The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K LeGuin

An envoy gets sent to a winter planet to talk its people into joining a commonwealth of worlds. The catch is the people: Gethenians have no fixed sex. They're neutral most of the month and only become male or female during kemmer, and it isn't the same one every time.

Nice story with a genuinely interesting premise.

Genly Ai, the envoy, comes alone and unarmed. That’s deliberate policy because one man can’t invade anybody, so nobody has to be scared of him. Problem is nobody believes him either.

He deals with two states. Karhide is a monarchy with a paranoid king, and it’s chaotic and personal and runs on feuds. Orgoreyn looks more orderly and modern but it’s really a bureaucratic oligarchy with a secret police and labour camps they call voluntary farms; of course Genly ends up in one of these camps.

What holds the whole thing together is shifgrethor which is something like prestige or standing. Everybody is constantly maneuvering for it and Genly never quite reads it right. He spends most of the book misjudging Estraven, the prime minister who gets exiled for trying to stop a border dispute from turning into an actual war. Gethenians haven’t invented proper organised warfare yet, and the plot is basically them getting close to it for the first time.

Estraven breaks him out of the camp and the two of them cross the ice cap on foot. Eighty days, eight hundred miles, hauling a sledge. This is the best part of the book. Two people who’ve misunderstood each other the entire time finally stuck in a tent together with nothing to do but talk. Genly only really gets Estraven after he’s dead, shot at the border he was trying to cross back over.

The ship only comes down at the end, after that, as a last resort. It lands in Karhide, which hands the king the prestige win Orgoreyn had been chasing all along, and that’s what finally gets Gethen to sign on. The prestige game decides it, not the technology.

Worth saying that Le Guin later picked at her own book because she used “he” for everyone throughout, and you never see a Gethenian doing anything traditionally female, like raising a kid. So in the end even the premise falls flat.

Recommended. Slow in the middle, but the ice crossing pays for it.