In "The Left Hand of Darkness" I really struggled with naming, maybe because they didn't have a latin-based structure. But I really appreciated on the other hand her effort to make sense of the language, toponomy and so on all together.
[SPOILER ALERT]
. . . . .
I liked that she convinced me that the main character was a women in the beginning, but later revealing it's actually a man.
Otherwise the whole book read more like a fantasy novel than sci-fi. I found it rather boring too.
The story starts from his first-person perspective, and he talks about how he feels insecure and about his fancy robes.
Try "Too Like Lightning" by Ada Palmer :)
>The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from Northern Europe, which is why it was about white people. I’m white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for “young adults”) might not identify straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees—hoping that the reader would get “into Ged’s skin” and only then discover it wasn’t a white one.
Also the geek in me loves the Ansible ;-)
Have you read The Lord of the Rings, and did you have trouble with the made up non-Latin names? (you'd be in good company: I know plenty of people have trouble with Tolkien languages, which I also find puzzling, because I simply assume "these are foreign names" and go on with the plot)