The Dispossessed

Si bien leí la mayor parte de la novela en Nono, en enero durante el verano, la terminé acá en casa, con mi gato Carbón de compañía, mimoso, cercano después de habernos extrañado muchos días. 📚🌱✨ Algún día haré la reseña, este es más bien un comentario que sale del momento recién terminado del libro, donde la expansión de todo lo que sentí y viví me rodea como una neblina o un refulgor, o capaz como la capa de polvo de Anarres. Es mucho, es intenso, es un poco abrumador. Me gusta escribir reseñas cuando ha pasado un tiempo, capaz hasta olvido algún detalle o personaje pero algo ha sedimentado y eso es justo lo que quiero contar. Confío en eso que queda como semilla para la reseña. Por ahora solo un punteo: La ingenuidad de Shevek como mirada de mundo, una ingenuidad que me permitió identificarme fuerte con su confianza en la humanidad a pesar de todo. El amor de Takver como un vínculo elegido para una promesa de vida. La lealtad primero y siempre. Defender la identidad colectiva aún a pesar del colectivo. La preciosa manera espiralada de contar la historia en dos temporalidades/espacialidades. Los abrigos de Urras llenos de bolsillos y una libreta con el punteo de una teoría que cambiaría la humanidad en el universo. Y el deseo de querer regalar ese conocimiento. Descubrir que, al haber leído La mano izquierda de la oscuridad primero, fue mi propio viaje en el tiempo saber algunas cosas antes que el propio protagonista. La emoción que me embargó cada vez que leí las ideas de que el viaje es el retorno (y aún no estoy segura de saber por qué me emociona o si me emociona por todo lo que puedo sumar a esas palabras).

Listened to the '87 CBC audio drama of it and it was such a time capsule to audio productions from another era. The specific seductive feminine voice, the music, the way shevek sounds like he is the voice actor for some favourite Canadian children's cartoon.

Pairs well with the tail-end (covering the 60s-70s counter-culture) of "A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present." On the more philosophical-end of SFF I typically read, but glad I read it!

Gran llibre! És un clàssic que m'havien recomanat molt i que ha complert les expectatives.

This was a slow starter, but I quite liked it when it got going, it's a really fun exploration of an anarchist communist and a plutocratic capitalist society meeting.

There is only one bad thing, a rape scene a bit before the half way point that felt gratuitous and not needed, and it served very little purpose in the story, apart from that I really liked the book :)

The two planets Anarres and Urras are each other's moons, yet the people living on them hardly know what it's like on the other planet. All they know is that Urras is an archist society, while the people of Anarres are anarchists.

In this book we follow Shevek, a scientist from Anarres, who travels to Urras in a mission to facilitate interplanetary understanding. Every other chapter switches between past and present (or future and further future) and we thus get introduced to Shevek on Anarres and what led him to go to Urras while we also learn about him on Urras and how his mission is going.

But the book is not actually that interested in Shevek's story. Much time is spent showing us the workings (and failings) of Anarres' anarchist society: The education system, job distribution, living arrangements, romantic partnership, etc. Similarly, the chapters on capitalist and archist Urras further explores anarchism through Urras' people arguing with Shevek. Of course, we also learn about Urras' society, but any politically literate person should already know about such topics as wasteful production, poverty, police brutality, greed, etc.

Urras is obviously not presented as "the good ones", but Anarres isn't shown through rose-colored glasses either. It too is corrupted by power and is by no means a paradise. It's still a society made up of humans that can be shitty to each other.

In the end world building takes a bit of a backseat as Shevek's story becomes more important, but he is a stand-in for anyone. This story is not about a physicist—or an anarchist diplomat. It's about what justice, shame and greed are. What role art and science plays in politics. It's about what freedom means in a society.

One star is docked for a sexual assault that occurs somewhere in the middle. I don't have a problem with that topic popping up in general, but the way it enters into this story is just baffling: The people of Anarres are always painted as very conscious of power imbalances, going so far as describing sex as "copulating" as that is supposedly the only word that does not carry heavy undertones of something being done by one party to the other, but rather something done together. And still one of these folks does not understand the concept of consent! And it's not portrayed as that one person being "one of the bad ones". It would have needed more set up or explanation to be valuable.

This book blew. My. Mind. I'm serious, for this alone Ursula K Le Guin became my fav sci-fi author, leaps and bounds above anybody else. She showed me what you can do with science fiction, how you can break the limits of the imagination. It is the first time I actually managed to picture a non-hierarchical society and it is so real, so visceral, that things clicked and I realized that "wait, this is possible!?" And she does that with a completely made up story set in two completely made up societies, both fleshed out with their greatness and infamy, their ideologies and contradictions.

It is NOT an easy read: Le Guin happily forces your brain to do some mental gymnastic, where things don't make any sense until a few pages later when they suddenly, perfectly do, things click in place and your mind is blown.

It is the book that made me understand how the limits of our current society are, first and foremost, limits of our imagination, and I don't say this lightly. This book blows our minds, because we have been robbed of the ability to imagine a better, if imperfect, world.

Wow. What else is there to say? This book was a buffet of ideas ranging from sexism, capitalism, socialism, the military-industrial complex, and politics. I especially enjoyed Le Guin's writing on women, but anarchist and archist, through the eyes of the anarchist main character. For the first few chapters I was amazed at Le Guin's interpretation at an anarchist utopian, and took it as a blueprint for the work we socialists have to do here on Earth. But as the book progressed we learned more about the so-called utopia and it's possible fault -- one of which being politics and the formation of government--and I finished the book with more questions than answers. This was a delightful and nerdy read.

The cover blurb for The Dispossessed makes it sound like a thrilling exciting narrative, filled with tension and action:

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 mother planet, Urras, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.

But that's not what it is, and it's certainly not Le Guin's focus. This is clear in the way she avoids what might be the more dramatic elements of the story, or distances us from them in how they are portrayed. The story is bookended by two examples of that. The opening sees Shevek - although we don't know it's him at this stage - leaving his homeworld and causing quite a bit of upset, seen from the viewpoint of a minor character who never reappears. And the book ends abruptly with no certainty of an outcome.

The capitalist society on the planet Urras that Shevek travels to felt too much like 1950s America rather than some far flung society thousands of years in the future. Other elements of the novel such as Shevek's unfortunate sexual dalliance, the possibility of defecting from the capitalist society to a nearby communist society, and getting caught up in a riot really don't amount to much and the plot as a whole is quite thin.

What I did like about the book was Le Guin's vivid portrayal of a functioning anarchist society on Shevek's homeworld Anarres. And Shevek himself was a likeable character.

The book is more concerned with the question of whether a truly anarchist society can survive, given the generally acquisitive nature of humanity, and during the story there is an indication that even this utopia will fall foul of the general tendency for all systems of government to move towards a hierarchy of control. Shevek struggles against this tendency: "We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive."

We never know if Shevek achieves what the cover blurb says. There's not much indication that the capitalist society will change because of him, though the anarchist society may survive if they take the example of his life to heart. But with no certainty about how the story ends, all we are left with is a political thought experiment.