out that they were an experience designed by the Hainish. Whatever the answers are, their physiology is unique and restricted to this planet.
Being Gethen implacable, when these same Ekumen envoys arrived and inserted themselves on the system, they felt a fraction of what it is to live in this world. And as they found its natives, sharing this androgynous configuration, they envisioned that this singularity might indicate a valuable biological aspect. Where infant mortality and the burden of winter are immense challenges, gender ambivalence may represent the survival of the entire race.
Dispute, with no blood. Controlled, stylized, ritualized. Deriving from an old word for shadow. The shifgrethor, both in Karhide and in all other Gethen civilizations, is a fundamental social principle. This pride can be both individual and collective. You may see physical violence, once the shifgrethor went broke, but it never evolves to mass violence.
Once the Gethenian begins to enter in the Kemmer cycles, the shifgrethor becomes effective over their life. From this point on, it would be rude to offer an advice to one of them, for instance. How to say how your shadow should look like, your identity? Hurting ones' shifgrethor can mean a discussion. Challenging the shifgrethor of a domain can represent great reprisals. But when countries crash into the shifgrethor, they would ram like two mountains trying to get one in the way of the other.— Each one possesses a shadow, a unique impression, and the only capable of questioning this shadow is the one that projects it.
SHIFGRETHOR
--- GETHENIAN IN KEMMER, FEMALE ASPECT
Before interacting with a Gethenian, a precaution. All of them have an imperative instrument, both in their society and persona: the shifgrethor.
It seems complicated for outsiders to decipher its true meaning. In a crude translation, the shifgrethor represents a form of pride, or personal prestige, that each Gethenian brings with them. An elaborated social channel provided for competition, and an adopted way of aggression.
--- GETHENIAN IN SOMER, NEUTRAL ASPECT
DOTHE-STRENGTH
Another curious aspect about the Gethenians is the use of their Dothe strength — which corresponds of two phases: doth, force, and thangen, repose.
At Dothe they manage to command their body to a state of strength and durability, on voluntary use and control over their hysterical forces. The phenomenon makes one of them manage to carry a weight far above their own, or extend their resistance as the Old Men of Handdarata does — in their beautiful dances, they perform their full strength for a day and night, sometimes even more than that. There is not much to worry, once in dothe.
But this extreme state drys out their forces. When it passes, the Gethenians are not good for anything else. It is what is paid to call the body's full potentiality. They have to stay still. Ended the effect of physical intensity, what comes along is hunger, gnawing hunger that tortures the body. At this stage sleep is heavy, thangen-sleep, and its the price over the body's abuse. The night covers the sky, the dark covers the body. — The dark sleep. With duration much superior to the period which a Gethenian supports the dothe. At this stage, the danger of resisting it can lead them to death.
It will be long nights of sleep.
HAINISH INFLUENCE
A disturbing thought lies over the influence that the Hainish had on the Gethenians' creation. Creation by the genetic engineering aspect of it. There are no facts that prove its execution, just as there are no reasons in biology for the Gethenians to present the characteristics they present. The only vestige, the only clue is on Terra, where there is evidence of Hainish induction. Human genetic manipulation was a known practice performed by the Colonizers. And the Terran
--- GETHENIAN IN KEMMER, MALE ASPECT
Colony was their experiment. So for Gethen, there remain only theories and possibilities, which cannot be disregarded. What else could explain the Gethenian ambisexuality. A random evolution, something that happens—natural selection, hardly.
What is the reason for such undertake, and why this planet as an experiment? Nothing lives there. There are no answers. The first Investigators wondered, they did not find a solution.
Investigator Ong Tot Oppong has tried to make sense out of the problem, and to some extent alleviate the Hainish barbarism, treating people like toys. Her guess might point to what they were looking for, if they were looking for something:
Even though highly competitive, inflated by their shifgrethor, the Gethenians do not seem to be aggressive, to the point of going into open warfare. They can kill themselves, yes, but never a hundred at the time. Her idea leads us to think that such Hainish influence occurred in an attempt to eliminate the act of war itself.
Because nothing brings Gethen to war. There is no sign of that on their 13,000 years of recorded history. They know how to fight, they are good at killing, in quarrels, incursions, vendettas, feuds, and torture a bit well too — among other perversities. One that appears off their list is war. There have been no great invasion by peoples on the move. They are unmotivated, without some directed mobilization. The temptation of a large-scale conflict have never been aroused. And what does their androgynous aspect affects on this. Anything.
Perhaps because there are not many of them in this unforgivable world. Their population seem to remain stable in size, they do not move in large masses, rapidly, no one generation going very far. Your biggest enemy, bigger than the shifgrethor, than banners or lines on a map, it is just the weather. An unfair weather, at the limit of intolerable, even for these adepts of living in icy hell, they have only strength left to fight against their biggest enemy that is the cold. Try to understand this, the weight of glory, the weight of war — just try to spend a winter on Winter. And face the Ice.
"Here man has a crueler enemy even than himself.” — Ong Tot Oppong
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS-CHAPTER 7
---"Tinibossol thinks the Colony was introduced during a major Interglacial. Conditions may have been fairly mild for their first 40 or 50,000 years here. By the time the ice was advancing again, the Hainish Withdrawal was complete and the Colonists were on their own, an experiment abandoned.”— Ong Tot Oppong
EXTENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY
UKL "Is Gender Necessary"--The Language of the Night, 1979