"The Dispossessed", Ursula Le Guin

[igenlode]

"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.

The motor for the plot is Shevek's research into 'temporal physics', which is a field that (so far as I know) the author has invented completely from scratch (there is a hint that his work is connected ultimately to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, long since considered obsolete in this far-future universe). She pulls off the very difficult balancing trick of making the reader feel that he has understood the thought processes of someone who is clearly a genius -- though never described as such and not seeing himself as one -- without our ever *actually* learning or understanding what it is that Shevek studies or does. His search for a grand unifying theory drives the plot of the book without the author's ever going into terms that we as laymen could not be expected to understand; it's all represented convincingly in terms of abstract analogies (save one jarring reference to a slide-rule in an era of far future spaceflight!), and because it's so difficult to depict the creative process in any field in fiction it isn't until you try to analyse the book that you realise that you are never really told anything concrete about what he is doing :-)

The author is ultimately, I think, on the ideological side of the communist/anarchist society of Anarres, or at least of its founders' vision; but she draws a vivid picture of just what such principles amount to in practice, how narrow-minded and oppressive being taught not to oppress people can be ("you're egoising!"), how such a society enables people to survive in desperate conditions on a rockball planet and the amount of liberty that their 'freedom' requires them routinely to sacrifice. This is old-style hard SF, both in terms of the sort of ideas examined and the amount of world-building that's being done (e.g. it becomes very gradually apparent that the protagonists aren't entirely 'human' as we would recognise it, and in one of the most shocking twists Shevek encounters 'real' Earth-humans at the end of the novel). It's also oddly prescient in terms of the sort of competitive 'privilege-checking' that currently goes on on Tumblr and elsewhere -- the tyranny of those who define themselves as oppressed.

But it's a great novel because the characters are all very recognisably *real* and engaging, whatever their political philosophies (which are made out to be a matter of education and custom rather than of innate virtue). People are just as selfish and flawed on both sides of the divide, and as they stare at each other in incomprehension we the readers can understand them both, and the tragic gap between them. And ultimately, for a story of disillusionment and betrayal, it ends on a note of unexpected hope: Shevek completes his intellectual discoveries and sets out to broadcast them for the benefit of all mankind, despite the opposition of both governments, while becoming more confident than ever of his home and his family.

Comments

[capri0mni]

Ooh! I'll take this as a rec., then!

Thanks/

[igenlode]

Definitely, if you haven't come across it yet (and if it's still in print; the library copy was a reprint from the 1990s)

It's one of the SF classics, and rereading it now I can see why. (Interesting from a linguistic point of view, as well, as the author tries to represent the differences between two languages while rendering them both in terms of English.)

I was also reading "Flowers for Algernon", another of the great SF stories, but I imagine you've already seen that.

[capri0mni]

(Interesting from a linguistic point of view, as well, as the author tries to represent the differences between two languages while rendering them both in terms of English.)

Oh, yes. Definitely on my to-read, list, then, as that's one of the puzzles I'll soon be facing in my reboot of my Eloise story as original fiction (as Wellspring Trolls and Lightning Trolls speak different languages, and she'll soon(ish) be meeting Walter Duncan.