Beautifully written; this makes me want to read more Le Guin.
I wasn’t bowled over by the ideas on offer. In part this is probably because this book is an innovator; others have used sci-fi to examine gender in more radical ways since, which makes this feel slightly tame.
But I suspect that my reaction is also in part because I’m a man. The signature implication of Gethenian physiology is that things in their culture aren’t gendered. This mostly registered to me as bland ambiguity, but I can imagine that might have to do with my own gender being the default for so many things in my own culture (witness even Le Guin employing “he” as the pronoun used for ungendered characters).
But though I might have a blind spot when it comes to the novelty of the setting, I feel pretty confident in saying the plot is thin. It’s driven largely by politics, but those politics are presented through a veil of intentionally alien concepts (shifgrethor, for example) that prevent the reader from feeling excited, Wolf Hall-style, even when very little is actually happening.
Inscrutable political shuffling then gives way to some heroic questing, but with an extremely spare cast of characters. That’s fine for a Jack London story, but I’m not sure it works here — particularly since Le Guin shies away from making us uncomfortable with the Ai/Estraven dynamic’s final destination.
Basically: needed more kemmering.
“Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.”
A favorite quote of mine since I first read it.
I had similar sentiments. Lots of good options with Le Guin but let me suggest The Dispossessed. Writing is just as good and the ideas though still not quite novel are better delivered. It is similar in that she presents an aspect of modern culture from the perspective of a character/culture with a critically different starting point, but here instead of gender it is modern capitalism. It is more nuanced and considered treatment of economic organization than I’ve seen about anywhere in fiction. Almost comes off as nostalgic.