Digging for Meaning

I intend to write science fiction. Hence I am reading it. Ursula K Le Guin's 'The Left hand of darkness'.  She wrote this in 1969. If she were to write it now, I would think it would be a completely different novel. It is a story set on a cold planet where people do not have one gender. For the most of the time, they are neither male nor female. Once a month, they go in kemmer, a state of being either male or female and desirous of sex. And when they meet an earthling, they think of him as a pervert for being always in kemmer, always male. This perspective though revolutionary, remains the setting and never quite drives the narrative. And that was disappointing for me when i read the book. When i picked up the book, all I knew about the book was this perspective on gender. And it made me really curious of what can happen differently in this world. Instead, I got a story that emphasizes the similarity of the human condition across the planets, across the differ