Science Fiction in Making the Strange Familiar

     If I were to approach you on the street and tell you that Ursula K. LeGuin's story about a hermaphroditic alien's first sexual differentiation and experience in a communal mating house, taking place on an unknown alien planet where people always refer to the current year as Year One and young children toss babies around for fun, speaks to the universal themes of adolescent anxiety and the comforts of family, you might think me a bit strange. But hear me out. What LeGuin accomplishes in her short story Coming of Age in Karhide is a classical anthropological transformation: taking what is strange and alien, and finding in it something familiar.

     She starts off establishing the setting - right off the bat the reader is thrown off by a string of unfamiliar names and terms that gives the impression that they are not quite on Earth anymore. The reader gradually learns, through the use of contextual clues, that this is a society of periodically hermaphroditic individuals, living in communal and inter-generational "hearths" of roughly one and a half hundred individuals. The narrator is an old individual, some sixty-odd years (not necessarily Earth years) old, looking back on his/her youth. A great deal of importance is attached to the word "kemmer", which the reader slowly figures out is the word used to reference the periodic sexual differentiation of these normally asexual beings into either male or female forms, for the purposes of having sex (which usually occurs in someplace called a "kemmerhouse"). 

     Having created this strange and new world, LeGuin wastes no time in making seem as familiar as possible. As odd as it may seem, anyone who has gone through the trials and tribulations of puberty (read: everyone) can identify with the narrator's descriptions of his/her feelings before and during his/her momentous first kemmer. S/he talks about how s/he wants to be treated like an adult, but was still frustrated by her/his own immaturity. S/he mentions how frustrated s/he is at her own clumsiness, and the confusion and shame s/he experiences when her body starts to change in new unexpected ways. S/he's confused but intrigued by her/his first erection, and just about horrified when s/he wakes up one day to bloodstained sheets. This teen analogy culminates in the narrator's first sexual encounter, after which s/he falls in love with her/his first partner (only to immediately fall in love with her/his next partner, and so on. Typically teen.) Cleverly, by making her narrator a hermaphrodite, LeGuin makes her/his experiences relevant to readers of both genders. 

    Amusingly, LeGuin also participates in the other major transformation of anthropology - making the familiar strange. Throughout the story, the narrator compares her/himself to the Aliens - strange, savage creatures, some with supposedly large breasts and other particularly repulsive individuals with hair around their mouth, always controlled by passion and permanently stuck in kemmer. It's not long before an observant reader thinks, "Hey, wait. This sounds familiar..."