[Part of a joint review with The Sparrow]
LHD was a re-read, and I picked up The Sparrow in a used bookstore. They were… similar superficially, dissimilar on a deeper level, and then similar again in morals. I think.

They’re not easy books, and they both benefit from a re-read. They’re both about an individual or small group who is/are the first on an alien planet, who deal with weird and perplexing alien biology and morals, and who end the book in contact with a newly alien group of humans.

Basically, Left Hand of Darkness is about aliens and humans, but it’s really about gender and sexism; The Sparrow is about aliens and humans, but it’s really about God.

They’re both also about the incredible strength and despair of humans in unconscionable situations, the ability of aliens to be human in all our best and worst ways, alien ecology, the act of creation, love, death, and trauma.

The Sparrow is about the first discovered aliens and the Jesuit mission sent to make contact with them. It’s about what we’re to make of God when we’re not the only ones to leave the Garden of Eden, and it’s also about the unimaginable cruelty of God’s creations. It doesn’t answer what we’re to make of such a God, which is almost left up as a challenge to the reader. It asks hard, impossible questions, it refuses to back down from the inescapable conclusions we must draw, and then it equally refuses to answer the questions–not a cop out, but rather the same strength that it posed the questions with. The questions are unanswerable; to answer them would be to reduce them. The conclusion, as such, is not easy or kind.

And yet, at the end, both books reach the conclusion that it is not the ends, it is the means, and humanity will always, always clutch at the stars. It is our geas, our doom. To ask us to stop exploring would be to ask us to stop breathing; all we can do is explore with the best of intents.