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I did like the answering the wrong question part of the foretellers in Karhide (it made me wonder if this provided inspiration to Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), but it seemed to me this didn't really go anywhere (unless we are supposed to question whether the answers provided by this book are to the wrong questions?). The commune-styling of the foretellers had obvious inspiration from such communities in the 60s, even to the extent of feeling temporary (to me) which seemed contrary to how long foretellers had been doing their thing.
The creation myth, and even the harsh planetary setting, seemed mostly there to emphasise theme of duality: snow-white and cold-dark; the inability to see anything on the ice cap when there were no shadows. I liked all this, I thought it was neatly constructed and revealed, but it does feel simplified for the purpose - which is probably to be expected.
The rest of political/religious/spiritual aspects of the novel, for me, were less interesting, because they didn't feel particularly new and they didn't feel as if they reflected what these people were. We have talk of kemmerhouses and hearths, but I felt that none of this was really reflected in what we saw in the book. That is; it didn't feel different enough to match that of a people who were all one gender/non-gender. However, I can see that making the communities too different may have distracted from the theme Le Guin was trying to explore and so threatened to turn the book into something quite different.
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