The Dispossessed

Aahhhhh, Ursula LeGuin is a genius. A GENIUS, I TELL YOU!! I can't get over how incredibly GENIUSY this woman is.

It had been a few months that I had thought of re-reading The Dispossessed, especially after moving to Tanzania and getting all my econ heart all discombobulated by the harried contradictions of development work. Commodified, commodified, arghh, everything is commodified! And corporate, and multinational, and a totally lopsided playing field. Just thinking about development issues, and the constant struggle of “developing” countries to adapt to our current Western-centric, capitalist, corporatist system, made me reeeeally want to pick this up again.

And I'm so glad I did. Because this spec fic story is so good, in so many ways. The book is set in LeGuin's “Hainish” universe (the Hainverse?), where there are a handful of known, human-inhabited worlds that have - after a long period of separation and isolation from each other - begun to reconnect. And we learn that the planet of Hain is the oldest human place, that colonized the others, and blah blah. This is BACKGROUND, and perhaps not even necessary to the review. If only to say that this book, coupled with LeGuin's other Hugo/Nebula winner (because she was baller enough to win both, twice!), Left Hand of Darkness, are both so good, so smart, and so different.

In The Dispossessed, we focus on a pair of twin planets, Urras and Anarres, that couldn't be more different. Each is, depending on your point of view, a dual utopia-dystopia and extreme version of Earth. Urras is beautiful, bountiful, glorious, and basically Earth of the 20th century. It has a big, powerful capitalist nation, a big Soviet-style one, and a big bloc of poorer, “developing” countries. Anarres, instead, is barren, dusty, with a pretty lame ecosystem whose most complex organism is a fish. It's also an anarchic commune-style place, with no governments or nations, established 150 years ago by a group of Urras anarchists inspired by the works and philosophy of some badass, legendary political theorist and anarchist named Odo.

The story centers around a physicist, Shevek, from the anarchic Anarres. Shevek is on the cusp of figuring out a massive, totally awesome physics theory, similar in scope and profundity as Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Something that could shake the very foundations of reality itself!... And, incidentally, make space travel quite a bit easier (yay for Hain stuff! yay for reconnecting!). The book begins with Shevek undertaking a trip to Urras, in the hopes of chatting physics and working with other scientists there. Obviously, there are massive political implications to his action (it does feel a lot like a Cold War-era defection, except Shevek's not really fleeing from Anarres). Everything follows from there.

And damn, it's good. One thing I love about LeGuin (and Haldeman does this a bit as well, I believe in Forever Peace), is that she introduces characters without describing their physical appearance for a while and then - when she does - you're jarred when she reveals that they're a, for example, Indian woman (rather than a white man, as you had been assuming for so long). I was jarred so many times by this meta trick of hers that I started getting really concerned about just how many patriarchal prejudices I harbored in my nominally fem heart. For example, Odo is spoken of with great reverence throughout the book. We hear of this great political thinker, this freedom fighter, who wrote an epic while unjustly incarcerated. And then LeGuin drops in that “she” also did this. And you're like, “Oh, Odo's a woman?” Because, of course, my default assumption was that she was a man. And I was surprised. And then I was disappointed that I was surprised. And then I was impressed with LeGuin (yet again), for showing me - both explicitly within the story, and implicitly within the writing - just how brainwashing some hegemonies can be.

The moments that feature “Terra” (i.e. Earth) are also intellectually whimsical in the best spec fic style. Of course, you're dead curious to hear about what Terra is like, you want to know what century it is so you can just place this whole damn Hainish cycle, and LeGuin drops the hints and the info with her usual deftness and intelligence. Aaahhh, I love it so much. URSULAAAAA! You are magical.

As with Left Hand of Darkness, and as with her short stories, I'll no doubt carry this story and these ideas rattling around in my head for years and years. Indeed, as I have already! But refreshing them was a great move.

I have so much more I could say, but I'll just say, READ IT. Highly, highly recommended.