Product Description

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, Anarres, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2237393 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: School & Library Binding

About the Author
Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of more than one hundred short stories, two collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, ten books for children, and eighteen novels. Her Earthsea books have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb, it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an, idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

A number of people were coming along the road towards the landing field, or standing around where the road cut through the wall.

People often came out from the nearby city of Abbenay in hopes of seeing a spaceship, or simply to see the wall, After all, it was the only boundary wall on their world. Nowhere else could they see a sign that said No Trespassing. Adolescents, particularly, were drawn to it. They came up to the wall; they sat an it. There might be a gang to watch, offloading crates from track trucks at the warehouses. There might even be a freighter on the pad. Freighters came down only eight times a year, unannounced except to syndics actually working at the Port, so when the spectators were lucky enough to see one they were excited, at first. But there they sat, and there it sat, a squat black tower in a mess of movable cranes, away off across the field. And then a woman came over from one of the warehouse crews and said, "We're shutting down for today, brothers." She was wearing the Defense armband, a sight almost as rare as a spaceship. That was a bit of a thrill. But though her tone was mild, it was final. She was the foreman of this gang, and if provoked would be backed up by her syndics. And anyhow there wasn't anything to see. The aliens, the off-worlders, stayed hiding in their ship. No show.

It was a dull show for the Defense crew, too. Sometimes the foreman wished that somebody would just try to cross the wall, an alien, crewman jumping ship, or a kid from Abbenay trying to sneak in for a. closer look at the freighter. But it never happened. Nothing ever happened. When something did happen she wasn't ready for it.

The captain of the freighter Mindful said to her, "Isthat mob after my ship?"

The foreman looked and saw that, in fact there was a real crowd around the gate, a hundred or more people. They were standing around, just standing, the way people had stood at produce-train stations during the Famine. It gave the foreman a scare.

"No. They, ah, protest," she said in her slow and limited Iotic. "Protest the ah: you know. Passenger?"

"You mean they're after this bastard we're supposed to take? Are they going to try to stop him, or us?"

The word "bastard," untranslatable in the foreman's language, meant nothing to her except some kind of foreign term for her people, but she had never liked the sound of it, or the captain's tone, or the captain. "Can you look after you?" she asked briefly.

"Hell, yes. You just get the rest of this cargo unIoaded, quick. And get this passenger bastard on board. No mob of Oddies is about to give us any trouble." He patted the thing he wore on his belt, a metal object like a deformed penis, and looked patronizingly at the unarmed woman.

She gave the phallic object, which she knew was a weapon, a cold glance. "Ship will be loaded by fourteen hours," she said. "Keep crew on board safe. Lift off at fourteen hours forty. If you need help, leave message on tape at Ground Control." She strode off, before the captain could one-up her. Anger made her more forceful with her crew and the crowd. "Clear the road there!" she ordered as she neared the wall. "Trucks are coming through, somebody's going to get hurt. Clear aside!"

The men and women in the crowd argued with her and with one another. They kept crossing the road, and some came inside the wall. Yet they did more or less clear the way. If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling, there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life.

Some of them had come there to kill a traitor. Others had come to prevent him from leaving, or to yell insults at him, or just to look at him; and all these others obstructed the sheer brief path of the assassins.

Customer Reviews

Politics and corruption on two contrasting worlds
"The Dispossessed" is a utopian/dystopian novel along the lines of "Brave New World" or "The Handmaid's Tale." Although Le Guin creates an atmosphere of tension, there's not a lot of action (at least for the first three quarters of the book)--so readers expecting more "traditional" science fiction or surprising plot twists will certainly be dissatisfied. This unashamedly political novel portrays one character torn between two worlds with disparate political and economic systems, and it focuses on the highlights and the inadequacies of both those worlds.

Shevak, an unappreciated scientist from Anarres, travels to Urras, whose inhabitants seem to value better his discoveries in physics. Annares, the home of the "Dispossessed," is a 175-year-old rebel outpost of anarchists who have established "an experiment in nonauthoritarian communism" that emphasizes community and cooperation and who must make the most of the limited resources on their desert planet to avert the constant threat of starvation. Anarres's mother planet, Urras, boasts a triumvirate of strong and repressive governments, the most important of which is the capitalist government of A-Io with its impressive wealth, cultural accomplishments, and scientific achievements.

But all is not what it seems on either world. Le Guin alternates chapters detailing Shevak's early years of disenchantment on his lawless but peaceful native planet with chapters describing his growing realization that Urras has a significant "dispossessed" population as well. The novel is, of course, deeply informed by the Cold War--it was published in 1974--and each world features its own "ambiguous utopia" (the book's subtitle). The anarchists of Anarres have diluted their revolutionary vision with mindless and dogmatic conformism, discouragement of artistic pursuits and dissenting ideas, and an entrenched and uncaring bureaucracy that acts like a government in all but name. The capitalists of Urras, meanwhile, have traded libertarianism and meritocracy for a repressive oligarchy and the armed reinforcement of widespread economic disparities. As the novel progresses, Shevak appreciates that there is much to be learned from both (or rather, all) worlds.

Some readers and critics have suggested that Le Guin is "promoting" anarchism/communism; this is too simplistic, since the book is far too subtle and tentative to work as propaganda. Instead, she posits an attractive and idealistic society, contrasts it with a world with an appealing facade and an unattractive underclass, and shows how human nature tends to corrupt even the most well-meaning of civilizations. A book of ideas rather than of advocacy, "The Dispossessed" challenges readers to envision humankind's limitless possibilities.

Thoughtful and compelling
Quick -- name three SF literary portraits of functional societies founded on principles of anarchism.

I come up with Eric Frank Russell's Gands in _The Great Explosion_ (" . . . And Then There Were None"), Robert A. Heinlein's Loonies in _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, and Ursula K. Le Guin's Anarresti in _The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia_.

Oh, there are a handful of others, notably James Hogan's _Voyage from Yesteryear_ (which was itself strongly influenced by Russell). But most of the rest are thinly disguised libertarian propaganda without a great deal of literary merit (though your mileage may vary).

Of these three, Le Guin's is in some ways the most compelling. In part that's because she's just such a fine writer. But it's also because she's probably the _least_ "ideological" of all the SF writers who have ever tackled this subject.

On Le Guin's somewhat Taoistic approach, each of the contrasting societies contains the seeds of the other, and she lets the reader see both their "good" and "bad" points. She clearly likes the Anarresti society (and on the whole it comes off rather better than its Urrasti foil). But she doesn't hesitate to show the reader some of its critically important drawbacks. Its childrearing practices, for example, recall Ira Levin's _This Perfect Day_, and its treatment of original thinkers (and their "egoizing") even recalls Ayn Rand's tub-thumpingly propagandistic _Anthem_.

In general, then, Le Guin is pretty well immune to the usual salvation-by-ideology claptrap. And as her subtitle suggests, her utopia really _is_ ambiguous. For her, people aren't "saved" by adopting the correct philosophical position or social principles.

Least of all is her protagonist Shevek "saved" by such means. Shevek is a physicist from Anarres (the moon of the planet Urras) and has grown up in its anarchist society. But it doesn't really have a place for him. Neither, more obviously, does Urras, the "propertarian" counterpart to Annares's communitarian society, with which Annares has had no contact for about a century and a half. So with respect to the two polar-opposite patterns of social organization, Shevek is doubly dispossessed.

What's the book actually _about_? Well, Shevek cooks up a plan to get the two societies on speaking terms again and, in order to pursue it, decides to leave Anarres for Urras; so off he goes, as a passenger in a ship called the _Mindful_. (And yes, do be careful not to trip over the symbolism.) That's all I'm going to tell you about the plot. But the essential theme of the novel is, I suppose, barriers and their overcoming. (The very first sentence goes like this: "There was a wall." Yep.)

It's a very thoughtful novel. The narrative hops around in time a lot and the plot isn't exactly marked by nonstop action, so it's probably not for space opera fans. But readers of a more philosophical bent will enjoy it immensely.

And if you're at all interested in literary portraits of anarchist societies, make sure you read this one. If you share Le Guin's Taostic/anarchistic leanings (as I do), you'll like the Anarresti _and_ appreciate Le Guin's refreshingly anti-ideologue-ish honesty in her portrait of it.

Can a world be based on dispossession?
This novel won the 1974 Nebula Award and the 1975 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel of the year as well as the 1975 Jupiter Award. It is centered about a complex society that is founded upon anarchism: an ordered society without laws. The "dispossessed" in the novel are the millions of the inhabitants of Anarres, an arid moon of the lush planet of Urras. Two centuries earlier, the followers of an anarchist philosopher had fled Urras to forge a new society, a society that has done away with the concept of "possession." There is no property on Anarres, no money, no marriage (I hope that Le Guin is not meaning to suggest that marriage is a possession by one or other of the participants), no government, no laws, no prisons. Even the language reflects this attitude. Possessive pronouns are even avoided. Instead of saying "My hand hurts," one would say "The hand hurts me." A mathematical genius of Anarres, who has made a conceptual breakthrough that allows for the development of the ansible (an instantaneous communication device that other science fiction authors will begin to use), travels to Urras. He had been having difficulties with the philosophical ideas of his home world but the social structure of Urras baffles him. The cultures of both world cause problems for the protagonist Shevik. This is one of the best science fiction novels of all time. However, I'm surprised at some of the comments by earlier reviewers. It appears that some reviewers are really offended at more cerebral type of novels. I gave this book five stars. And, I also gave "A Princess of Mars" five stars. Both books have their place within the genre. Perhaps we should be not so narrow in our tastes so that we exclude valuable works. Both of these novels should be read by any serious student of science fiction literature.