The Dispossessed

This is one of the most satisfying books about ideologies and intentionally-worn blinders I've ever read. Use of an SF world with two opposed cultures and their economies, social psychologies, and deeply-entrenched biases really allowed Le Guin to write clearly about realpolitik, more so even than most non-fiction writers with their own internal mechanisms.

And Shevek is simply a mensch for all seasons, you gotta love him.

Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed is a very hard book to write about. It's clearly great literature, but exactly why is hard to pin down.

The Dispossessed centers on the story of Shevek, a physicist and idealist, but the true characters of this book are the twinned planets of Urras and Anarres. Urras is a world much like own our, of nations and government and money, a garden planet riven by dominance and war. Anarres is a dry and dusty moon, home to an exile civilization of revolutionary anarchists. The story takes place in alternating chapters, an Urras track beginning with Shevek's escape from Anarres to Urras, and an Anarres track following his life and growing dissatisfaction with his homeworld.

This is a book about revolutionary show more anarchism, about the radical potential for humans to be truly free. But what separates it from most utopian literature is Le Guin's reflexive critique of Anarres. Most utopian literature is about a plan; "if you designed a society like, this is how it'd be perfect." Le Guin shows us a society that is freer and more egalitarian than any that exists on Earth, backed up by a rational language that makes even thoughts of ownership and dominance difficult to express, but she is also wise enough to show how the revolution has become conservative and fearful, how social norms replace law, how the dominance games of politicians and academics still play out in the absence of formal power, and how true freedom must begin and end in the spirit.

The Urras plot concerns Shevek's final work on a Theory of Simultaneity and Sequency (the caps are deserved), a unified theory of physics which would make faster-than-light travel possible, along with the ansible communicator from the rest of Le Guin's Hainish cycle. Fictional physics on this level aren't really my cup of tea, but the book takes a solid run at how cosmology, and how we perceive time, matters as a fundamental basis for society and ideas like property and profit. Shevek's idealism won't let him give his invention to either the grubbing 'invisible parliament' of his own world, which opposes new ideas, or the profiteering and warmongering Urrasian academics who host his stay. There's a war and a great strike, but somehow the action on Urras seems unreal and irrelevant, compared to the dust and hard work of Anarres.

Stepping back to look at the big picture, The Dispossessed covers a lot of the same territory as Left Hand of Darkness, with a lone ambassador coming to another world, but I think The Dispossessed does a better job by giving us some context for Shevek, and his principled opposition to walls and barriers of all kind, especially walls that exist in the head and heart. Le Guin's talk of Simultaneity and Sequency is also about the question "can two people really meet?" and "how do we know when become ourselves?"

This was also a solid year for the Hugos as a whole. The Mote in God's Eye could've easily won in any of the past five years or so. Flow My Tears The Policeman Said is one of my favorite Philip K Dick stories. I haven't heard of Fire Time or Inverted World, but both sound fascinating. show less

As of writing this review, this is my #1 favorite book. I've read it twice in the span of two years, and I very very rarely reread any books. Its the story of two planets, one capitalist (Urras), and the other (Anarres) a anarcho-syndicalist commune. On the anarchist planet there are no laws, and no possessions. Everyone there shares everything.

The plot follows a physicist named Shevek. Each chapter alternates between his life growing up on Anarres and his time spent on Urras.

But the plot isn't the important part of this book, its the examination of it's setting. Chapters on Anarres detail life in an anarchist commune, the good and the bad. Chapters on Urras demonstrate how someone born into a society totally unlike our own reacts to show more our ways.

The first time I read The Dispossessed I was totally enthralled by the idea of living somewhere like Anarres. I desperately wished that we could reshape our society to be more like it. My second read through the downsides and struggles associated with that style of living stuck out to me more.

What I love about this book is how it got me to question the underlying assumptions of our society, and how things could be different. While I've always loved sci-fi, The Dispossessed showed me how the genre can be more than futuristic fantasies, it can tells us a lot about our lives. show less

Magisterial, beautifully written, challenging and dense, yet also somehow approachable, welcoming, and warm. I have to imagine that this is Le Guin at the height of her powers, because it really can't get any better than this, right?

The Dispossessed follows Shevek, a politically active physicist who grew up on the planet Anarres. Anarres, a desolately dry planet akin in many ways to Mars, was settled several hundred years prior to Shevek's birth by anarchist refugees fleeing persecution and injustice on the neighboring planet Urras, whose multiple nation states are politically diverse but lean towards versions of capitalism. The comparison between life on Anarres and Urras is where Le Guin fixates her attention the most. Where as life show more on Anarres is lean and sometimes desperate, requiring an emphasis on mutual aid in order to survive, Urras is a planet of plenty, with massive oceans, forests, and other resources to exploit. As Shevek struggles to develop a new theory of physics and time, he discovers a wall of hidden bureaucracy and socially enforced rules that he didn't believe existed in his planned utopic society. Fighting against these stigmas, he more-or-less forces his way to Urras in the hopes of diversifying his intellectual knowledge base and finally finishing his theory on faster than light travel, while simultaneously breaking a moratorium on interplanetary travel. Shevek sacrifices comfort, safety, and stability in order to be a wall-breaker, and finds out firsthand just how difficult it is to be a revolutionary.

Science fiction often gets laden with the stereotype as a "genre of ideas", de-prioritizing characters and narrative in favor of scientific musings. The Dispossessed does fit that generalization, but in perhaps the best way possible. Le Guin is able to balance a metric fuck load of philosophy and political ideas with characters that I cared deeply about and a plot that, while sometimes dry, managed to keep me near the edge of my seat. Shevek's tender and nuanced relationship with Takver and his childhood friends are memorable and serve to humanize a work that could otherwise get bogged down with the weight of it's philosophical ambitions.

The Dispossessed could've also easily come out as a top-to-bottom polemic, but Le Guin's nuanced perspective allows the reader to develop their own conclusions. Even on the idealized Anarres, there are plenty of internal problems that threaten the personal freedom of it's citizens. We are left to ask which parts of both systems serve to benefit the individual, the stability and equity of society, the planet itself, and the progression of our sphere of knowledge. How can we find the strength and resolve for the revolution to be unending?

There is a distinct humanity to Le Guin's work that elevates it to a level often above her peers. Her prose is often sublime, even when she takes pauses for longer passages of exposition. This is the type of work that could easily be discussed for hours on end. Suffice it to say that it more than lived up to it's singular reputation. Even if you find yourself at odds with its occasionally dry intellectualism and narrative, I still think there's enough here to sink your teeth into. show less

Obra prima, onde as tensões sociais-organizacionais de uma lua-enclave anarquista são contrastadas com as de um planeta plutocrata capitalista, na alternância de duas fases da vida do brilhante físico Shevek, uma em cada locação. Mais que ideias (mas há algumas delas, como a do nome único, e diversas considerações linguísticas - a vida reflete formas de vida, afinal), o livro é impressionante pela linguagem e atenção aos detalhes da psicologia e formação social humana e as relações que compõe cada personagem e situação. Assim, é claro que há pressões, moralismos e repressão mesmo em um enclave anarquista (não há "não-organização", a espontaneidade é construída), há aposta e anseios complexos entre os show more "proprietiers", além de amor além possessividade ou não-possessividade.

Parte do ciclo Hainish. show less

Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed won pretty much all the awards for best science fiction novel in 1975. The title refers to the inhabitants of Annares, the moon of the planet Urras, populated many generations earlier by the emigration/expulsion of a revolutionary anti-authoritarian movement. The Annaresti view the larger Urrasti homeworld as their moon, so the system could be taken as a dual planet--they are in any case two worlds.

The novel begins with the departure of an Annaresti physicist Shevek for an unprecedented journey to Urras. After that, chapters alternate between those on Annares, giving Shevek's biography from childhood to that point of going to Urras, and those on Urras, detailing what transpired when he went there. Urras show more is a highly civilized world that resembles a stabilized 20th-century Earth in many ways, while Annares is a harsh frontier utopia fulfilling the program of revolutionary sage Laia Asieo Odo. Le Guin invented Odonianism by synthesizing ideas from Kropotkin and Goodman, along with a dollop of philosophical Taoism.

Odonian culture rejects hierarchy, the "state," egotism, and property. The Annaresti speak Pravic, a language constructed for their society and expressing its values. They have created a world in which no one is materially wealthy, but where everyone is entitled to shelter and food, and the most sought after prize is fulfilling work. They suffer with a small amount of egalitarian bureaucracy. Their sexual mores are libertarian, with the sole customary constraint of privacy, rooted in their communitarian ethos: It is rude to exhibit the enjoyment of sexual intimacy in front of those who lack it.

Much of the book concerns intellectual culture and the vagaries of academic prestige. In these respects, in its biographical structure, and in its imaginative remove from our own society in order to examine our difficulties, it reminded me of Hesse's final novel The Glass Bead Game.

The science-fictional setting is well in our future, and the "Cetian" humanity of Urras and Annares is not derived from our Earth. There are however a few contacts with Terran ideas and eventually even a few Terrans themselves, thanks to the Hainish starfarers who have connected some of the worlds in our part of the galaxy.

The Dispossessed is full of real conflicts and some momentous events, but the overall pace of the book is rather sedate. It offers a lot of food for thought, and despite a fairly plain prose style, its literary artistry is substantial. It would be an excellent choice for a reading group. I imagine it has featured frequently in academic courses on science fiction, and it wouldn't be out of place in creative curricula for political theory or social science. show less

After a second reading I can now see The Dispossessed isn’t as much a science fiction story as it is a thought experiment. Concepts and ideas that are fleshed out into characters, themes, and settings. The first time I read it I saw it as an overview of two worlds with widely different political systems and cultures, a comparison of the positives and negatives of each. But there's more to it than that - how does personal freedom fit into the picture? morals? property? family? - and I suspect the ‘more’ I see may not be the same ‘more’ as for everyone else. This has the quality that makes art art, the nebulous something that calls for interpretation and provides different meanings to different readers and also for each time show more it's read. show less