Genly describes war as “the opposite of civilization,” and this is literally true on Winter—if not on our Earth. The planet’s inhabitants cannot afford the destructiveness of war or risk Death by Planet, by diverting or destroying resources needed for survival. They do not have the luxury of surviving both the climate and war. Writes Genly in Left Hand of Darkness: “On the fortieth day and the two succeeding we were snowed in by a blizzard. During these long hours of lying blotto in the tent Estraven slept almost continuously, and ate nothing, though he insisted I eat, ‘You have no experience with starvation,’ he said. I was humiliated. ‘How much have you—Lord of a Domain, and Prime Minister—’ ‘Genry,’ he replied, ‘we practice privation until we’re experts at it. I was taught how to starve as a child.’” Here on Earth, we are blessed, or have been blessed, with living on a planet with a range of climates, many of which have been mild or fairly easy to adapt to. This is not to say that there have not been terrible periods of famine and privation even before the climate crisis, but we have also been allowed the luxury of a range of acts of the imagination not available to the planet Winter. We have, for example, in truly terrible ways, been allowed the “luxury” of war. Even if recovery from this luxury has varied depending on circumstances of resources and landscape as well. Another, ongoing war we often don’t acknowledge comprises deforestation, devastation caused by contamination by the fossil fuel industry, and the loss of the natural world in so many ways. This war is one largely defined by invisibility or by its sudden absence, which is difficult to quantify or to make manifest in people’s minds even as ghost. How do you memorialize or refer to a nothing that may not have been documented as a verdant forest to begin with? In Tallahassee alone, where I live, over hundreds of acres of forest have been clearcut within city limits in the past two years, wiping out trillions of organisms, including the topsoil, and will be replaced with unaffordable houses on the now terraformed landscape. This isn’t happening in the Amazon—it is happening everywhere. We call this ecocide, but we need a better word or words. Just as the inhabitants of Winter have dozens of words for snow and ice, we need as many words for ecocide.
I don't have much to say about that actual essay, but I'm nitpickily annoyed at the bad case of space filling empire syndrome that map has, cause one of the things I was very struck by and really liked about TLHoD was how well it avoided the Star Trek depicting a planet as a small and ethnically homogeneous country thing, in vibes if not so much in concrete worldbuilding. Like, yeah, the text only actually gives us descriptions of two states that share a border and an offhand mention of another continent or two, but it feels like we might be getting just plot/characterization-relevant glimpses of a more realistically big and diverse world. If I were drawing a fan map of Gethen I'd definitely at least leave some default land color "presumably misc. other states, tribes, etc. here" territory on the great continent.
Also, this makes me think about how I don't think Gethen's politics as described really fits with the "no history of war" concept. Gethen has at least two territorially extensive states that seem to have uncontested sovereignty in most of their territory, which have a framework for relating to each other that seems not that different from our Westphalian system. I don't know what exactly I'd expect the politics of a world with no history of war to look like, but it's not that.
Like, I think the politics of a world without a history of war would be much more decentralized (unless it's a set-up like my idea for how I'd write Yonada, where there was a hegemonic central authority there from day one). Without an implicit threat of violent coercion, why let somebody in a distant city control how your community is run? Like, "no war" removes possibly the biggest structural obstacle to anarchism. I think the closest thing to a geographically extensive territorial state on a world like that might be something kind of like the Medieval Catholic church; an organization which doesn't have uncontested sovereignty in most of its territory but does have a lot of political influence over a very big area. A brewing potential big war in a world like that would probably look more like a brewing civil war between factions with different political ideologies; the rival factions in a conflict like that would function more like political parties or religious sects than sovereign states.
I kind of hate to say this cause I like speculative fiction that explores worlds that are in some ways radically better than ours and I'm not fond of the "they're secretly shittier places than they look" approach to interpreting fiction like that, but I think the politics of Gethen as depicted in the book might make more sense if you assume Gethen doesn't have a history of wars between states but does have an extensive history of wars of conquest and subjugation waged by states against non-state people, analogous to the USA's "Indian Wars" and the wars historical Japanese states waged against the "Emishi."
