All hail Ursula K LeGuin, one of this (and last) century’s foremost writers. If you haven’t read any of her work yet, you should!
LeGuin’s (later*) work tells the truth with clever lies that strip western social norms to their roots in order to better shake the tree. You’ll never look at the world in the same way.
(*Interestingly enough LeGuin started as a fairly conservative Sci Fi writer.)
Then, when you’ve cut your teeth on that, you can move on to Octavia Butler . . .
What is “O”? What is “tell(ing) the truth with clever lies”? I tried to read LeGuin back in the mid-80s and couldn’t finish the book, whatever it was.
I checked out her website, though. And Catwings 5, by a 1st grade class inspired by her work, was certainly an entertaining story.
“O” is a planet in the LeGuin’s Hainish universe. On this bucolic, sustainably managed planet, marriages are quartets rather than couplets.
Telling the truth with lies is something LeGuin refers to in an essay in her non-fiction collection, “The Language of the Night.”
You shoudl try again. “The Left Hand of Darkness” is one of her classics or try some of LeGuin’s short stories, such as “A Fisherman of the Inland Sea.” Also, there are “young adult” stories, such as the Earthsea books, which start off sexist and progess down a quite feminist bent as the author grew in her own thinking.