Paperback, 456 pages
Español language
Published Dec. 27, 2021 by Minotauro.
Shevek, un físico brillante, originario de Anarres, un planeta aislado y «anarquista», decide emprender un insólito viaje al planeta madre Urras, en el que impera un extraño sistema llamado el «propietariado». Shevek cree por encima de todo que los muros del odio, la desconfianza y las ideologías, que separan su planeta del resto del universo civilizado, deben ser derribados.
En este contexto la autora explora algunos de los problemas de nuestro tiempo: la posición de la mujer en la estructura social, la complejidad de las relaciones humanas, los méritos y las promesas de las ideologías, las perspectivas del idealismo político en el mundo actual.
I mean, everybody has read it already over here, right? The only thing I would "criticise" are some outdated and not very inclusive ideas/concepts. However, this is only pushing me to find more queer and contemporary fiction. Or, worst case scenario, write it myself. :P
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.
You don't need to read this but I stronly recommend it. It outlines, how a egalitarian society could look like.
very deep personal relationship with this book
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.
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.
