I have not read everything that Ursula K Le Guin has ever written. I have read The Left Hand of Darkness and that was incredible. That being said, I don’t think anything could top The Dispossessed. I’ve only read one Earthsea book and haven’t finished all of her Hainish novels. Haven’t read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas either. But this might well be her masterpiece and if you come across a list of the ‘Greatest Science Fiction Novels of All Time’ and this doesn’t appear somewhere on it, the list is wrong. Tell whoever wrote it I said so and then find a different list.
Set on the twin worlds of Anarres and Urras, the two planets of the Tau Ceti system, The Dispossessed tells the story of Shevek, a physicist who is working to develop a General Temporal Theory, believing he can prove that time has a much deeper more complex structure than previous understood. However, he lives on the anarchist moon of Anarres, populated by settlers who were allowed to leave two centuries before to create their own, anarchist society on the habitable moon, while the planet below, Urras, retains hierarchies, laws, power structures, and capitalism.
Shevek’s work is eventually blocked by a superior, Sabul who controls the publication of manuscripts on the planet and Shevek begins to realize that even in the anarchist society of Anarres, there are rules and limits to how far any one individual can go. He becomes involved with a female friend of his, Takver, and they start a relationship together and eventually have a child. They are forced apart when social obligations force them to be posted to different places during a drought on Anarres where personal desires are set aside to ensure the survival of society as a whole. Shevek puts his research aside, but is eventually reunited with Takver and his daughter and comes to realize that in order to further his research he has to do the unthinkable: go to Urras.
He leaves for Urras, but an angry mob (who wants to maintain the separation between the two planets) attempts to stop him but is unsuccessful. Arriving in the nation of A-Io, Shevek is feted as an honored guest but soon becomes disillusioned with the hierarchical power structures and inequalities of Urras. His grievances grow with the outbreak of war in a neighboring country which A-Io is supporting. He soon realizes that the physicists on Urras are manipulating him in the hopes of him completing his General Temporal Theory and using that to build a faster-than-light ship for their own power and profit. He flees to the underground- finding the anarchist movement on Urras in the shadows and joins a protest against the government that is violently suppressed. He flees to the Terran embassy, where he reveals his completed theory and asks them to transmit it to all worlds and they, for their part, give him safe passage back to Anarres.
Whether he is welcome or not is a question left open and one of the Hanish crewmembers who sympathizes with Anarres and its philosophy wants to return with Shevek and he agrees, thinking about reuniting with his family as the spaceship lands.
I don’t know if I’ve come across any author in any genre that immerses the reader so completely and so effortlessly in their world as Le Guin does here. Everything right down to the language (on Anarres, they teach children not to say ‘I’ as that is a sign of egoism they want to discourage) is covered. (Le Guin has a thing for language- whether that’s a deliberate choice of just because she’s a writer, I don’t know, but it’s what stood out for me when I first listened to A Wizard of Earthsea— the magic system there is rooted in the power of the word/name.) Here, the structure of the society of Anarres especially evolves around the power of language. But there are other touches too: people don’t really have houses, per se— they can sleep in communal dormitories or, if they enter into a mutually agreed upon relationship with someone, they can stay with them. Parents can and do have children, but the level of engagement with the child isn’t a societal expectation, but a personal choice. Shevek’s father is far more active and present in his life. His mother, Rulag, whom he doesn’t know until adulthood is not. Shevek and his partner Takver are active parents with both their children— even though they are separated for long periods of time due to the drought described in the books.
In short, there are no aspects of the society that aren’t touched upon in some way- ranging from the concept of not having prisons, to what they do with non-conformists/the mentally ill. It’s a stunning level of world-building because it’s not overdone— I feel like some authors probably have a tendency to over-explain their worlds up front in order to give the reader all the information and then get on with the story. Le Guin blends the process to tell the story through building the world.
The portions of the book that occur on Urras are more accessible because that society reflects our own, in that it has a similar hierarchical structure, inequalities, etc. Shevek making his way in that society and then interrogating his own interactions with it are really powerful stuff— here is a character not only experiencing a profoundly different society for the first time- a literal fish out of water- but interrogating his own reaction to it and asking himself questions about it. We see Shevek go through a similar process on Anarres, as he realizes that the privations of the drought forced everyone to work for the survival of the whole have led to a system that threatens to undermine the revolutionary principles of free choice that created Anarres to begin with.
In the end, though, it is neither society that really comes out ahead in this book but the principle of individual free choice that is the founding principle of Anarres. Shevek and his friends found a Syndicate to print books and plays and things that normally wouldn’t be printed or studied. Shevek chooses to find the underground and participate in the protest against the government. He chooses to have the Terrans transmit his ideas to every world instead of keeping them for himself. He chooses to return home, unsure of the welcome he will receive, and in a nice touch, leaves his home with nothing and returns with nothing.
Overall: It’s tempting to put this on a shelf next to Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, but I don’t think I can. I think it’s better. It’s not as dated and even though it was written in 1974, it still feels timely today. The temptation here would be to succumb to the notion that anarchism is awesome and Anarres is ‘right’, as it were, but Le Guin offers up a more complicated and more satisfying answer that really is grounded in individual choice in the end and that is where the power The Dispossessed really lies. This book is one of the few to win a Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award for Best Novel and it deserved it and is absolutely worthy of its accolades. My Grade: **** out of ****