Grounding the Reader - The Importance of Familiarity
An examination of why Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness was so hard for me to get into, yet became one of my favorite reads of 2025.
I recently finished The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, an excellent science fiction novel originally published in 1969 that examines gender and sexual identity through an alien society that is androgynous—being neither male nor female—save for a few days every month.
The Left Hand of Darkness is one of those books that is so beautifully written and so thought-provoking that by the end of it you’ve gained a new perspective on life. It is an example of the best fiction out there; proven by the fact it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1970.
It is also incredibly difficult to get into.
The book takes place on the alien world of Winter, with the only “human”—a character named Genly Ai—sent as an envoy to bring Winter into the knowledge-sharing civilization of the Ekumen, an interplanetary conglomerate.
And if I’ve lost you already, the first 200 pages of this 300-page novel aren’t going to be an easy journey.
Why Does This Happen?
Every story has a learning curve, and speculative fiction—namely science-fiction, fantasy, and some horror—have some of the steepest learning curves out there. It makes sense. These are genres that are introducing entirely new worlds, myths, magics, technologies, and creatures to us. They’re genres that require excellent storytelling and description because they often are describing the imagined. The inexplicable. The impossible.
Regardless of genre, authors must introduce the world to their readers before they can describe how the plot and characters will be moving and changing that world. They must place the reader on solid ground before they can guide them through the story.
Author’s Note:
“Grounding” is definitely not something I’ve come up with. In fact, it’s something I am historically bad at. My editor on Truth’s Overture gave me several handouts and writing craft book recommendations on grounding because I was so bad at it.
It’s also called “orienting the reader,” which is probably a better phrase, but I like “grounding” more. It makes it sound like the prose is in trouble.
To use Deception Point by Dan Brown as a counter example—a thriller set in the modern day—Brown grounds the reader with a high-stakes political campaign, an election cycle, a government conspiracy, and a top-secret research base filled with scientific experts. And he does all of this in the first couple of chapters. By the time we’re 30 pages into the book (if that) we know the whos, whats, and wheres of our story well enough to be taken on whatever journey Brown chooses to take us on.
All of that can be done so quickly because we as readers know what an election cycle is, we’re already familiar with political campaigns, and we’ve all no doubt dabbled in our share of government conspiracy-theorizing. All Dan Brown has to do is tell us “there’s a sleezy president-elect who’s willing to do anything to get ahead in the election” for us to know exactly what kind of person he is and what role he’s going to play in the story.
Getting readers on board with “an entire planet populated by sexless humans who see the dichotomy of sex as a perversion trying to be brought into an interplanetary conglomerate by one such ‘pervert’” is, understandably, a lot more difficult.
However
Just because a task is more difficult does not mean it should take three, or even four times the page count to get readers on board.
The Left Hand of Darkness takes its time grounding the reader, and it does not hold your hand. The book is filled with hard-to-pronounce fantastical words and naming conventions for people (Therem Harth rem ir Estraven), places (Orgoryen), and ideas (Shifgrethor, which is, in the actual text, described as an untranslatable word on this fictional world of Winter (which is also called Gethen. Sometimes.)).
The story also jumps around a lot, and not just between point of view characters. One chapter may be told from the protagonist’s, Genly’s, point of view as he is invited to attend an audience with the king, while the next is a historical myth about the planet’s cultural view on incest, while another is a seemingly unrelated story of a man 2,000 years earlier who died receiving a prophecy.
This follows a trend I’ve noticed in speculative fiction—especially award-winning speculative fiction. Dan Simmons’s Hyperion is all over the place: jumping between point of view characters, timelines, and nested frame stories. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin uses similar storytelling methods, as well as third- and second-person perspective shifts.
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson is another example, where an entirely fictional world, magic, and ecology are slowly revealed to the reader over the course of 1,000 pages with interspersed epigraphs, interludes, and flashbacks.
Now, Let Me Clarify
This is not a bad thing. People love these stories. I love these stories. God, I write these stories.
Author’s Note:
No, really. Of the 3 unpublished novels I’ve written: one has a second-person frame narrative, another has non-linear storytelling, and the third uses first- and third-person perspective AND past, present, and future tense.
My therapist has defined this as “a personal problem.”
There are few things as satisfying as getting immersed in a new world you’ve fought so hard to understand and live in. Especially when, by the time you finish reading, you just want to go back to the beginning and continue living in it, which is exactly how I felt about Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
However, I didn’t start feeling that way until 2/3 of the way through the book.
There reaches a point in the story where Genly and his companion, Estraven, must cross through the polar ice-cap (of a planet covered entirely in ice and snow, so, you know, not very hospitable) to reach the government that will listen to Genly’s plea while avoiding execution from another government.
It is a long, harrowing trek that takes almost 80 days, through unimaginably inhospitable lands where the only support network these two people, these two near-strangers, have is one another. Together they experience the arctic beauty and dangers of frozen oceans, volcanos, glaciers, and ice-melt crevices. They learn. They grow. And we get to grow alongside them. Feeling them connect and adapt and risk their lives together for a common goal that transcends their differences in culture and gender and politics.
And goddamn it, why did I have to get lost in 200 pages of politics, sex cult prophecy dens, and unexplainable “shifgrethor” before getting to the GOOD STUFF?!
That’s the question. Why does the beginning take so long? Why is the “on-ramp” to a new world and story often so difficult to get through? Why do so many people recommend fantasy and science-fiction books with the caveat that “it gets really good after the first 300 pages, trust me”?
This is far from the first time I’ve asked this question. Some of my favorite reads of all time have made me ask this question—Herbert’s Dune, Wang’s The Sword of Kaigen, El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s This is How You Lose the Time War, Ruocchio’s The Empire of Silence, and Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series, just to name a few.
However, it was by reading The Left Hand of Darkness that I think I finally found an answer, and a way to avoid the dreaded “on-ramp” in my own writing.
I don’t have a reason to care about the fictional world and its politics without first caring about a character.
And some of these characters take their sweet ass time getting charismatic.
Where To Find the Ground
Often, the advice I’ve received to ground readers is to treat your opening like a film’s establishing shot. Take things from the broad view, see everything in macro, then come in on our characters doing something interesting in that world. Start the story like you would start a film.
But film has two things books don’t: audio and visuals (Okay, probably more than just two things, but you get the point). An establishing shot in a movie can communicate a whole lot of things, even if it’s the same shot, only edited differently. A black-and-white, raining shot over Queens, New York with the slow vibrato of a saxophone and a sultry voice-over narrator ground the reader completely differently than the same shot with a BIG ASS LOCATION NAME like the one from Captain America: Civil War.
Author’s Note:
Those goddamn location names from Civil War are still the funniest establishing shot changes I’ve ever witnessed. I think about them at least once a month. I always remember them being way bigger than that, though.
Viewers can build a connection with a setting in film because they have something visual to map their ideas and thoughts onto. Even for fantastical settings, such as Avatar’s Pandora or The Lord of the Rings’ Middle Earth, having a visual and audio establishment can pull the audience in almost immediately. Novels don’t have that (short of book covers, which is probably why those suckers are so important).
However, novels have something films don’t.
They let us get inside a person’s head.
Character intimacy is an interesting tool in an author’s toolkit. At any given moment, I can know exactly what the point of view character is thinking, feeling, how they’re experiencing the world, and how they’re reacting to it. I get to see how they view other characters. What their exact thoughts are.
And the sooner I can empathize with that character, the sooner I’ll care about what they care about.
Getting an idea of the fascinating world, culture, ecology, politics, and a myriad of other things is helpful information. I would argue that books like The Left Hand of Darkness are as evocative and effective as they are is, at least in part, because I have an understanding of all those things.
However, for the first 200 pages of The Left Hand of Darkness, I don’t care about Genly. He’s rough, skeptical, standoffish, and misogynistic. He’s incredibly unlikable, and his attitude toward everything around him is antagonistic, which makes me as the reader A) not empathize with Genly and his goals, and B) adopt his attitude toward the world around him. It’s hard to care about the audience with the king when Genly doesn’t have a positive perspective on the king.
It isn’t until Genly is broken, beaten, and on a journey that forces him to confront his flaws and work toward hope and survival that I actually started caring about him. Once I did, I cared about his goals, and since his goals are so deeply steeped in Winter’s culture and politics, it reframed my entire attitude toward all of that.
But if I had empathized with Genly earlier, that reframing would have simply been framing, and the first couple hundred pages would have been a lot more engaging.
But All That’s to Say
If I were a different reader, perhaps the opening of politics and environment in The Left Hand of Darkness would have been perfect for me, and I would have hated Genly and Estraven’s personal journey across the icecap.
Perhaps the experience of reframing the beginning of the book so completely that I found a love for the first 2/3s posthumously was the point. Maybe that’s what Le Guin was trying to achieve.
In the end, grounding the reader depends on the reader, the storyteller, and the goals of the story. What matters is finding a point of familiarity—giving the reader something to latch onto—so that they can have stakes in the story they’re reading, regardless of its goals.
Because if a reader doesn’t care about the story, it doesn’t matter what the storyteller has to say.
For My Own Writing
If I want a story that awes the reader with its incredible world and history, perhaps the prologues often found in epic fantasy novels like Sanderson’s The Way of Kings or Erikson’s Malazan series would be the right route.
Perhaps if I want to ground the reader in the absurd comedy they can expect in the story, I would opt for a beginning like Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
More often than not, I like telling stories centered on characters and their internal journey through self-discovery and change. I like getting personal with characters, and making the reader empathize with them. Which is why I will likely ground readers by getting into those characters heads.
However, it’s important to note there’s not one right way to ground the reader. One day, I may want to tell a story about a world and politics and culture of a people fundamentally different than our own. Perhaps I will want to tell a story about breaking through those cultural differences to survive and inspire empathy for a people so entirely alien than us.
And if I do, perhaps I will ground my reader in that story the same way Ursula K. Le Guin did in The Left Hand of Darkness, and some other naive author will miss the point and write a long essay about the importance of character empathy and grounding the reader in familiarity before diving into the unknown.
I just hope that if they do write such an essay, they’ll remember to ground me.
With a Smile,
Quain Holtey