Bookshelf Essentials: The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin

A year ago this week science fiction lost one of its wisest and most profound voices, the singular Ursula K. Le Guin. In commemoration, we thought it would be fitting to launch a new type of post, Bookshelf Essentials, with a tribute to one of her masterworks, The Dispossessed.

Above: the 1975 Panther Science Fiction UK edition of The Dispossessed. Cover art by Colin Hay.

The Bookshelf Essentials series highlights books that we believe deserve a place on every speculative fiction fan’s shelf – foundational classics of the genre as well as works that we have found personally meaningful. The Dispossessed (1974) fits both categories. Having won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best novel in 1974-75 it also stands as one of my personal favorite novels. It remains a lasting influence on my political and literary perspectives, and the book that opened the door for me into Ursula K. Le Guin’s remarkable and broad body of writing.

Over the course of her long career Le Guin published more than 20 novels and 100 short stories, mostly (but not exclusively) fantasy and science fiction. She was also an accomplished poet, essayist, and translator of works to English from multiple languages. I could easily call out a half dozen of her works as essential to any bookshelf (actually, maybe you should just clear a shelf right now), but for now I choose to focus on The Dispossessed as it so clearly demonstrates core themes that permeate her entire body of work; the possibility of societies radically different than our own, the inevitable tension between the individual and the system in any social structure, and the long journey that the individual must take to understand themselves and develop the courage to make a change in their world.

Above: Ursula K. Le Guin in the mid-1970s. Photographer unknown.

The Dispossessed is set on the twin worlds of Tau Ceti; the lush planet Urras and it’s bleak moon Anarres. Urras is dominated by highly patriarchal and class-stratified capitalist societies, while Anarres is home to an anarchist utopian society of voluntary exiles, now several generations into their great experiment. The narrative revolves around the life of Shevek, a brilliant Anarresti physicist and deep believer in his society’s utopian mission. Shevek is pulled between his individual passion for his research and the pressures of the collective “social organism” of Anarres. Alternating between his past on his homeworld and his present as a “distinguished guest” on capitalist Urras, the story reveals how he came to the decision to leave Anarres to complete his work despite the anger and disgust of his countrymen, and his struggle to hold fast to his ideals while in the control of the “propertarians”.

Above: the 1975 Avon SF US edition of The Dispossessed. Cover artist unknown.

In some editions of The Dispossessed the novel was given the subtitle “An Ambiguous Utopia”, and I believe this comfort with ambiguity is one of its greatest strengths. The society of Anarres is neither a perfect ideal nor a dystopia lurking under a revolutionary veneer. While it is clear that Le Guin believes there is something of genuine value in a society free of formal property and hierarchy (which she works out in compelling detail), she is clear-eyed and reflective enough to create a complex, contradictory place inhabited by real people. Their instincts for jealousy, power, individualism, and even love often run counter to these ideals and push Anarres’ reality away from its guiding mission in ways both good and bad. Similarly, Urras, while grossly and violently unequal in ways that disturb Shevek (and in ways that should be familiar to us 21st century Earthlings), is not a nightmare world. It is graceful, beautiful, and rich – the Urrasti have established a functional equilibrium between human prosperity and ecological health, and of most importance to this story, their social stratification allows for the existence of institutions such as the sophisticated universities that Shevek requires to complete his research. Late in the novel a Terran ambassador bitterly notes to Shevek that this world he views as a propertarian hell seems to her, a survivor of a planet consumed by human greed to the point of collapse, an enviable paradise. This nuanced depth sets The Dispossessed apart from most utopian and dystopian fiction and allows for Le Guin’s characters to express their rich humanity in a way that more didactic social examinations make impossible.

In her speech upon receiving the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, Le Guin said these words:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries, realists of a larger reality.”

Ursula K. Le Guin lived up to this lofty vision of the writer throughout her inspiring career, and with particular clarity and force in The Dispossessed. Read it and enter Le Guin’s larger reality.

Header Image: Ursula K. Le Guin in 2016. Photograph by Benjamin Reed.