This book is so wildly out of my wheelhouse that I don’t really feel qualified to assess it. I’ve almost never read science fiction and rarely read short story collections, and I’m sure I’ve never read a book that was both. There were some stories I loved and some I hated (luckily, the longer novella at the end hit a solid “liked a lot” on that scale), but without a doubt I now have tremendous respect for Le Guin as a writer. It’s astonishing to me that you can take such potent, human concepts as sexuality, adolescence, religion, duty, privacy, exclusion, dignity, and class, turn them completely on their heads to mean something totally different than what they mean to us, and have them still resonate as so real and human. Is that the goal of science fiction? I guess it probably is.
Unfortunately, the opening story (Coming of Age in Karhide) was my favorite by far, and I spent the rest of the book hoping to get back that can’t put it down feeling and never really did. I absolutely hated Old Music and the Slave Women and The Birthday of the World, which was disheartening since they were past the mid-point and back to back so I felt like I’d never slog through them, but it wrapped up with the satisfying Paradises Lost, a novella about what was supposed to be a ten-generation ship on its way to a new planet after we trashed the old one. It still isn’t really my genre, but I’m glad I read it.