{"id":182300,"date":"2021-04-05T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2021-04-05T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=182300"},"modified":"2021-04-04T05:34:26","modified_gmt":"2021-04-04T04:34:26","slug":"the-dispossessed-is-still-one-of-sci-fis-smartest-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/04\/the-dispossessed-is-still-one-of-sci-fis-smartest-books\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Dispossessed\u2019 Is Still One of Sci-Fi\u2019s Smartest Books"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, about a society with no government or laws, remains a thoughtful exploration of politics and economics decades later.
Photograph: Neil Turner\/Alamy<\/p><\/div>\n

2 Apr 2021 – <\/em>Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s 1974 novel The Dispossessed<\/em><\/a> depicts a society with no laws or government, an experiment in \u201cnonviolent anarchism.\u201d Science fiction author Matthew Kressel<\/a> was impressed by the book\u2019s thoughtful exploration of politics and economics.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter reading The Dispossessed<\/em>, I was just blown away,\u201d Kressel says in Episode 460 of the Geek\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em><\/a> podcast. \u201cIt was just such an intellectual book. It\u2019s so philosophical, and it was so different from a lot of the science fiction I had read before that. It made me want to read more of Le Guin\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Science fiction author Anthony Ha<\/a> counts The Dispossessed<\/em> as one of his all-time favorite books. \u201cI would be hard pressed to think of another novel that made as strong an impression on me,\u201d he says. \u201cI was insufferable about it. I put quotes in my email signatures, and I identified as an anarchist for several years after that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Le Guin<\/a>, who died in 2018, was one of science fiction\u2019s most popular authors, and The Dispossessed<\/em> was one of her most popular books, winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. Geek\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em> host David Barr Kirtley<\/a> notes that her themes of environmentalism, social justice, and feminism have had a profound influence on generations of readers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember when I interviewed Le Guin<\/a>, one of the things I asked her about was that there had been a story in the news about how protesters\u2014left-wing protesters\u2014had these plastic shields on which they\u2019d printed or painted the cover of The Dispossessed<\/em>,\u201d he says. \u201cSo it was really\u2014in a very direct way\u2014inspiring people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s moral ambiguity and deliberate pace won\u2019t appeal to everyone, but science fiction professor Lisa Yaszek<\/a> says it\u2019s exactly those qualities that make The Dispossessed<\/em> so distinctive. \u201cThat\u2019s my favorite thing about this book, is it really shows you that the process of getting to a utopia is boring,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s so much work, and it\u2019s so much talk, and it\u2019s so much thought. There\u2019s nothing Flash Gordon<\/a> about it, which I think is super-cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Lisa Yaszek on Ursula K. Le Guin:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI was in graduate school in the 1990s, and I was working at Wiscon<\/a>, the oldest and largest feminist science fiction convention in the world, and I ended up having breakfast with Le Guin and Judith Merril<\/a>\u2014and by the way, best breakfast of my entire life. Nothing will ever be better than that day. That was a really interesting moment, and it made me want to go back and look at Le Guin\u2019s work again. \u2026 My favorite thing about Ursula Le Guin is that she is science fiction\u2019s best ambassador to the rest of the world, ever. She has done more to show people why this is an important genre\u2014and maybe the mode of literature we need to navigate our way into a very uncertain future\u2014than anyone else ever will.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Barr Kirtley on The Dispossessed<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things I really like in science fiction is this opportunity to see a society that has never existed but seems like it could exist, and to see our society through the eyes of some hypothetical society. And I thought that this book did that amazingly well, as well as any example I could think of. \u2026 One of the things I really liked was that [Shevek] is surprised at how hard everybody works in a capitalist society, because he always imagined that the main thing that motivates people is this volunteer instinct, and if you take that away\u2014if people are just working for money\u2014they would be lazy and wouldn\u2019t be motivated. So it\u2019s interesting how opposite a lot of the ways that he thinks are from what we\u2019re familiar with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthony Ha on \u201cTo Read The Dispossessed<\/em>\u201c:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a 50- or 60-page essay where [Samuel R. Delany<\/a>] goes into a lot of detail about some of the other shortcomings of the book, that I think are real and that we haven\u2019t maybe gone into as much, but that it\u2019s very much\u2014despite being this \u2018anarchist revolutionary book\u2019\u2014it\u2019s very into the heterosexual married traditional family unit, and the one queer character is not portrayed very convincingly and is marginalized in a lot of ways. So there are a lot of things about it that are not entirely persuasive. But the way he ends the essay is by saying that when you read the book as somebody who\u2019s young, you might be totally blown away by it, when you\u2019re a little bit older and more sophisticated, you might come at it and be disappointed, but then when you\u2019re more mature than that, you\u2019ll see that the ambition of the thing is itself incredibly worthwhile.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthew Kressel on genre snobbery:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cYou sometimes get certain literary circles that pooh-pooh science fiction. Even in the New Yorker<\/em> article<\/a>, there\u2019s a quote: \u2018If science fiction was down-market, it was at least a market.\u2019 And then the other quote was: \u2018Her editor, Charles McGrath<\/a>, saw in her an ability to transform genre fiction into something higher.\u2019 They\u2019re writing this profile of one of the greatest science fiction authors of the 20th century, and they still can\u2019t resist shitting on science fiction. \u2026 If you\u2019re ignoring science fictional tropes, you\u2019re ignoring reality. We have supercomputers in our pockets that connect to satellites. We have artificial intelligence that decides what we see every day. We have video conferences. NASA\u2019s going to the moon again, and we have a probe on Mars\u2014helicopters will fly on Mars in the next week or two. We\u2019re living in a science fiction world, and if you ignore that, maybe you\u2019re the one who\u2019s the fantasist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original – wired.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2 Apr 2021 – Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s 1974 novel The Dispossessed depicts a society with no laws or government, an experiment in \u201cnonviolent anarchism.\u201d Science fiction author Matthew Kressel was impressed by the book\u2019s thoughtful exploration of politics and economics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":182302,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[217],"tags":[873,272,354,642,444,1243,1779,870,1701,458],"class_list":["post-182300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anarchism","tag-anarchism","tag-cooperation","tag-economics","tag-literature","tag-nonviolence","tag-nonviolent-action","tag-nonviolent-communication","tag-reviews","tag-social-contract","tag-social-movements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}