The Dispossessed

Took me forever to finish it, but loved!

An essay in disguise with boring, forced development and idealized , inhuman personalities

I had high hopes that I would like this more on a reread – after all, I'm much more politically-savvy now! And I can engage with hard things! And so many people I like have been saying how this is their favorite Le Guin book!

I tried so hard, but you know what, no, two stars is where it stays. The ideas are interesting, sure. And the writing can be very evocative – I mean, it's Le Guin, after all.

But I'm not sure it actually works as a novel. It just. Drags. Every character in it is unlikeable (and, moreover, feels more like an embodiment of a philosophy than an actual human being). The plot is a lot of not much happening and thinly-veiled excuses to debate political philosophy. Every time I picked it up I just felt, I dunno, tired. It's an exhausting book and it remains the only Le Guin work I've read that I don't really care for.

I do like the overall structure and how it echoes the circular idea of Simultaneity. I just wish the story itself held more emotional resonance for me.

I nearly dnf'd this book, the beginning doesn't leave much to be invested in, but definitely lays the groundwork for a really interesting story.

One thing I really appreciate about some earlier Sci-fi writers is the ability to create stories that transend the time period in which they are written. The innovation to break down ideals and create a whole new world to explore them is so mesmerizing. The prose I think lends itself to the timelessness of the novel.

As a kid, I was a big fan of The Wizard of Earthsea series (the Tombs of Atuan being the best, of course) but hadn't really read too much of her adult work. I think I tried to start this or The Left Hand of Darkness in high school and couldn't quite grasp either. The Left Hand of Darkness destroyed me emotionally when I read it recently and I may never recover -Ai and Estraven! Ah! - and now, I'm not sure I will stop thinking about this book.

"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words." - Le Guin, Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

ALSO: Shevek and Takver are couple goals and I love their family.

While being somewhat slow and exposition-heavy in the beginning half, the exposition in this book becomes necessary to flesh out the meaning of this unfamiliar world of Anarres. Each aspect of life on the unforgiving planet is laid out in stark detail, especially when contrasting it with the lush conditions of Urras and its society much like our own current system.

The book really picks up halfway through, and all the exposition gets put into practice as each society wrestles with what ails them: Anarres with its horrible material conditions, and its people’s monk-like devotion to collective survival and solidarity over anything considered non-useful to the collective, and Urras with its massive income inequality and oppressive police/military state.

I wish the ending carried forward so we could see the consequences of the final events, but I understand the authors choice to leave things open. I’m interested to read more of the Hainish series. Overall, I loved this highly thought provoking book.

The first hundred and some pages resisted all effort at interest. UKLG is a dry writer. I know she is beloved by many, but this is my second fiction from her (first was Left Hand of Darkness), and I'm left with the same feeling that I am interested in the story in spite of the pacing, structure, and characters.

It is bizarre to say, but Dispossessed has a little kinship with Atlas Shrugged. Rand's tome is also a thin-to-barely veiled excuse to talk about philosophy and economics. Dispossessed is certainly better than that in most measurable ways. It's shorter, much better written, and has a lot more interest in interrogating ideas and stressing them.

I mentioned in my review of Everything for Everyone(?) that I have no interest in the anarchy idea and typically find it dumb. When it comes to fiction, part of that disinterest is the idea of a post-scarcity world. It is difficult to imagine and doesn't pass any reality testing, in a way that I find difficult to suspend disbelief. Dispossessed does not take place in a post-scarcity utopia and is interested in how an anarcho-syndicalist world would navigate things like droughts and resource shortages. That's interesting!

I think UKGL's Anarres manifests a lot of my concerns with a totally stateless world. The absence of government is an illusion, and factionalism and cults of personality still spawn as a part of human nature. We see that Anarres has no actual protections for this, only protections on paper. Sabul is able to accrue power and exert outsized influence on his world by virtue of being an expert, and this results in suffering. Shame, which is the primary enforcement tool of the Anarrean norms (think on that), does not impact Sabul at all. I don't think we ever see Shame deployed against a power-holder in Anarres, only the people struggling against the power holders.

And that's the problem with a Stateless world in which shame and fear are the enforcement mechanisms. Anarres portends to be a quasi-utopia, still navigating scarcity, where individuals can do whatever they like (with the possible exception of rape of a woman or child, I don't think there's mention of rape of a man). Deviations from this are shamed, bullied, or beaten to accept therapy. We see this break at least one character after they write a play that is poorly received. This world does have laws, but they are unwritten. My suggestion is that the unwritten law is more dangerous than the written law, because it is immutable by anything but, if optimistic, time.

An unwritten law, when questioned, can be waived away easily, “there are no laws!” One of the Odonianisms is, “to create crime, create laws.” That's something that sounds deep and moving until someone is raped or beaten near-death or run from every town because they hold an idea or an association. The power-holders in this world are creating laws, but they are calling them norms and acting as if they are mutable.

To an extent, this is a deviation from what I understand to be Odo's initial setup. I don't think Odo means “write” when she says “create,” and would thus still consider these as laws. But that's all semantics, because in the reality of Anarres in the story we find it, the society has failed to resist laws and hierarchy and operates within these structures, veiled now against critique and change.

I like all of this. It is the most realistic working on these ideas that I've read in fiction. UKGL is poking these academic ideas with sticks and seeing where they break and where they hold. One of my favorite bits around this idea is when the utopia is hit with a (I think multi-year) draught, and the scarcity of it all begins to warp people.

I think UKLG's Anarres is successful within a window of scarcity: things must be scarce enough that mutual aid and sharing is required and beneficial, but not so scarce that people's survival instincts trigger. Well enough!

There is a passage around page 312 where a character talks about having the job of counting people as numbers, and making lists of who will eat and who will starve. I thought this had tremendous potential and wish we'd have seen this instead of had a character tell us they did it at one point. I want to be in that character's head while they're navigating that crisis. Nearby this passage, another character is describing actions taken during the famine - plotting of food raids, food supply lines, etc. I loved the logistical discussion and the picture of this society's resort when scarcity begins to crunch it.

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A big part of the book involves the main character trying to figure out his unifying theory and then figuring out what to do with it. The middle section of the book has a lot of interesting ideas on this — scientific research co-opted by States, control of ideas, scientific communities being quasi-Stateless in times of peace. I wonder how much of this is inspired by the atomic sciences and specifically the process of scientific research around the atomic bomb. Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb (an incredible work of non-fiction) explores these themes in our history. There was an earnest belief that ideas, if explored, would be found unusable or as a deterrent. Scientific naivety combined with the fear of the threatened State.

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In terms of the book itself, I pained myself to read the first half. It simply does not move with any swiftness and has ideas that are only vaguely interesting. There's a lot of world building that is written in the driest possible prose. It got a lot better in the second-half, which is where the book really does become an excuse to poke and prod at these ideas. The plot in the second half is basically nonsense but the idea exploration is quite good.

Speaking of the plot in the second half — where'd it go?? There is a deus ex machina the size of a civilization or two, and then the book sort of clatters to an abrupt end with nothing resolved. I'm not someone who needs everything to be resolved, but it'd be nice to be left with the impression that the author didn't leave half the manuscript on a park bench somewhere.

It feels unfinished. I think the problem with writing a book to poke and prod at philosophy is that once your poking and prodding is done, you have to figure out what your story is. I don't think the book has a good idea of its story. The alternating timeline chapters bemused me, but ultimately they add nothing at all to the story other than a false feeling of suspense. I wonder if it was written chronologically and then shuffled because, if read straight through, there really is very little of interest happening.

That said, I found it very thought-provoking and it made me turn some ideas around in my head that I've previously been dismissive of.

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One last note: my copy of this book is RIDDLED with errors. One every few chapters, it seemed, to the point where I became on high-alert for them. I think these are with the publisher, not the author. They almost feel like OCR errors; for example one error on pg 148 is ‘life' instead of ‘like,' another on pg 181 is ‘them' instead of ‘then.' These errors were really distracting and annoying.

It's a good book that I recommend everyone read. While it's not a great work and I feel the author could have delivered more, especially on certain topics covered in the story, it's still a worthwhile read. My expectations were higher, but it remains a commendable effort.

Despite these reservations, I firmly recommend it to all. The book is an excellent example of science fiction, exploring various philosophical topics, though it does not delve deeply into them. It addresses the fallacies of both capitalism and socialism, illustrating how human nature—characterized by bureaucracy, power consolidation, judgment, and inequality—inevitably undermines any system, regardless of societal intentions.

You'll find yourself contemplating ideas you may not have considered before.

This was my first Le Guin and, having just finished it, I am still processing it. It is scifi of its era, very philosophical, exploring ideas about humanity and human thinking more than adventures in space which is how we think about scifi in the ‘modern' age.

This book is about society - a socialist ‘utopia' on the moon and its capitalist ‘sister' on the planet below. It is about anarchy, about how people rely on one another for their survival even if they don't want to.

It is very dry, like all philosophical scifi that I have read, though this was better than Asimov for me - I could not get on with how he wrote - I found Foundation very boring to read.

This, like Dune, is a book that warrants rereading.

3.5 stars

The beginning is a bit slow but boy that second half of the book flies by! I'm much more used to action-packed sci-fi, so I wasn't expecting something so philosophical. But I loved it. The themes this book touches on are extremely relevant today. There were times I disliked Shevek, but overall I think he's a character that will rattle around comfortably in my brain for a long time. I'm definitely hooked on this author now! ❤️ 

the best book everrrrr...........just dazzling and luminous. I loved that the structure of the story reflected the Odonian principles in the book as well as Shevek's theory of simultaneity (i.e., circular, constantly coexisting/crossing over etc.) (and how his society fundamentally forms his major scientific work, the portrayal of him growing up and his experience of life from childhood to adulthood on Anarres was amazing, complemented the part with him on Urras so well). This is just one example of how well thought out every part of this book is, it wasn't as simple as ‘the Urrasti are humans/modern society' (although that parallel does exist) because the human species exists in the novel separately from the Urrasti and Anarresti and both are distinctly ‘alien'. Also how the Pravic language reflects and influences the anarchist society of Anarres that's so cool...love it!

хочется верить

(4,5) Not big into Sci-Fi, but this book might have changed this for me. Both the writing and the story were wonderful. Will definitely be picking up more of Le Guin's books!

A wonderful political commentary that had a sly way of challenging familiar cultural norms in ways that felt new to me. I enjoyed it, but was a little slow for my taste.

Amazing, as always. Her ability to imagine other ways of living that feel plausible and realistic! And oh her prose!! This was a far more beautiful book than it expected it to be.

I started this book without looking much into what it's about and got something I didn't expect from a sci-fi novel. This book tends to be very introspective. It brings a lot of direct commentary on social structures (capitalism/socialism) within a sci-fi setting. Overall it was interesting and I became invested in the characters. I recommend it if you're looking for something different to read, but it can feel slow at times if you're expecting a traditional sci-fi story.

Feels like the communist version of Stranger in a Strange land. This is the kind of sci fi I want to be reading, where the future stuff is just a framework to tell a human story. And Ursula as always, does it so well.

Shevek is a physicist who is trying to do an almost-impossible thing: to unite two worlds separated by completely different philosophies of life. One world is that of the home planet, Urras, a planet that is dominated by the ideas of capitalism and private property and individualism. The other world is the breakaway world, the moon of Urras, the world called Anarres, the place where Shevek grew up, and a world that is dominated by ideas of the common good and sharing with others and being part of a group. Both worlds, we soon see, have their strengths and weaknesses, and, within Shevek, an idea grows to bring the worlds together.

Alternating chapters tell of Shevek's life from childhood with his mission on Urras.

This is a rich and thoughtful read. I don't think that I can adequately talk about this book after a single read-through, and it's a book that deserves a second read and a comprehensive discussion with other knowledgable readers. I hope that I will be able to do these things some time in the future.

Some interesting ideas. The way the story bounced back and forth between past and present similar to the mathematician's theory of simultaneity was neat. But the philosophical angles felt a bit to ham-fisted for me.

Against the developing backdrop of the Hainish Universe, the story pits a socialist utopia against itself and the capitalistic society it stems from.

Me ha parecido una maravilla de libro. Lo he disfrutado mucho a mis 42 a??os, y estoy convencido de que lo habr??a disfrutado todav??a m??s cuando iba al instituto. Las sociedades enfrentadas que se nos presentan en la obra, tan relacionables con posturas filos??ficas y pol??ticas reales, nos hacen plantearnos y cuestionar muchas cosas. Creo que es un libro perfecto para debatir posteriormente en grupos de clase o de lectura. Adem??s, a pesar de tratar temas que pueden ser pesados y poco interesantes para algunas personas, lo hace de un modo tan ameno que creo que cualquiera puede engancharse y disfrutar la historia hasta el final. Pasa inmediatamente a mi lista de lecturas favoritas de todos los tiempos.

A third of the way into this book I had the strange experience of realising I must've read it as a teenager and completely forgotten. This makes young-me an idiot, because this is a masterpiece. Well written, complex world building that manages to balance the showing with the telling.

I can see how young-me may have had difficulty with this manifesto on anarchism, one that doesn't shy away from the difficulties and weaknesses of the system even as it promotes its values. Plus at one point the protagonist suffers some drunken premature ejaculation.

I hate rating a Le Guin book so low, but I couldn't finish this. It felt like a slog. So, per my rating standards, I am giving it a 2. Can't give it a 1 because maybe I would have loved it if I got past 60%, but also just...don't have time to waste reading books I don't love.

I am a total noob, only dipping my toes into sci-fi. I am 100% sure that my intelligence and knowledge is not equipped enough to give this book the analysis it deserves. I am only here to mention a few thoughts I had whike reading the book. I have nothing to compare it to. I haven't seriously read about capitalism, socialism or anarchy anywhere else before.

For those who haven't read the book, it takes place in a fictional world where of 4 planets. Urras, Anarres, Terra, Hain. Of these Urras and Anarres are twin planets, earths and moons of each other. On Anarres is a newly formed civilization by the Anarchists of Urras, who mass migrated generations back.
In Anarres, there is no hierarchy or property. People don't own, they share. Consider the consequences.

I have always associated anarchy with chaos and violence. The anarchists in this book are peaceful people, whose survival depends on their solidarity. There is no chaos, there is order.

This book does not deny that, the functioning of it's society is dependent on the limited population and adequate resources, that it will not survive a tipping of scales. It is utopia. A perfectly functioning society, given certain prerequisites are followed.
People who have a better grasp of sociology, might appreciate this better. Nevertheless the concept is thought provoking.

Personally I found it difficult to find a connection with the characters. The are cold and distant. That is the whole point within the story too. There is some sort of delineation happening between love and relationships, that I didn't quite understand. What kind of love is it, in a world where one can't say “You are mine.”?
It's not “your smile is beautiful”, it's “the smile is beautiful”, because possessive word don't exist/are not used.

I haven't read a utopian novel before, and have always wondered how it would be. This one I found is only a prettily dressed dystopian. It makes you realize thay the negative elements in our society exists for certain unavoidable reasons.

The book is easy enough to understand. Appropriate as a foray into sci-fi.