"...when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed."

I do not think I understand this book at all. Even as I was reading it, I could not shake off the feeling that there was something deep and subtle about those words and I won’t be able to understand them on my first read no matter how carefully I read. There were signs of cyberpunk in there, but instead of a web of information and technology there are mystic powers of the human mind that entangle the humans. There is also the winter planet, diametrically opposite to the desert planet in the Dune. Just as the desert planet in the home for the most ferocious warmongering race, the ice palnet is home for a pacifist one, one that has subverted their belligerent urges to more nuanced complexities in life. It is a race unlike any other, a genderless race, where a king gives birth to a child.

I love the introduction of this book. It is the most poetic text I have read about writing, something that I’ve always felt and have never been able to articulate and express properly. “The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.” When I hear these words what comes to mind is Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. As Wittgenstein said, “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest.”

I might read this book again and see what I can comprehend in the next iteration.