I know this is a classic of science fiction (you can tell because it's one of like thirty SF books you can still reliably find in your local public library) but It's a book that if people were reading it for just the story it tells, and not for the gender-related stuff it brings with it, I ... don't think people would really be clamoring about it. It's slow; and the primary narrator is unpleasant and hapless and staggeringly naive, for someone sent to make First Contact, there are few decisions he makes in the first three-quarters of the novel that are not obviously wrong; it has scattered within it interludes of folk stories of the world the novel's set on, which serve mostly to distract, and to show off that Le Guin can write stuff that makes just as little sense as myth tends to. The gender-related stuff--the people who functionally only have gender a few days a month (and while pregnant)--is clearly the point, here, and this isn't a subtle novel (though it shows its age here, as well). I kinda skittered along the surface, here, never really felt engaged by anything in the novel, though I can't really point at anything in the writing itself other than the age of it. The extra stuff--an introduction and an afterword--don't really add much value, here. I read this (and of course "Omelas") while I was in college and then read basically no other Le Guin ever, and after reading this I kinda think I know why.
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