No Substance #199: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed

Lately, I’ve found myself reading through the work of Ursula K. Le Guin. I’d read some before, of course. Some short stories, a couple of novels. I always liked The Left Hand of Darkness, for example. But I was never very focused on the work. It was always a bits and pieces experience for me. I couldn’t tell you why. Then, the Library of America started putting out these collections of Le Guin’s work and I started buying them. After a little bit of time, I started reading them. Maybe I hated the covers of the other editions. There might be something in that. I’ve read a lot of Philip K. Dick in similar LOA editions.

Le Guin died in 2018, six years ago. It feels like yesterday, honestly. Of course, these days, yesterday feels like a minute ago and last week an hour. Still, I remember being surprised that Le Guin had died. She wasn’t young, so I shouldn’t have been. Still, she gave the impression of being indefatigable. She would always be there. She would always have an opinion. She would appear with a new book, or a criticism about an adaption of The Wizard of Earthsea for white washing. She would tell fantasy writers they were being complacent and lazy imagining these worlds full of kings and queens. She would tell the publishing industry that being happy capitalists wasn’t how you created good art. Her essays on those things are still out there, if you haven’t read them. She always wanted speculative fiction to be more aware of itself and wanted everyone to be more thoughtful about what they wrote, in general. There really isn’t anyone who has replaced her, I’m afraid. Perhaps no-one could.

I started reading The Dispossessed a while back. It took me longer to read than I usually would because I was enjoying it. I know, it sounds strange, but sometimes it works that way. I was busy and I didn’t want to sit down and read a couple of pages and then walk away. I wanted to sit down, give it my full attention, and read fifty, sixty pages, spend a night with it. It was that kind of book. If you’re not familiar with it, The Dispossessed is about Anarres, a peaceful, anarchist society on a moon, and Urras, a capitalist society on the much richer world that the Anarres people left a hundred and sixty or so years before so that they could forge their own, equal society. The story follows Shevek, a physicist working on a General Temporal Theory, who leaves Anarres to go to Urras. He goes there, in part, because he will have better access to equipment and scientists, but also to bring his anarchist ideals to the culture there. However, once on Urras, he finds himself trapped in the comforts of the society, kept within the orbit of the university, always aware that the people who are seeing after him are waiting for his theory so that they can turn a profit from it.

At the heart of The Dispossessed is Le Guin’s imagining of Anarres, a desolate, ecologically poor moon that was once a mining colony for the Urras. It still is, in fact. Part of the agreement to allow the people on Anarres to live there free is that they continue to operate the mines. Of course, they also have a society. They grow their own food, run schools, and allow people the freedom to live as they please. There is no money on Anarres. Everyone eats from communal halls. They live in communal accommodation. No-one owns anything. The self is sacrificed for the larger whole of the community. Necessary jobs are done on assignment. Everyone contributes some of their time to maintain their communities. Of course, it’s not all perfect. People do covet. Within a lack of power structures there are power structures. The right to print work is carefully guarded by the university and other scientists. Shevek must constantly share authorship of his work with another scientist who has done no work for it. The work is censored, as well.

It’s a great portrayal of a society. Le Guin strikes the right balance on what she wants to show you in her utopia. She doesn’t tell you it is perfect. It has its problems. At one stage, a famine grips the community, and the portrayal of that is terrible because it feels so natural, so impersonal. The people, also, are mixed. Some live according to the ideals, others don’t. Some are fearful. Some suffer. The Urras society, a capitalist society similar to the one we live in now, acts as a foil to Anarres (or Anarres acts as a foil to our own society, a distinction that depends on the reader, I imagine). There the class system ensures that some are forced into lives of poverty, while others live with riches. There’s constant war. There’s jails. There’s inequality between races, cultures, and genders. It is, as I said, a wonderful portrayal, a whole, breathing world between two cultures, familiar and not. The only real complaint I have of it is that sometimes it feels a little middle twentieth century in its portrayal of a colourless anarchist world, so similar to the cliché of communists of that time. But then The Dispossessed was first published in 1974, and in this, I think, it shows the time it was written in.

In almost every other way, The Dispossessed is that rare speculative fiction novel, a book that equals the promise of its genre, to be a book of ideas. It’s entirely possible that you haven’t been subjected to the conversation of a genre of ideas, of the impassioned argument that SF is better, or more interesting than other genres, because of this. It’s a nonsense argument. I want to be clear on that. SF is no better or worse than any other genre. Also, SF isn’t really driven by ideas. It’s mostly driven by recycled and repackage genre tropes, sold without thought or innovation. The one saving grace that SF has in this regard is that this is true of all genres. Most books are bad. Most are poorly thought out, badly written, and deserve the obscurity that they find. We’re fortunate, as a people, that there are so many books published that we can avoid this, and that we cannot agree on what is good and what is bad, even if I will tell you, should you ask. But in regards to The Dispossessed at least, the promise of speculative fiction is found within it. It is the genres most cherished desire, its most lofted goal, realised. It is a novel of ideas. It is uncompromisingly so.

Ben

(Ben Peek is the author of The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories, amongst others. His next book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)