E-book extra: In-depth study guide.Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life. Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian planet, Anarres, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.
I first read this book 20 years ago in a German translation and liked it a lot, but I didn't get a lot of it. Now, reading the English original and having had more of a political education, at first I was: "Is this book as good as I remember it?", but then, I enjoyed it even more.
I love that it's not an unbroken utopia and the ending leaves some things open. I also liked how it shows how power-laden relationships and positions can inadvertently creep back into a society that's not supposed to have them.
Really cool, right up my alley in the sense of "here's how people would be different if brought up under these circumstances". And while I'm trying to figure out why I'm not so hyped as I was over [b:Embassytown|9265453|Embassytown|China Miéville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320470326l/9265453.SY75.jpg|14146240] or [b:Children of Time|25499718|Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)|Adrian Tchaikovsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1431014197l/25499718.SY75.jpg|45276208] I realise that my most favourite alley is "what if our brains were different". Because even an "anarchist society" becomes recognizably human. And, I guess, that's not a fantasy I want to get lost in. Still, much prefer this to a lot of anything else.
The Dispossessed takes it's place as one of my absolute favorite books all time. In it I feel LeGuin reaches her apex both in regard to literary style, story, world building and so on. It is an absolute literary masterpiece. In the Dispossessed we are taken on a journey to the twin planets Anarres and Urras. Here we experience the in and outs of an anarchist society based on the harsh dessert world of Anarres. We follow Sheveks life from his early childhood growing up in an anarchist society, we see education, love, and interests interact with the complex dynamics of the anarchist society. At the same time we follow the same characters journey to Urras a sort of earth analogy with its capitalist states, imperialism, and really existing socialism. While not recapping the story the main takeaway from this work is how an utopia is as the subtitle says …
The Dispossessed takes it's place as one of my absolute favorite books all time. In it I feel LeGuin reaches her apex both in regard to literary style, story, world building and so on. It is an absolute literary masterpiece. In the Dispossessed we are taken on a journey to the twin planets Anarres and Urras. Here we experience the in and outs of an anarchist society based on the harsh dessert world of Anarres. We follow Sheveks life from his early childhood growing up in an anarchist society, we see education, love, and interests interact with the complex dynamics of the anarchist society. At the same time we follow the same characters journey to Urras a sort of earth analogy with its capitalist states, imperialism, and really existing socialism. While not recapping the story the main takeaway from this work is how an utopia is as the subtitle says ambiguous. As a communist it is important to understand that a communist society won't be a perfect or harmonious society but one that will deal with social and private problems in a different way, where individual freedom both will be expanded and limited. We will be free to develop ourself according to our "telos" at the same time this will be done in a way that does not limit or restrict the freedom of others, we have to negotiate society by in a conscious way not in a way that is dictated behind our backs by the automatic subject of capital.
I read The Dispossessed when I was way too young to "get it" and I honestly remembered very little except for the scene at the beginning where Shevek lands on Urras and the guard getting hit in the head and killed by a rock. I'm glad I decided to pick it up this time around - at the end of last week, students were asking me about some positive/utopian sci-fi that wasn't all about battles and/or white dudes, and this one immediately came to mind.
I've been thinking about the relationship of individual to larger collective/org and how that relates to work for a while as I've been trying to navigate some personnel matters that come down to trying to get staff to stop thinking about their individual fulfillment/sense of purpose and start thinking about the collective fulfillment/purpose of the library+college. MPOW is also going through an organizational restructuring right …
I read The Dispossessed when I was way too young to "get it" and I honestly remembered very little except for the scene at the beginning where Shevek lands on Urras and the guard getting hit in the head and killed by a rock. I'm glad I decided to pick it up this time around - at the end of last week, students were asking me about some positive/utopian sci-fi that wasn't all about battles and/or white dudes, and this one immediately came to mind.
I've been thinking about the relationship of individual to larger collective/org and how that relates to work for a while as I've been trying to navigate some personnel matters that come down to trying to get staff to stop thinking about their individual fulfillment/sense of purpose and start thinking about the collective fulfillment/purpose of the library+college. MPOW is also going through an organizational restructuring right now, and it's been a wild ride to see where the past is copied and pasted on the present even as we hear about an orientation to the future. The discourse about work, time, and perception in this book were weirdly calming and relevant to this ongoing stuff (similar to The Seep and its meditations on change).
Anyway, many smarter people have had smarter things to say about this book than I do. It's interesting to think about Anarres as a possible partial model for what life might look like in a society as automated as the technosolutionists tell us we're going to have. Not that THEY care, but maybe someone else can, lol.
i spent close to the entire book lulled into the urras/annares binary, learning a disgust for the propertarian urrasti that i took to represent the world we live in now. and then i reached the moment when le guin reveals terra - the ruined earth, the third possibility - and knew then that urras was our present, and terra our fast-encroaching future.
What a beautiful and melancholy novel of ideas. Of the many aspects that struck me one scene has stayed persistently since finishing. In it, a Hanish character named Ketho decides to land on Anarres with Shevek. Surprised, Shevek asks him why, there will be so many hardships he will have to endure. Ketho responds that though his race is very old (100 millennia) and has tried every political system one could think of, he has never seen Anarchy for himself, and that made its own relevance. More than flippant curiosity, his position made clear the value of individual experiences in the moment, yet an interdependence of ideas. History is merely a record, reality can only truly exist in the web of the present tense and it is always important. I don't know why that stuck with me but I found it very meaningful.
A lovely exploration of a utopia that Le Guin managed to make seem both appealing and plausible without shrinking from the sacrifices that it entailed.
At times the weird temporal structure of the book confused me, though it does make sense given the principal character's work. And there are moments when the utopians' political talk starts to feel like author lecturing reader - though really only moments, this isn't one of those books that bludgeons you with its rhetoric. It is one of those that I've spent as long thinking about after finishing as I had spent reading it, because there's more substance and subtletly to its politics and sociological observation than you might expect after I've thrown the "utopia" label at it.
I write this review only for people like me who might, like me, enjoy literature and have reservations about reading sci-fi, but similarly have an interest in Ursula le Guin to try some sci-fi. I found this book really hard to get through. The ideas (political ideals and economic systems in the 1970s transported into a world and a moon) are well established, but the writing is often slow, the naming systems and world-building too convoluted, and the pace trudges in an over-lengthy novel. I will try something else by le Guin, who has an excellent mind, but this was not for me.
I take this quote from the book, part of the excellent ideas expressed, and unfortunately something I would also use to summarise the story: Excess is excrement. Excrement retained in the body is poison.
An engrossing read. My friend described it as a pile of ideas disguised as a story, which is pretty accurate. But, I also think the story is well done. It transmits the main character's unease and discomfort very well, and when he finally breaks free it is an incredible relief.
Within the book she describes multiple different societies. How these are presented, and how the main character reacts to their various customs and limitations, will stick in my mind for a long time.
"Hay una sola ley que respetamos, sólo una, la ley de la evolución humana. -¡La ley de la evolución humana es la supervivencia del más fuerte! -Sí, y los más fuertes en cualquier especie social, son más sociales. En términos humanos, más éticos. Ya ve, nosotros no tenemos en Anarres ni víctimas ni enemigos. Solo nos tenemos los unos a los otros. No es fuerza lo que se gana haciendo daño. Sólo debilidad"
I didn't love this book quite as much as [book:The Left Hand of Darkness], but I still adored this one, too. Imagine, if you will: ten years old, Ogden, Utah. This was the first time I'd heard of anarchy, and this and [book:The Left Hand of Darkness] were the first I'd ever really heard of feminism. In fact, this was also around the same time someone told me I couldn't go to heaven unless my husband took me. I can't begin to tell you the impact these books had on me.
