The Dispossessed

I hate giving bad reviews. There’s probably some troll out there who gets off on savaging other people’s work, but I’m not one of them. Atleast, I try not to be. Sometimes I fail. And even if I don’t fail, it’s easy to come out the backside of a bad review feeling like a Grade-A Asshole–which is top of the line Asshole for the discerning connoisseur.

The other day I roughed up Roche Limit a bit. I took it to the back-alley and smacked it around like a cheap pinata. I hate doing it, but as a reviewer I think it’s more important to be honest and mean than disingenuous just for the sake of saving feelings. In the end that’s how you gain the trust of your readership, by remaining consistent and honest. Doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally feel bad for it, though.

With that said, I decided to cherry pick today’s review by going with a book I really liked. I figure too many pessimistic, mean-spirited reviews in a row and you all will rightly decide I’m just a hard to please jerk-wad. In point of fact I *am* a hard to please jerk-wad, but you’re not supposed to know that.

Shhhh!

The Dispossessed is from the perennial masteress of sci-fi, Ursula K. LeGuin. This is a woman I would love to meet, so, you know, if you’ve got her contact information, send it over. I’d like to shoot her a couple late night texts telling her I think she’s really cool.

The Dispossessed is book five of the Hainish Cycle although it serves as a bit of a prequel chronologically speaking. We experience the world through the eyes of an Odonian scientist named Shevek who is busy unraveling the theories of physics which will eventually lead to the creation of the Ansible.

Ansible, you say? What’s that? Well, you hardened sci-fi readers will be familiar with the ansible because it’s become a staple of modern sci-fi in much the same way that faster than light spaceships, light saber, and robots have become infused in our daily lexicon.

The ansible is a neat little machine that transports information across vast distances instantaneously (effectively working around that pesky speed of light restriction that the physics police keep trying to enforce). If you’ve read Ender’s Game, you’ll be familiarized with the importance of such a device.

Now, it’s just mind-blowing, and often overlooked, how much LeGuin contributed to science fiction in the way we understand it today. It’s astounding the impact she made on such a male dominated genre as far back as the 1970’s. A true luminary who showed that sci-fi is not just a boys only game.

The Dispossessed at it’s heart is a story about Utopian societies and what those might look like. The Odonians left their lush, capitalistic home world hundreds of years before the story picks up. They did the old–

–and then migrated to a grungy, dust covered sack of marbles barely passing for a livable planet. Once there, they set up the purest interpretation of a communistic society they could muster.

Despite their ideals, however, the power structures they so adamantly oppose start to seep into their day to day lives. Small justifications stack atop one another until nobody even notices the hypocrisy surrounding them. I liken this to eating an entire bag of popcorn, in the dark, while watching your favorite movie on the big-screen. If you’re anything like me, once those lights come back on, you quickly realize that nearly half of said popcorn missed your mouth. Which is cool, ’cause now from the nipples down you’ll have a thin veneer of rogue popcorn.

Yum.

Anyways, somebody smarter than me has pointed out that communism looks great on paper, but not so much in execution. I don’t spend much of my life considering the relative merits of communism versus capitalism (or any societal construct, really. I spend alot of time thinking about food, to be honest), but I think it’s safe to say that neither works particularly well in a vacuum.

As is the case with most things in life, the balance lies somewhere in the middle. And ultimately that’s what we find in The Dispossessed. Shevek starts noticing the hypocrisy inherit in the behaviors of his society and sets out to tear down the self imposed rules and walls they’ve surrounded themselves with. How he goes about this is both interesting and heart breaking.

The Utopian genre has pretty much died out in the past decade or so. Dystopian is much more en vogue these days. In the end I think it’s easier to think about all the ways society will fail, rather than trying to dream up the perfect world. I don’t think this is a good or bad thing, merely different. Times change, tastes ebb and flow, politics wish-wash, but despite that, The Dispossessed remains a really good story.

If you’ve never read anything by LeGuin then you’ve done yourself a disservice. Go pick up one of her books and then stop back and thank me later. I’ll be available between 6am-10pm, Monday thru Friday, to receive your praise and worship. I typically take the weekends off, but if your praise absolutely can’t wait, then go ahead and shoot me an email, I’ll understand.