Inga

This was my first Le Guin and, having just finished it, I am still processing it. It is scifi of its era, very philosophical, exploring ideas about humanity and human thinking more than adventures in space which is how we think about scifi in the ‘modern' age.

This book is about society - a socialist ‘utopia' on the moon and its capitalist ‘sister' on the planet below. It is about anarchy, about how people rely on one another for their survival even if they don't want to.

It is very dry, like all philosophical scifi that I have read, though this was better than Asimov for me - I could not get on with how he wrote - I found Foundation very boring to read.

This, like Dune, is a book that warrants rereading.

This is not a book I would have willingly chosen to read, its not really a genre I tend to gravitate towards. But saying that, I enjoyed this book more than I was expecting to. Yes, parts were difficult to read, without getting into too much detail there are some taboo things in this book. But at the heart of it it is a story of love and loss, of grieving for the life you though you were going to have but didn't, how the bitterness that some people hold onto when their lives don't turn out the way they wanted can poison future generations.

Would I recommend this book to others? Yes, but with warnings about the taboo sections.