A triumph of the author's imagination, "A Woman of the Iron People" was an entertaining read. At the same time, it was worrisome because of the fact that HUmans proliferate too much and are hateful and destructive, so now I'm worried about the future of the planet they invaded. At the ending, the shamaness tells them to stay on their island, and not to bring more HUmans from the ship, but in the last chapter, it is questionable if they are obeying those orders. See how believable Arnason made her craft? ( )

This one sure did take a long time to read for such a short book.
On the one hand this book is fascinating. Anthropologists of a future Earth being dropped onto another planet with a similarly configured species of intelligent life. Sign me up for reading it, right?
But it wasn't just the explorations of the cultures of the aliens that got to me, it was the exploration through asides of a possible future Earth that's very different from the one we know now already.
I was fond of how thoroughly anthropologist Lixia is in this story. Not every form of fictional anthropologist does, most even break the ethical rules of the field, but Lixia is pretty close here. The story discusses ethics codes a lot, and really deals with the complications that can cause someone to break them, or cause them to be unusable on a situation. Straight up, this is one of the best depictions of anthropology I've seen in fiction.
The problem with the books is that it's dense enough in meaning to need a slow read, to need someone's attention on it and not half on other tasks.
So yeah, this gets a full five stars from me, but it's probably dense and boring to a lot of readers. ( )

4.5

This is the story of humans going into space and meeting a sentient species for the first time.

I liked:
- the characters, whether human or not. They were not unidimensional, all evil or all good
- the other planet, how it's like Earth but not
- the question of intervention, the moral dilemma of the human expedition

I liked less: a very open end. There isn't a resolution of the situation. The reader is invited to think about it by him/herself. ( )

This has the most misleading cover ever! A different furry people with separation between men and women. Slow moving but not quite glacial. It would have been a much better read in the early 90s. Too much mix of technologies for a mostly nomadic people, but hey well, they’re aliens. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2883700.html

I enjoyed A Woman of the Iron People a lot. It's a great piece of speculative anthropological writing, about vulnerable Earth people exploring a planet where gender roles are very different from ours (men live solitary hunting lives, and possibly are not all that bright; women run all the settlements and technology). The tensions in the human starship crew and among the locals are sharply defined. It's in the shadow of The Left Hand of Darkness, obviously, but I thought Arnason managed the exceptionally difficult feat of creating an alien society and then concentrating on those who are deviant within that society's own constraints - by contrast, Gethen seems to be full of "straight" Gethenians. ( )