It has some interesting explorations on first contact but despite having a potentially interesting world, an exhausting amount of time is taken up by Ai being confused about Gethen sex & gender yet never passing beyond a surface level conversation on the topic. While it was groundbreaking for 1969, I can’t help but feel its exploration of gender and feminism to be a little half-arsed in today’s context. Nothing specifically bad, but I don’t see how it can be so elementary when so much of the book is occupied by it, to the detriment of character development and the broader world building.