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.

I nice quick read. Le Guin offers an interesting, thought provoking, and (somewhat) timeless treatment of the influence of human nature on societal structures and the ever-evolving and competing forms of governance.

“‘If you can see a thing whole,' he said, ‘it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives .... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.'“

—

“Fulfillment, Shevek though, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

“Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

“It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

“So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.”

This was good, though I wish the whole book were more like the last third, which had stronger, tighter storytelling. The first two-thirds have too much heavy-handed exposition for my taste.

I'm afraid I can't give this book a proper review, because I haven't read it since 1993. It lingers in my memory as a book I didn't like, so I've never read it again.

However, when I look back at my 1993 diary, I find to my surprise that I described it as “impressive” and “interesting” at the time. Well, I already knew that Le Guin was capable of good writing. I think the problem is that I read fiction for entertainment, and I didn't find it sufficiently entertaining. Also, it seems to be a book about contrasting political systems, but it wasn't clear to me what political points it was trying to make.

Thus, I ended up neither entertained nor educated. Maybe you'll profit more from the book than I did; good luck.

Metaphorosis Reviews
4.5 stars

A determined but awkward physicist from the anarchic communal world of Anarres returns to Urras, the sister planet from which his idealistic ancestors fled. Hoping to find freedom from tradition and habit, he finds a rich world with a host of flaws beneath the surface.

I came to Ursula Le Guin's work, as did many, via Earthsea - light but deep YA fantasy. The Dispossessed is the other side of Le Guin - deep, dense, intellectual science fiction focused on social issues and human nature.

I hadn't read this book for decades, but after spending what seemed an endless period in Phillip Jose Farmer's adventure pulp Tiers series, I felt I owed myself something a little more thoughtful (and better written). The Dispossessed was a good fit.

I'm sure I got more out of the book this time around. I was young when I read it last, and I recall thinking it was well written and interesting, but slow. Then, I was a budding scientist. Now, I work on governance issues. But my first judgment is still correct - it is well written and interesting, but it is slow. It's just that now I'm a little more patient, a little more interested in pondering, and I look at things from a different point of view.

The Dispossessed is a masterful thought experiment - to see how anarchy might work out in practice (not entirely anarchic) and how an established mostly-anarchic culture might interact with a mostly-capitalist one. Le Guin has done an excellent job with pretty dry material. There are no clear blacks or whites, though Shevek, the protagonist, is sympathetic and largely on the side of good. Le Guin acknowledges the shortcomings of both sides, and if she has a clear inclination toward one side, it's not at such an angle that she can't see the other. This is the kind of book that gives science fiction a good name - it's intelligent and thoughtful, and it genuinely introduces and explores an idea.

That's not to say it's all rainbows and puppies. As with Anarres, the anarchists' world, it's dusty and convoluted in places. Le Guin's sequencing could do with clearer time stamps.The pace, as noted, is slow. And while she purports to set out a world in which gender is not determinative of role, she can't quite get away from stereotypes. For a book written during the disruptive, freedom-seeking early '70s, that's disappointing. But it's heavily outweighed by the strengths of the book.

Overall, The Dispossessed is a remarkable achievement, and well-deserving its status as a classic of science fiction. If you haven't read it, you should - and not in the ‘Oh, it's a dull classic, but I have to read it' sense, but because it's a genuinely good book. Just have some patience with it, and it will reward you.