Trying to explain the human condition, Socrates resorted to a story about people chained in a cave, watching shadows on a wall. If generations of philosphy teachers are to be trusted, this is—in the deepest sense of the word—a true story; yet it is set in a different world, one based on very arbitrary rules. By the time I came across this tale, I was already a Fantasy reader, and it came as no surprise that as philosophical thought needed concrete examples to be expressed, these examples were most often to be found in fables or myths. It appeared to me, then as now, that Fantasy has an affinity to philosophy. This study is the result of an exploration along the lines of that hunch.

Thus, the aim of this memoir is to highlight the literary tools provided for philosophical questioning by the Fantasy mode. The redefinition of gender is meant as a specific example, since the whole spectrum of philosophy would be far too broad to analyse—politics, theology, sociology, etc. The corpus is restricted to two contemporary novels, by two award-winning American writers: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Orson Scott Card’s Enchantment (1999).

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