The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

[james_davis_nicoll]

A physicist determined to complete his research emigrates from a planet of idealists to a planet of economic surpluses.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Comments

[patrick_morris_miller]

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

I can't be the only one who wishes you hadn't. (For one, it bears on the nascent Traveller setting I will never use. (And it's interesting that I kept thinking of Zhdant and Viepchakl reading the review, although Viepchakl is not a shirtsleeve world.))

[petrea_mitchell]

You aren't!

[spiralsheep]

"Is Anarres, like Britain, only intermittently habitable by the doomed2?"

Yes, but here in Britannia we have not one but two exciting potential environmental dooms: freezing AND drowning. :-)

I suspect Le Guin understoond that both societies could be ambiguous Utopias for differing people. (And the Terran ambassador often seems almost a stereotype of the way USians, wrongly, believe most Brits view the US, which might suggest a possible real-world origin for the tropes.)

[james_davis_nicoll]

Even if Antarctica and Greenland melt, there's still a lot of Britain above water, whereas the ice sheets have successfully wiped out British indigenes five or six times.

[spiralsheep]

I mean, that's true, but the doomed populations of Doggerland etc were still doomed.

[conuly]

...did they not simply move elsewhere as the water moved in?

[spiralsheep]

Invading your neighbour's territory is rarely "simple", especially for people already dead of cataclysmic flooding.

ETA: Unless you're thinking of some sort of aquatic zombie horde?

[patrick_morris_miller]

Unless you're thinking of some sort of aquatic zombie horde?

I'm expecting them any day now.

[spiralsheep]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog

It's a Christmas movie!

[patrick_morris_miller]

I like that movie more than it deserves.

[spiralsheep]

"We like that movie more than it deserves" is the secret of John Carpenter's success. :-D

[conuly]

It's the best kind of zombie.

[oh6]

I suppose I only have my late father and some of his colleagues as an example, but I was willing to posit Shevek as a physicist. The passage where he makes his theoretical breakthrough is about the most believeable I've read in science fiction, at least on the emotional side.

[(Anonymous)]

"What is meant by ambiguous? That’s unclear."

I see what you did there. 😉

-Awesome Aud

[chrysostom]

There's more than one culture on Urras. Shevek spends his time in the capitalist one, but there's also a communist one - I don't think we're given any reason to think that that one is very good, either.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Not to mention the third region, where the Great powers hold proxy wars. Also not a fun place.

[(Anonymous)]

So now I’m thinking of stories - mostly before H. G Wells or else for children - where one or more Earthpeople visit Earth’s and discover an arguable utopian society there. Whereas in this novel, a citizen of an exoplanet’s moon visits the planet. Which sounds just like later twentieth century Earth. But with a sinless, etc.

Cartoon police detective Dick Tracy for instance visited Moon people one or more times, though I don’t remember how utopian they were. Would a utopia need to bring in police? Surely he must have gone there pursuing an Earth criminal?

Robert Carnegie

[(Anonymous)]

“Earthpeople visit Earth’s Moon” is what I meant to say.

Robert Carnegie

Radio play

[rpresser]

I don't know if you've heard it or if you want to, but there is a radio play adaptation of the novel available here: https://libcom.org/article/dispossessed-radio-play

The actual audio files are on archive.org in this directory listing: http://ia800207.us.archive.org/21/items/VPoint/

Re: Radio play

[james_davis_nicoll]

I listened to part of that before stopping in part because I thought it would overwrite my memory of the book and in part because I disagreed with certain creative decisions such as making Urras a unified world with an outer planet empire whose rebels Urras planned to bring to heel by using the ftl drive they were sure Shevek would deliver.

[philrm]

The Magnificent New Epic of an Ambiguous Utopia is, um, a sentence.

Having spent a career in astrophysics, I don't recall anything disbelievable in the portrayal of Shevek as a physicist.

It would be a coin flip for me whether this or The Left Hand of Darkness is Le Guin's greatest novel.

[voidampersand]

I've had this argument between friends:

A: The Left Hand of Darkness is the greatest SF novel of all time.
B: What about The Dispossessed?
A: Damn.

[ba_munronoe]

I recently read The Left Hand and found it very fine: with such a recommendation I am looking forward to reading "The Dispossessed", which is on my to read pile.