The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Man in the Moon Goes to Town One hundred and seventy years ago thousands of Odonians (followers of a woman called Odo who promoted individual freedom and mutual aid) left the planet Urras to colonize its nearly barren moon Anarres, there to build what they hoped would be an anarchic utopia. Ever since, the much larger population of Urras (divided between capitalist or state-centered socialist societies) and the smaller population of Anarres have viewed each other with ignorant fear and hatred. Trade and communication are limited and travel verboten. In that context, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Nebula and Hugo award-winning novel The Dispossessed (1974) begins when the genius physicist Shevek leaves Anarres for Urras. Shevek is a man on a mission: to unbuild the wall separating his people from those of Urras and to enable the two worlds to engage in free intercultural communication and exchange. His leverage is his nearly completed Unified Temporal Theory that is expected to enable things like faster than light space travel and instantaneous communication across interstellar distances. His goal may be impossible, because on Urras he is hosted by a capitalist culture hoping to co-opt him or otherwise use him for his theory, and because many of his own people view him as a traitor for leaving their “utopia.” Given Shevek’s work on simultaneity, Le Guin fittingly tells his story in two time strands, alternating chapters between the present on Urras, in which he struggles to do his secret work (unbuilding walls) while delaying his public work (finishing his General Temporal Theory), and the past on Anarres, in which he grows from a spindly baby into a famous physicist increasingly at odds with his increasingly stagnant and conservative society. The chapters depicting Shevek on Urras in the uber-capitalist country of A-Io are rich with defamiliarization, as the man in the moon visits an exaggerated version of Cold War era America (with many interesting differences, like a tax on cars that prevents most people from driving) where everything is new and disorienting. Shevek hears bird song as “little sweet wild” voices and feels leather as “a non-woven brown stuff that felt like skin” (apart from fish Anarres has no animals or birds); he shops for clothes wrapped like everything in A-Io in multiple layers of paper and packaging (Anarres has no money or stores and people have few possessions); he works and lives at the top A-Io university, which has only male teachers and students (on Anarres there is no gender discrimination); he has his own servant (Anarresti are all equal and share unpleasant jobs by rotation); and so on. Le Guin wants to make us see our own cultural givens with alien eyes so as to question them, like the supposed courage and manliness of organized military hierarchy (to Shevek “a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency” good only for killing unarmed civilians), and or to laugh at them, like the fancy toilet in Shevek’s Urrasti university apartment (to Shevek a “magnificent gold and ivory temple of the shit stool”). Part of the texture of Le Guin’s world building is made of interesting language differences between the two cultures. The Anarresti, for example, don’t use personal pronouns (e.g., “the mother” instead of “my mother”), terms of respect (they call people by their names or “brother” or “sister”), or swear words (sex isn’t dirty for them and they have no organized religion). Similarly, their worst insults are “profiteering” or “properterian” or “egoizing,” and to denote superiority they use “more central” instead of “higher.” In the chapters set on Anarres, Le Guin explores how an anarchy might function and what it might be like to live in one. It is appealing in some ways when contrasted with capitalist or state-centered socialist cultures. For example, in principle, nobody eats while others go hungry, everyone can do some work and has some place to live, and there are no laws or prisons, nations or wars. But the Odonians have not made a eutopia (perfect place), for human nature (e.g., ambition, power hunger, jealousy, etc.) intrudes and Anarresti society has become hidebound, conservative, and group-dominated. As Le Guin is wont to do, she poses questions and explores answers without necessarily choosing one. Apart, perhaps, from what must be her basic principles (developed also in The Left Hand of Darkness): cultures thrive in mutual communication and interchange etc. with each other, individuals flourish when they are free to do the work they want to do, and “the essential function of life is change.” Like Shevek (and unlike Trump), Le Guin devoted her life to unbuilding walls rather than constructing them. The Dispossessed is an sf novel of ideas in all the best ways: thoughtfully exploring time, science, society, human nature, love, life, art, freedom, perspective, and so on. And in its alien cultures live authentic, compelling, human characters. And without relying on page turning action, it is suspenseful because we care about Shevek and his friends and family and want to find out what happened to them in the past and what will happen to them in the future. And Le Guin (as ever) writes fine lines of precise, poetic, philosophical prose, like “The light of his world filled his empty hands,” “The sunlights [of different planets] differ, but there is only one darkness,” and “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?” The audiobook reader Don Leslie is great—a bit like Stefan Rudneki but more flexible—but he is not a reader who changes his voice dramatically for different characters. There is a newer audiobook of the novel available with, I think a British reader. . . Anyone who likes Le Guin’s work but hasn’t read The Dispossessed or anyone who likes thought-provoking and well-written and adult sf, should find the novel an enriching experience. View all my reviews
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