I write this review only for people like me who might, like me, enjoy literature and have reservations about reading sci-fi, but similarly have an interest in Ursula le Guin to try some sci-fi. I found this book really hard to get through. The ideas (political ideals and economic systems in the 1970s transported into a world and a moon) are well established, but the writing is often slow, the naming systems and world-building too convoluted, and the pace trudges in an over-lengthy novel. I will try something else by le Guin, who has an excellent mind, but this was not for me.

I take this quote from the book, part of the excellent ideas expressed, and unfortunately something I would also use to summarise the story: Excess is excrement. Excrement retained in the body is poison.