The Left Hand of Darkness

A bad audiobook narrator can destroy what would otherwise be a good book. I can't pinpoint it exactly, but I have great difficulty with anything narrated by George Guidall. As for the book, it explores a person that is trying to convince a planet to join his group of civilizations. The people don't really see the point. They also live in a world where most everyone frequently changes gender. They view those that stick to the same gender as deviants. 

The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands

In her short story collection Ursula Le Guin has a focus on the relationships. Many of the stories explore matriarchal societies. In some, males are primarily "drones" that serve only for the impregnation of dominant females. Love is completely separate from procreation and not really related to gender. It poses interesting questions about male dominance in societies. Is it in part to compensate for the lack of need of males for human reproduction? After all, a society with a 100 to 1 female to male ratio could reproduce just as much as one with a 1 to 1 ratio. How are men valuable?

Other stories explore different groups of people and even different organisms. Would people be able to understand the communications of other animals? In a society where people can read animal communications, wouldn't reading plant communications be like we see animal communications today?

In the intro, the author expresses concern about being pigeonholed in "speculative fiction." She doesn't like the term and doesn't like any of the "genre fiction" labels. However, much of her work does use future societies to explore social constructs. This gives her just enough distance to ask the tough questions about us.

Lightspeed: Year One

The collection of audio short stories from the lightspeed anthology. The stories are hit or miss. Many of them are very dark. (In one, space traveler eats the entire crew of his ship, only to be eaten by natives once he arrives.) There were a few that stood out positively. In one, there was a secret message from aliens that technology will lead to the downfall of civilization. In another, elephants came in to a town. They eventually knocked over some bad architecture. But people felt a little bad that they lost control.
There seems to be some good stuff in this Lightspeed, but also a lot of not-so-great to wade through.