Books/The Dispossessed

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Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Science Fiction

This is the second book I'm reading from Ursula K. Le Guin, the first one being "The Left Hand of Darkness". Also, this is the second book on Anarchist fiction I've read, the first one being Walkaway by Cory Doctorow (I suspect Doctorow got the word Walkaway from Le Guin too). I was reading Liu Cixin's science fiction books before this and noticed a marked difference in the writing styles of the two authors. Liu Cixin tries to keep his works focussed at a civilizational level, with less attention devoted to the lives and feeling of individual characters. There is no clear hero in his writings. On the other hand, Ursula K. Le Guin's approach to story-telling is from an individual's perspective, focussing on their feelings. Her writing probably cannot be classified as hard science fiction. She uses science fiction as a vehicle to explore other aspects of humanity, such as gender in The Left Hand of Darkness and Anarchism in this book "The Dispossessed".

One observation I have from reading two books set in the Hainish universe is that the author likes to explore the worlds that she created using the main characters in the story. She creates a high-level world with a basic idea and adds detail as the character explores the worlds. This is similar to how a video game renders the world as the character is moving through it. This unconventional writing style makes it a bit difficult for the reader to follow along for at least the first half of the book. Her books get easier in the second half. Her books are soft sci-fi focussing less on material universe and more on the internal conflict of her characters and their character development. I haven't seen this range and complexity of emotions being conveyed by fictional characters in any other work of fiction I've read so far.

I picked up this book when I was still below thirty years of age, which I think is kind of the right age for it. I probably wouldn't have understood or appreciated it when I was younger. Maybe this book would feel a lot different if I read it at 40. The book is quite a hard read. The reader is plunged into an alien world with alien words, customs and ways of living which are only slowly explained through subsequent chapters. It takes patience and time to appreciate the author's way of thinking. The book's politics is limited to the effect it has on the hero life. The hero is not an average person, but a special one, so special in fact, that he is the physicist who will change the way civilizations on distant worlds interact with each other in the future. His vulnerability, his human faults, his mistakes are all part of the story. Most of the brilliance of this book is in its approach to putting the reader in the hero's shoes. Discussion of abstract concepts is limited in scope to what affects the hero's life.

This book can neither be classified as utopian fiction nor dystopian fiction. A newspaper review back in the day called it "an ambiguous utopia". The story is set on two worlds, with two political systems functioning in near isolation. They aren't evenly matched. The original home planet of the Cetian species is plentiful while its moon (or rather a twin planet) though habitable is a mostly desertified wasteland which the exiled anarchists must make a home out of. The book is told from the perspective of one male scientist born on the Anarchist world (Anarres) who moves to the Archist world (Urras) in his forties. The Archist world is hardly different from Terra in 2020, or 1974 for that matter. The book's chapters alternate between the author's past on Anarres and his current life on Urras and beautifully converge near the end on his return trip to Anarres.

To be whole is to be part;
true voyage is return.

The hero of the story, Shevek is a scientist working on the General Temporal Theory, a general theory of time. He, like Einstein on Terra has to fight against the prevailing system of Physics called Sequency to found a whole new system called Simultaneity. Though Shevek thinks that this is the only battle he has to win, he finds himself spearheading a political battle as well. He has to make his people on Anarres who were slowing growing bureaucratic remember their founding principles of Anarchism and also serve as a living example of a functioning Anarchist society to the people of Urras. He had to be a rebel on his own world to accomplish this, by leaving Anarres and going to the much hated Urras.

Though the hero of the story is male, the society on Anarres is feminist as a whole. The society mostly follows the feminist principles of 70s America which the author seems to be influcenced by. Considering how the author likes to explore alien worlds and alien minds, it's not surprising that she chose the protagonist of her novel to be of the opposite gender. This book isn't her exploration of gender though; that's covered in The Left Hand of Darkness. This book is about a radically different social organization. Written during the period of the Cold War, the author explored a society where freedom is of the highest importance and domination is non-existent, which neither Capitalism or Communism can claim to offer. The book basically starts with a violent act, but violence is quite limited in the society on Anarres. The mob didn't know how to act like a mob. The assassins didn't know how to kill etc. Capitalism and Communism are represented in the book using the two countries A-Io and Thu on the planet Urras. Anarchism, especially of this non-violent kind had to be on a different planet of course.

The hero is not your typical sci-fi hero like Captain Kirk. His vulnerability and suffering are not ignored by the author. He often falls victim to the circumstances around him, not always winning over them. Though he does take heroic action once in a while, he isn't continuously being heroic all the time. That makes him more relatable to the reader. This book can be be broadly classified as "man vs. society".