"The Dispossessed", Ursula Le Guin

"The Dispossessed" by Ursula Le Guin -- it must be about twenty years since I last read this, and it was a science fiction classic even in those days. Interestingly, though, it's actually a lot more optimistic than I remember, given its subject matter...

Basically, it's a dual-track story that starts with the protagonist leaving his planet for the first time, told in parallel chapters with his childhood and the events that lead up to his exile; the 'past' story reaches its end and his departure simultaneously with the 'present' story reaching its end and his return, so it's quite a tight technical construction. The subject matter is basically a realistic look at ideas of Utopia: Shevek's impoverished home culture was founded by idealistic anarchists and functions on the basis that there is no law save the good opinion of your neighbours. Half the book examines his disillusionment with this home planet, Anarres -- not with the grinding poverty of its infertile soil, but with the stifling intellectual effect of a culture in which individuality is subsumed into a common identity, and with the human flaws that inevitably manifest in the most theoretically perfect societies -- and the other half recounts the culture shock and eventual disillusionment he experiences on Urras, the ancestral home planet from which his people originally fled, with its fertile fields, non-hidebound competitive research, throwaway economy and (as becomes finally apparent) equal political oppression.( Read more... )