One of the things that marks out a great writer for me is when something they have written in fiction eventually seems to be paralleled by something that happens in real life, often years or decades after they’ve written it. One of those great foresighted writers is Ursula K Le Guin. She’s someone this blog will return to and reference quite often.
SPOILER ALERT:
If you haven’t read Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, DO NOT read the rest of this blog post now. Or rather, read The Left Hand of Darkness, then come straight back here to read this post. I’m confident you’ll like the book, even if you don’t like this blog.
IF YOU’RE STILL WITH ME:
The central character of Left Hand is Genly Ai, an envoy on a solo mission to broker relations with the peoples of Gethen, a planet of ambisexual inhabitants and near-permanent winter. Gethen’s two main population centres are Karhide, a monarchic society riddled with complex etiquette and baffling codes of honour, and Orgoreyn, an intensely bureaucratic society complete with secret police force and strict regulations about every aspect of life.
Genly is eventually bundled off to a remote penal facility in Orgoreyn as a way of discreetly stopping the spread of everything he represents which threatens to disrupt the status quo, not just in Orgoreyn but on the planet as a whole. (It’s worth saying that many senior figures in Karhide were trying to find ways to contain Genly’s troublesome presence before this point.)
The journey to the facility is a terrible one, with Genly shoved naked into the back of a windowless vehicle which chunters overland, along with perhaps thirty other people he can’t see in the pitch-black confines of the cabin. They have one measly cup of water each day between them (meaning they sometimes get nothing to drink at all), very little food and no blankets, forcing them to huddle together for warmth. One of them dies along the way; his body is simply pushed into a corner. At least it means there’s a bit more food and water to go round.
The facility itself is an awful place, with everyone assigned to tough labour squads, underfed and inadequately clothed in the icy conditions. “The intent of the place and its regime was punitive, but not destructive, and I think it might have been endurable, without the druggings and the examinations,” Genly observes, and shortly after, he notes that “The principle of the Farm was work or die.”
As you read this section of the book, and however many times you encounter it on subsequent re-readings, you feel the horror of it but you also dimly manage to tell yourself how glad you are that such things won’t ever happen in real life in this day and age. And then, on Christmas Day in 2023, The Guardian reported this story, and the delusion comes crashing down.
The feed of Alexei Navalny stories on The Guardian makes for grim reading, full of details which veer from the ludicrous to the chilling and back again. If you weren’t reading about it in a newspaper, you’d be easily forgiven for thinking this was the outline for a piece of allegorical sci-fi.
The description of the conditions around the prison in which Navalny has been incarcerated could have come straight from the pages of a Le Guin novel — “Conditions at the colony are notoriously tough and it is surrounded by mountains and tundra, with freezing dark winters making way for short, mosquito-infested summers” — as could its brutal, poetic name: “Polar Wolf”.
