This is my first Ursula Le Guin book, and I found it oddly self-conscious. It knows that it is saying something "important." It knows, before leaving the womb, that it will be "talked about." And yet... I have to admit, I did not find the exploration of gender to be so interesting. Did I miss something? Very little seemed to done with it. It seemed, in a way, designed to be safe and to offend no one. The romance, in as much as it exists, was oddly chaste. Again, this is my first novel I've read by Le Guin, but it has "academic" written all over it. It seems deeply afraid of seeming ridiculous or childish. It wants to be sci-fi, but to also be "better" than sci-fi, better than the trash and pulp.

That said, I greatly enjoyed the trek through the ice. I'm a sucker for stories set on ice. I also found the descriptions of food and discomfort very well done. Worrying about keeping your feet dry, the constantly struggle to keep morale up, worrying about dwindling supplies... It's like Frodo and Sam in Mordor. Why mess with a winning formula? To her credit, she doesn't.

By discomfort, I do *not* mean the torture scenes. I found these, frankly, stupid. Stupid and lurid like a Jack Chick tract. I get it—as a Californian academic lefty, Ursula has to decry the "horrors" of the official bogeymen of the time, the USSR. Orgoreyn, doncha know, is absolutely a facile copy of that government. And like that government in the American mind, it consists of nothing but torture and secret police. This is unlike the monarchy next door, on the other hand where at least people are free in spirit... Stupid stupid stupid. Ursula even channels the Holocaust or the Gulags with the voluntary farms, in a dull and pious little segment. In fact, I found the overall political intrigue hollow and uninteresting.

This might be because Le Guin seems to have a "point" to make. Again, I must warn I have read nothing else by her, so perhaps I am judging too quickly. This is not sci-fi in the Vancian fashion, where Vance sets up a strange world and let's it evolve in all its horror, like a child throwing two bugs he found together in a terrarium to watch them eat each other. No, Le Guin seems to have a point to make, which is not necessarily a problem. The problem is that the Envoy and the Ekumen's way of doing things (which seem to be very much Ursula's view as well) are presented as good and evolved and right, with little to no criticism. Very virtuous! The Envoy, I think, would be at home in the NYT opinion column section, writing about the open trade of ideas.

I still enjoyed it!