The Dispossessed (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

Rereading this book has been a joy! I first read it as a teenager and it opened my eyes to so many ideas. Reading it at forty, it’s still an impressive tour de force, especially in its commitment to putting human nature at the core of its political messaging. A must read for any sci-fi enthusiast!

This book is Le Guin at her best.It is full of ideas, and in my view, should be mandatory reading for any curious adult individual. Not only SF nerds. In fact, I believe its genre hurts its reach (due to prejudice), as the SF elements are just an excuse for the story told.One of the few books in my life that I want to start reading again right after finishing it - literally flip to page 1 and read again.I stopped the impulse after a cursory glance at my to-read pile.The physical construction of the book: it is a mass paperback. It will sustain a number of reads, but wears out. Wished the few maps would be a bit more detailed and have bigger fonts.

i like the thick paper and nice feel of the book, the margins are big enough to annotate (as a student this is important)

I was swept away by this book. Its characters, its world, the fact that there's a profound, quotable phrase on every second page. A true masterpiece.

Es werden 2 Gesellschaftskonzepte ausgearbeitet. Ich fand das interessant. Das Ende kam überraschend - ich hätte gerne noch etwas mehr erfahren.Von 4 auf 5 Sterne aufgewertet, weil ich immer wieder daran denken musste. Chevek und seine Sehnsüchte haben mich nicht wieder losgelassen.

Lo compré sin muchas expectativas y vaya que ha sido mi libro favorito del 2022. Que bonita historia y que bonita forma de contarla de parte de la autora.

“The Dispossessed” is a 1974 science fiction novel by the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018). The paperback available on Amazon India is a 2002 reprint by the British book publisher Orion, under their well-known sci-fi imprint, Gollancz. This paper is part of a series of sci-fi books that Orion has been publishing since 1999 as part of their “SF Masterworks” series, in which almost 200 books have been published by now. I agree with some other reviewers that the cover of the book is a bit garish. But the inside is classic—reasonably good paper and time-honoured typesetting—so it’s not hard to ignore the outwardly ugliness.With those petty details out of the way, one can turn to the book itself. It is hard not to recommend “The Dispossessed” strongly. This is top-class, well-crafted literature. The story takes place on the twin planets of Anarres and Urras that are locked in each other’s orbit. Anarres is poor, Urras is rich. Anarres has fewer people, Urras has lots of people. Anarres is just a couple centuries old, Urras is much older. Anarres has a single nation, Urras has several. Anarres is anarchist, Urras is “archist”, with several nations with various kinds of governments. Anarres and Urras avoid all people-to-people contact with each other.Well, one day, a perceptive physicist from Anarres, Shevek, makes an epoch-making discovery in physics that has far-reaching consequences. It so happens that the process of this discovery also reveals to Shevek the deep problems of anarchism. In a bold move then, he flees to Urras. The novel is about what happens afterwards. There are several passages in the book that make you pause and marvel at the quality of Le Guin’s language. And the depth to which Le Guin takes the discussion of the limits of politics is mind-boggling. This is the real power of sci-fi: its capacity to allow a writer to imagine scenarios that enable such discussions.

Le Guin stellt eine faszinierende Frage: Wie könnte eine Gesellschaft ohne Machtsystem funktionieren? Kein Staat, keine Polizei, keinerlei offiziellen Regeln. Gabs sowas jemals in Größeren Verbänden als kleinen Jäger/Sammler Gruppen? Nein, aber geht es in dieser Art Science Fiction nicht eben darum, auch Fragen zu Ende zu denken, die auf den ersten Blick als lächerlich erscheinen.Ein Klassiker, der diese Bezeichnung auch verdient.

A cheap edition, but alright

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”The anarchist collective on the planet Anarres migrated from the propertarian, capitalist planet of Urras when a previous revolution occurred. Rather than continue to contend with them, they have gifted this planet. Then, using the teachings of Odo, the center point of this revolution and who ostensibly is also responsible for structuring this anarcho-syndicalist society experiment, they establish this new way of living; retreating into themselves for generations.“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”When Shavek, considered a brilliant and unparalleled physicist on both planets, decides to make the journey to Urras in order to finish his work, he must first figure out his place in a new society at odds with his way of life and way of thinking.“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.”The narrative is very clever, alternating between him negotiating this new space and how this society works and is perceived by an outsider, while also flashing back to his life back in Anarres, slowly exposing the ways in which life oppress and alter the citizens on both planets. There are many astute ways in which the author uses Shavek's own life events to communicate complex ideas and offers the merits of each society while presenting a condemnation of each.The book is extremely well written and filled with a unique form of prose. The book was a pleasure to read and consume. But part of why I chose this book was to examine it in order to see if this was a proto solarpunk book. There are clear throughlines to cyberpunk, there has, in some ways, never been more of a punk protagonist. An actual anarchist! It's also subversive of typical cyberpunk protagonists generally in it for themselves but punk in that they are against establishment, authoritarianism, and capitalism. In this novel, Shavek is deeply wounded by society. It gets its hooks in him. Twisting his way of thinking and seducing him, attempting to commodify his work and ideas.One definition of Solarpunk is: a movement focused on a positive, ecological vision for a future where technology is used for human-centric and ecocentric purposes.So the punk part is pretty clearly covered. Where the solar part comes in is somewhat more questionable for me, initially. Sure the anarcho-syndicalist society is kind of covering that aspect. We could take a lot of those principles and integrate it into an extrapolated version of our own society and get results for a much more sustainable future. However... it's not really technology that's doing this, right? There is little talk of technology at all throughout most of it, in either planets' culture and infrastructure even, beyond trains anyways. Written in 1974, it makes perfect sense that the book certainly wouldn't place any particular significance on these things beyond the physics that Shavek dedicates his life to. But what they are after from Shavek is faster-than-light travel; specifically in their ships, which was given to them by an alien race.Where this gets somewhat more clear is when another species or aliens are revealed: Terrans. They are Earth decedents which specifically state their planet is all but destroyed. An ambassador situated on Urras is the vehicle for the qualities of most solarpunk stories. A dystopic planet that seeks to get new technologies and cooperations from other forms of life to make their planet better.“My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.”It is certainly atypical of the emerging genre. But when a lot of the sort-of meta-narrative of all these groups of people and species of humans, and their subsequent societies, are driving at getting this new technology for their own respective reasons. Some to conquer and establish superiority; others to forge a better life, and still, others to never allow for it to exist at all. There ends up being much more of a focus on technology than previously thought.“Change is freedom, change is life.It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.”Furthermore, as such a seminal work of fiction, it seems to claim that solarpunk having roots here is highly plausible. It won many awards and was a major contribution to the genre. Before cyberpunk even existed. After it was established, to have a different sub-genre emerge which used this as a foundation instead of other seminal works credited to cyberpunk seems only natural.It could not be more punk. And it shows optimism in the face of the fear of technology, doing a very good job at exploring the issue more thoroughly than some other cyberpunk works by having whole societies project their uses and desires onto an emerging, game-changing technology only one man, Shavek, can provide; a punk no less, wanting to start a revolution within an anarchist state built from the ground up from it's own revolution.“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

A strange story, seemed somewhat confused where it was going on a large scale, but kept me interested until the end.

Escrito durante nos anos 70, no auge da Guerra Fria, a autora faz uma crítica à sociedade econômica e social da época que ainda se mantém muito atual, ao instroduzir contrastes das diversas sociedades que compõem o unvierso do livro. Algo interessante de ser notado é que a autora foge do esteriótipo de sociedade ideal, apresentando conflitos que ainda não foram resolvidos pelas sociedades do livro. O que me interessou foi retratar os personagens como que vivendo em bolhas da sua sociedade, sem perceber o que existe como alternativa. A autora descreve muito bem esse sentimento nas sutilezas das situações apresentadas.Ótimo como uma crítica à sociedade atual, tanto no sentido de meios de produção, relações sociais e familiares.

Ich habe dieses Buch bis etwa zu einem Drittel gelesen. Die Handlung ist dröge, außerdem sind die Kapitel viel zu lang, was ich nicht mag. (Man hat ja auch noch andere Sachen zu tun, und bei so langen Kapiteln muss man manchmal die Lektüre irgendwo mittendrin unterbrechen und findet dann nur schwer wieder den Einstieg.)Die Welt, in der dieser Roman spielt, ist schlecht durchdacht. Da passt eines nicht zum anderen. So leben z.B. auf Anarres alle in Gemeinschaft, d.h. sie übernachten auch in Schlafsälen. Trotzdem streiten sie sich schon von Beginn des Buches an ständig, schlimmer als im Fernsehen! Es macht mir keinen Spaß, so etwas zu lesen, und ich halte es auch nicht für realistisch. Wenn man gezwungen ist, so eng zusammenzuleben (warum eigentlich, von wem?), dann muss man anders miteinander umgehen. Ich hatte erwartet, in Anarres eine "ideale Welt", eine "Utopie" zu finden - aber dort würde ich noch nicht einmal meinen Urlaub verbringen wollen.Auf Urras ist es noch schlimmer. Dort bezweifeln sogar diejenigen, denen man einiges an Intelligenz zutraut, nämlich die Physiker, dass Frauen fähig seien, im Berufsleben ihren Beitrag zu leisten. Einer der Physiker merkt an, dass Frauen ganz gute technische Assistenten sein könnten, weil sie so gewissenhaft arbeiten, der andere widerspricht ihm. Mehr Streit und Rumgezicke. Ständig gibt es in diesem Buch nur Streit.So etwas will ich nicht lesen. Es gibt ja noch nicht einmal eine aufregende Handlung oder interessante Paradoxa in dem Buch. Ein Physiker reist von einem Planeten zum anderen, wo er - unter einem unfreundlichen Chef, der ihn immer nur angrummelt - als Physiker arbeiten soll. Toll. Ich bin begeistert. Sonst ist weiter noch nichts passiert.Geldverschwendung, Zeitverschwendung, nicht empfehlenswert!