It is indeed one of the great titles!
I'm going to start off by saying I'm glad to have read it. It's an important book and I was entertained overall.
Yeah, there's a "but" implied there! It strikes me as very much a book of its time, an outgrowth of the burgeoning women's and race movements. I don't think it's aged well. The take on sex/gender/sexuality was determinative and explicitly a case of either/or, whether it be masculine/feminine
or gendered/androgynous. It's heteronormative and what comes across as extremely biased in its attitudes toward women. I don't know enough about Le Guin to know whether that reflected her own attitudes or whether she was projecting her sense of what men think; I suspect that it's some of both.
Aside from that, I thought the world-building was tedious; it was far too much tell and not show. Again, I suspect it reflects its time. I don't read sci-fi or fantasy much if at all, but my sense is that the best of the current authors rely on knowing their world thoroughly and conveying it indirectly and consistently. More of the onus is on the reader, a very good thing!
Since I'm not grounded at all in classic sci-fi, I'm going to be interested to learn how this fits in with the literature. I know it was groundbreaking and it gets a pass for that.
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Originally Posted by stuartjmz
not nuanced at all, unlike the androgyny/bisexuality that became the book's most famous feature.
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As I said above, I didn't find the take on sexuality to be at all nuanced.
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Originally Posted by gmw
For example the developing relationship between Genly and Estraven is obviously central to the story, and this is about ambition, foresight, friendship, loyalty, betrayal and failure to understand one another; gender is in there behind all that, it is important to the story, but it's not the entire story.
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I agree that the relationship between Genly and Estraven was central to the story, but I didn't think there was enough plot. Once you strip out the world-building, both Genly's exegesis and the supporting historical and mythical texts, there was very little story left.