HAVEN'T READ IT

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 et...

The reading I most wanted to respond to this week was Jo Walton's SF reading protocols  post on Tor.com. I've never really gotten into Science Fiction, but it's not for lack of trying. I end up feeling confused for the first 150 pages, which is enough to make me abandon a book altogether these days. (Stay tuned for my annotation of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness  later this week.) I appreciated this post for recognizing that my frustrations with SF are not related to lack of intelligence or effort. I just haven't developed the same tools as readers who have engaged with SF since childhood. I don't know when to wonder or ask questions about a detail, or when to "skitter over the surface" of an info-dump the same way my SF fan peers do. I saw myself in that description, for sure. However, my problem with the article is that it heavily implies, and at least at one point outright states, that someone "who doesn't have the skills...