Annotation #3 - Science Fiction

Summary:
The Ekumen have sent First Envoy Genly Ai to the planet Winter to convince its inhabitants to join mankind in unity. Winter's inhabitants include the Gethenians, who are genderless except during mating cycles, when each can become either male or female. Genly is thrust into an alien sociopolitical world with strange rules and shifting loyalties. When Estraven, the King's Ear and the closest thing Genly has to an ally, is unexpectedly banished from the Domain, Genly's hopes of easily persuade the mad King of Karhide to join the Ekumen are dashed.

In order to accomplish his singular goal, Genly must journey to the ends of Winter: to ask a question of a group of spiritual foretellers, court a rival civilization full of spies and double-crossers, survive imprisonment and interrogation at a Farm, and finally, cross the treacherous Ice of Winter with Estraven the Traitor.

Science Fiction Characteristics:

• Explore moral, social, intellectual, philosophical, and ethical questions against a setting outside everyday reality. The societies on Winter put the problems and questions on Earth into stark relief, like a shadow on snow. What role does a genderless population play in their country's warless history, and what can we call a family? Can society advance when so much time and energy is spent trying to survive in an inhospitable place? Is loyalty to one's country a matter of pride or perversion of self-interest? These questions are relevant even now. I was shocked to learn this story was originally published in 1969 because the problems it grapples with still feel fresh and urgent to me today. "Ambiguity is a key feature of the genre as well. Multiple questions are raised, but there are seldom clear-cut answers to what is right and wrong" (Wyatt & Saricks, 2019, p. 95).
• Language is crafted to suit the story line and reinforce the intellectual and speculative nature of the genre. Genly is learning new words as we go along in this story, the most curious of which is shifgrethor, somewhat confusingly defined as "prestige, face, place, the pride-relationship, the untranslatable and all-important principle of social authority in Karhide and all civilizations of Gethen." It is no surprise that the civilizations on Winter have many words for snow. Le Guin's language itself shifts effortlessly between detailing the events of Genly's journey to an almost biblical voice in chapters sharing pieces of the mythology of Gethen.
• Tone is used to disorient readers and highlight issues. To say I felt disoriented reading this is an understatement. I'd barely get a sense of the world Genly found himself in before the story's sands would shift and we'd start all over in another unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people. This forced me to grasp onto the only thing I knew to be true: Genly's mission.
• Characters such as aliens and otherworldly creatures underscore the atmosphere and emphasize otherness. An envoy to an alien world is the perfect narrator for a story about, well, an alien world. The reader can feel connected to Genly because, although he claims to have studied the civilization and seems to be able to speak their language, there are so many subtitles of life on Winter that can only be learned in the first-person, and we are right there with him. It also allowed Le Guin to talk about the differences between the Ekumen and Gethenians in a natural way.
• Focus of the story drives the pacing; if there are more adventurous elements, pacing is usually faster, while if ideas are emphasized, pacing is more leisurely. I felt as though the scenes set in cities flew by, while the trek across The Ice dragged forever. This was an effective way of making me empathize with Genly and Estraven's dangerous and arduous path.

Read-a-likes:

• Read another from Le Guin's Hainish Cycle. Planet of Exile is #2. (All can be read as stand-alone novels.) 
• Not ready to leave Winter? Try Winter's King, Hainish Cycle #4.5.
• Learn more about the author and her extensive and prolific career in Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin by Carl Howard Freeman
• Like your SciFi a little more....down to earth? Try Octavia Butler's Earthseed series, starting with the first book, Parable of the Sower

My Review: ★★★★☆
I was humbled by this book. I was confused for, oh, approximately 200 pages, and it's only about 320 pages long. But I kept at it. I was determined to finish it for this annotation. I don't read a lot of science fiction, and when I do, I prefer stories that at least start in a more coherent, relatable setting, like Jeff VanderMeer's Area X trilogy or Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I'm interested in stories that are about the end of the world as we know it, but still heavily factor in the world as we know it. So this book was a complete departure from my comfort zone. I particularly enjoyed the chapters that provided context to the foreign planet through legends and fables. It's a marvel that Le Guin could make a civilization feel so deep and old by strategically placing those chapters between the modern day action. I also liked thoughtful turns of phrase that sounded almost taoist, such as "Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going." and "It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke." In the end, although confusion was still my most frequent emotion, I felt a whole range, and by the time the journey concluded, I was sad to see these characters go.