To Beat a Book: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
The Dispossessed is not a difficult book. The setup is based on a thought experiment: two planets face each other, one is governed by a radically anarchist government, the other one is governed under a no-less radical class system.
But Le Guin excels at tearing the thing apart. The nonlinear story forces the reader to recollect the events and the logics of the book, allowing step by step to a better understanding of its inherent complexity.
It’s one of the rare books to actually show a real understanding of the dynamics of society. Things moves. They evolve. The tensions between the individual mind and the collective society impacts everywhere, whatever the collective organization will be.
Once closed, this is nowhere to be seen as a defense of anarchist theory. The book gives the feeling to teach something about social dynamics. Not unlike George Orwell’s 1984, but in a less pessimistic way. Too bad it’s just an illusion.
After some search, I was able to find that Samuel R. Delany wrote a piece entitled “To read The Dispossessed”. After being extremely critical of the artistic and scientific value of the book, he concludes as this: The Dispossessed will excite young and generous readers — indeed, will excite any reader beginning to look at our world and us in it. And it will excite for a long time…. Nevertheless, some of these excited readers who return to the book a handful of years later will find themselves disillusioned: What excited them, they will see, was the book’s ambition more than its precise accomplishments. But hopefully — a year or so after that — they will reach another stage where they will be able to acknowledge that ambition for what it was and value it; and know how important, in any changing society, such ambition is.
Published in 1974, and winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula, it’s a must-read and a pleasure for the mind.
Have a look at The Dispossessed on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
And once again, have a look at Samuel R. Delany article. It’s an interesting reading in itself: “To read The Dispossessed”
I saw that Theodore Sturgeon had also written on it, but I was unable to find his text.
