Ursula K. Le Guin

Published: 18 Oct 2024

The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed book cover

Quick storygraph summary:

A fascinating book, with Le Guin putting a light sci-fi dressing onto a Cold War-era course in ethics, politics and governance, comparing and contrasting the capitalistic planet Urras with the ambiguously utopian and anarchic society Anarres - via the conduit of Shevek, a brilliant scientist and devoted Anarres anarchist who travels to Urras (for reasons slowly uncovered by the book) and experiences significant culture shock as the outsider. Shevek struggles to understand and reconcile the “propertarian” ways of Urras, while the populous inquires and similarly struggles to understand Shevek’s anarchist principles. But this exploration is never one-sided, as for all the criticism of Urras its clear that the anarchists of Anarres have their own problems and shortcomings, many deriving from human nature itself.

The worldbuilding the Le Guin pours into this book is extremely well done and takes significant portions of the book itself, allowing you to fully get immersed in both these worlds - and similar effort is made for the characters, to really allow you to reason, relate and mull over the arguments given by many of the characters (often by Shevek and another appropriate character to provide an opposite viewpoint) in long, rambly back-and-forth dialogues reminiscent of Socratic dialogue, examining characters’ deeply held beliefs and by extension examining Anarres and Urras’ societies themselves. This is both the meat and the heart of the book, and is extremely fulfilling to read with plenty of thought-provoking quotes and paragraphs with respective viewpoints all given the respect they deserve - with the ’twist’ of the protagonist visiting from Utopia, rather than visiting Utopia itself providing a better grounding for this critical examination.

This is a sci-fi story however, not a straight course in ethics, and so for all its philosophical ambitions, still needs to function as a coherent story, have interesting characters and all the other general expectations that good stories have. This is where I can see this book being fairly divisive, as without said philosophical ruminations there’s not much left to explore, with significant portions of the book merely illustrating characters, primarily Shevek, simply living life and all the toils and tribulations that come with that. Its slow, deliberately so, but slow regardless - and for being the main character Shevek is almost certainly the least interesting out of the whole lot, too ideologically pure and overtly naive compared to the numerous flawed, yet significantly more interesting characters presented on both planets. However, given the reputation is has gotten, and I had known beforehand around the exploration of human society, these flaws didn’t bother me much, or at least I could concede as necessary weaknesses to push the greater philosophical angle and discussion.