Le Guin is one of my favorite authors (though this is partially due to the fact that I don't tend to read the breadth of many authors' works) and The Dispossessed does not disappoint.As in most of her writings, Le Guin's story is an exploration of society: what makes up a society, how people act within society, and how those actors work together to maintain and change the societies they live in. In The Dispossessed, she explores the dynamics of an imagined anarchic society on the planet Anarres and contrasts it with those of a capitalist society on the neighboring planet Urras. And I do mean neighboring; for most of Urras's history, Anarres was an uninhabited moon. The anarchic society on Anarres was founded by revolutionaries from Urras about a century and a half before the beginning of The Dispossessed.
I should take a moment here to clarify: when The Dispossessed speaks of 'anarchy,' it does not mean the colloquial usage as a synonym for chaos. It is a true anarchy. There is no government. There are no laws or property rights. Only people, all working together to do what is necessary to support each other. However, it is an anarchy uniquely dependent on technology. A computer names each person born randomly, and oversees, in a limited capacity, the basic needs of the society--what work is needed where, etc. It is a practical anarchy, designed by its founders to persist, not just an abstract ideal.
The story follows the physicist Shevek, jumping between his past growing up on Anarres and the present where he ventures to Urras in an attempt to collaborate with the physicists there. He is also making this journey as an attempt at revolution--he believes his own society has stagnated. The first elements of a real government are beginning to emerge, and he seeks a way to reinvigorate the revolutionary spirit that first motivated the settlers of Anarres.
The details of the resulting plot are not quite important. Everything in the book functions to explore the societies of Anarres. The societies on Anarres and Urras are shown through our character's experience. We are not given a list of traits, instead we experience them as they arise in Shevek's story. When Shevek arrives on Urras, he is disgusted by the lavish patriarchy he finds there. There is no subtly here. Le Guin's anarchy is no Utopia--resources are scares on Anarres, and hard times bring suffering to everyone equally--but the scathing resentment of the capitalism on Urras is hard to miss. The (literal) climax of Shevek's story is a drunken rant against everything he has witnessed on Urras. The real value of a society is its people, he states, not its luxuries.
This book is worth reading for its ideas alone, but if you have read any other of Le Guin's works, you might notice a few interesting parallels. The first book I ever read of her's was The Left Hand of Darkness, the second was Malafrena. Both, as in this book, are about fictional societies undergoing strife/upheaval. Both do a great deal of world building through the experiences of their characters. And, interestingly, The Dispossessed is somewhat of an overlap of the themes explored in both. LHD is more concerned with society overall, while Malafrena was more focused on its impacts on individuals. The Dispossessed tackles both, but as a result I feel it has less of an impact overall. It does not help that it ends rather ambiguously--Shevek is on his way home, but we cut away before he lands again. We have only the hope of change, the idea that maybe things will get better, but no clear picture of how.
Ursula Le Guin died on January 22 of this year (2018). Though she won many awards, I believe she was still seriously under-recognized for the quality of her work. She has been a huge influence on my own writings, and I believe that if you are reading science fiction and haven't yet read Le Guin, you are doing it wrong.
The Dispossessed, and many other of Le Guin's works, are available wherever books are sold.
