Winter's King - Conception

Conception

The story takes place on Gethen, the same planet shown in more detail The Left Hand of Darkness. It was in fact Le Guin's first vision of that place:

"When I wrote this story, a year before I began the novel The Left Hand of Darkness, I did not know that the inhabitants of the planet Winter of Gethen were androgynes. By the time the story came out in print, I did, but too late to amend such usages as 'son', 'mother', and so on..."

"In revising the story for this edition... I use the feminine pronoun for all Gethenians - while preserving certain masculine titles such as King and Lord, just to remind one of the ambiguity... The androgyny of the characters has little to do with the events of the story."

The original story centred on the idea that someone could age 12 years while the rest of their world had aged sixty. (Itself one of many to address the point made by Einstein: that if he could travel far enough and fast enough he could return and be younger than his own son.) A similar idea was used by Le Guin's in the earlier short story Semley's Necklace, later expanded as Rocannon's World. But that was a Rip Van Winkle-type fairy tale, where a person goes underground in the company of dwarves or elves, spending an apparently brief time but on emerging finding whole generations had elapsed. Here, the Gethenians understand the science of what has happened. The focus is psychological, someone confronting their own child who is now much older than they are.

It also includes the idea of mind manipulation, used earlier and rather differently in City of Illusions.