James Nicoll Reviews

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is a science fiction novel set in her Hainish setting.

Shevek is his generation’s most brilliant physicist. For reasons that will become clear, Shevek makes the momentous decision to pursue his research not on his native moon Anarres. Rather, he takes what he hopes is just a sabbatical in A‑Io on Urras, the world about which Anarres orbits.

Almost two centuries before, the Urrasti Council of World Governments made a deal with the unruly Odonian anarchists then plaguing various nations. The Odonians would be given Anarres for their own. The Odonians could attempt to put their political beliefs into action as they pleased, free of interference from Urras, while Urras could carry on as usual, free of interference from the Odonians.

The Free World of Anarres has just twenty million people to Urras’ billion. The harsh, dry climate features periodic droughts that trigger famines. The economy has very little surplus, and certain goods cannot be made on the moon at all. Nevertheless, Anarres and its Odonian way of life prevail.

One reason for Shevek’s visit to the mother world is that by necessity, Anarres has comparatively few resources available for research. Compounding that issue, everyone is expected to set aside their vocations for farmwork, drought mitigation, and other necessary drudgery. Shevek has also encountered a professional roadblock in the person of Sabul, a senior researcher.

Shevek is the first person to leave the moon for Urras in 170 years. His decision makes him a pariah to some on Anarres and a curiosity to many on Urras. Shevek’s work on Simultaneity makes Shevek a treasured commodity to A‑Io, not merely because of the prestige involved, but because the theory might lead to faster-than-light travel, which would allow the imperialists of Tau Ceti to extend their glorious political systems across the human-occupied worlds.

The governments of Urras might be surprised to discover that Shevek has his own agenda.

Shevek is naïve and unworldly. It takes him some time to realize that the A‑Io in which he lives is a Potemkin village concealing the grim reality of an unequal nation in which a few are rich and many are poor and oppressed. Hence, despite the Odonian exile, there are still anarchists on Urras. A prudent man would avoid entanglement with them, lest it endanger his primary goal. Shevek has many fine qualities but prudence is not one of them.

~oOo~

I bet the maps are legible in the hardcover editions. They are very nearly legible in the Avon MMPB. I wonder if anyone has written a piece about the role of maps in Le Guin works….

Certain details about the setting¹ led me to feel grave concern about the long-term viability of the Odonian enclave on Anarres. A dry world with three isolated seas, Anarres at first glance seems challenging but habitable. Consider this: the Hain populated all the inhabited worlds hundreds of thousands of years before the present. Does it make sense that they would have planted a colony on Urras but overlooked its habitable moon? Or did Anarres’ bleak conditions overwhelm its first human colonists? Is Anarres, like Britain, only intermittently habitable by the doomed2?

Did Le Guin intend this or is it just an accident of her setting this particular pair of worlds in the Hainish setting because that setting already featured ansibles and the invention of ansibles is the perfect central invention for a book about communication? This is just one of many elements of the novel open to question.

Some editions include the subtitle ​“An Ambiguous Utopia.” What is meant by ambiguous? That’s unclear.

Some might think that Anarres is intended to show a world in which all are free, all are brothers and sisters, all prosper or suffer together, where poverty and resource shortages are not used as an excuse for lack of mutual support3. It has survived for centuries, when many real-world hopeful would-be utopias have collapsed within a few years of founding. By the standards of Zoar, Nashoba, Hopedale, and many others, Anarres is wildly successful.

However, the Odonian way of life has intentional outcomes some would see as decidedly non-utopian. For example, considerable social pressure is applied to ensure that individuals conform.

Anarres also has unintentional outcomes that are also decidedly non-utopian. Anarres shuns contact with the mother world. This prevents political contamination. It also means that the people of Anarres are provincial, conservative⁴, and xenophobic. Various social parasites use the political vernacular to justify manifestly anti-Odonian behavior⁵. While many Anarresti would angrily deny the fact, they do have a government. However, it is a government that is hard to reform because to reform it, the Anarresti would have to admit the government exists.

Furthermore, another way to look at the Urrasti/Anarresti arrangement is that the Odonians agreed to become a captive population forced by necessity to mine that forbidding planet for minerals needed by their political rivals on Urras. The Odonians help make the Urras nation-states function.

This is not a book like Ecotopia, in which the setting has issues to which the author is blind. Le Guin goes out of her way to draw attention to the ways in which Anarres falls short of its ideals. This is all perfectly deliberate. As is the ambiguity. Le Guin starts the novel discussing the significance of the wall around the Anarres spaceport:

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. 

Alternatively, perhaps it’s Urras that is the ambiguous utopia of the subtitle, not Anarres. This may seem counterintuitive, given the economic and social stratification, the rampant sexism, various egregious acts of state violence and suppression, the imperialism, and the wars that have plagued the planet throughout history. However, the ambassador from Terra sees Urras thus:

To me, and to all my fellow Terrans who have seen the planet, Urras is the kindliest, most various, most beautiful of all the inhabited worlds. It is the world that comes as close as any could to Paradise.” 

It’s not that the ambassador is blind to Urras’ flaws. It’s just that Terra is much, much worse, thanks to resource depletion during Terra’s stupid years. In fact, the Terrans appear to have Anarres-formed the Earth. Ah, well. Come back in twenty million years and you’ll hardly be able to see the marks.

Further undermining any chance of reading Anarres as an unambiguous utopia, Le Guin eschews the standard utopian practice of peopling her novel with cardboard angels and demons whose purpose is to explain the setting, to have the setting explained to them, or to embody various principles of the society [5]. Instead, she invests considerable effort fleshing out the characters in a way that is contrary to the conventions of utopian fiction.

The Dispossessed is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books)

I did not find a functioning link to The Dispossessed at Apple Books. I did find links that claimed to lead to an entry for the novel but they hung.

1: I bet you thought I was going to wrestle with the difficult problem of whether or not Urras and Anarres are tide-locked to each other. I think they pretty much have to be. An Anarres orbit takes about twenty-four hours. If Anarresti hours are the same as Terran, then the two are much closer to each other than the current Earth-Moon distance, comparable to the Moon’s original separation from Earth. Therefore, moon and mother world must be much larger in the other’s sky than is true for the Earth and the Moon. However, as this is not a Poul Anderson novel, nobody ponders at length what is perfectly normal for all but two characters in the novel.

Of course, there’s no way to tell if Anarresti hours are the same as Terran. The characters speak Pravik and Iotic, and we have to treat the text as though it was translated into English. Similarities of unit names may be a translation contrivance.

Be very happy that I deleted my three hundred words on the significance of Urrasti and Anarresti hydrologies.

2: Speaking of doomed, Shevek is mildly anti-vaccine in part because such things are unnecessary on Anarres. The Odonians took care to leave communicable diseases behind. This means whenever Urras decides to reintegrate the moon back into the mainstream, they need only drop germ bombs to clear out the anarchists while leaving the infrastructure untouched.

There’s another aspect to his medical shyness, which is that Anarresti youths see illness as criminal.

Most young Anarresti felt that it was shameful to be ill: a result of their society’s very successful prophylaxy, and also perhaps a confusion arising from the analogic use of the words ​“healthy” and ​“sick.” They felt illness to be a crime, if an involuntary one. To yield to the criminal impulse, to pander to it by taking pain relievers, was immoral. 

That’s an issue entirely orthogonal to their political system but I am sure it has the potential to bite them in the ass at a later date.

3: While Shevek mentions a mother who killed her baby because the alternative was to let it starve for lack of milk, that was in the middle of a great famine. In normal circumstances, Anarres passes the (alleged) Margaret Mead test: the default is to care for those who need care.

There’s a telling conversation between Shevek and partner Takver in which Takver uses the metaphor of a sick baby:

But if for some reason (the baby) would die if we kept it, it could only live in a nursery, if we never could set eyes on it or know its name — if we had that choice, which would we choose? To keep the stillborn? Or to give life?” 

Takver takes for granted that the nursery is a plausible option, therefore there must be children on Anarres who need and more importantly get ongoing care.

This isn’t uncommon for humans but it is unusual in SF, which as a genre is always eager to find reasons to invoke lifeboat rules before hucking the unwanted overboard. See, for example, Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite.

4: Before rereading this, I had incorrectly thought that Odonians, while rejecting formal marriage, retained obligate heterosexuality as did Tanith Lee’s characters in Don’t Bite the Sun. Not the case, which is unusual in a 1970s SF novel. How on Earth could an author writing in the same genre as Delany and Russ, a writer resident in 1970s San Francisco, come to reject heteronomy? We may never know.

5: There’s a structural argument in favour of Urras being the ambiguous utopia. Generally speaking, utopian novels feature outsiders to whom the glorious world order is explained. In this novel, that outsider is Shevek and the world that is explained to him is Urras. However, in a standard utopia, the visitor embraces the utopian way, whereas the more Shevek understands A‑Io, the less he likes their society. Shevek’s relationship to A‑Io is closer to John the savage’s relationship to the greater world in Brave New World than it is to anything seen in works like Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887 or Ecotopia.

The Terran ambassador fits the standard model, but the Terran ambassador is only a supporting character.