The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Summary
Anarres is a dry moon settled a hundred and seventy years ago by anarchists who were given a barren world to leave the rich one alone. There is no government, no money, no property and no law. Work is assigned by a computerised syndicate, everyone eats the same food, and the language has no possessive pronouns, so a child says the handkerchief rather than my handkerchief.
Shevek is a physicist there, working toward a unified temporal theory that nobody on Anarres has the training to evaluate and that the informal committees keep quietly obstructing, because a genius is an inconvenience in a society without hierarchy and social pressure turns out to be as effective as a police force.
So he does the unthinkable and takes a ship to Urras, the rich green mother planet, where he is feted, funded, housed in luxury and slowly comes to understand that he has been bought, and that the country hosting him is one half of a cold war whose other half is starving.
The chapters alternate: his life on Anarres from childhood forward, and his months on Urras, so the two societies are always in the same sentence being weighed against each other.
Le Guin subtitled it An Ambiguous Utopia and meant it. Anarres is admirable and it is also grim, conformist and hungry, and she refuses to let either planet win the argument.
Around three hundred and fifty pages, thoughtful rather than fast, with real warmth in the domestic scenes and a famine sequence that is among the most quietly harrowing things Le Guin wrote.
Best for readers who want political philosophy conducted through a marriage, a laboratory and a hungry winter, rather than through a war.
Historical Context & Significance
The Dispossessed won the 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award and the Locus Award, the second time Ursula K. Le Guin had taken the Hugo and Nebula together after The Left Hand of Darkness in 1970.
It belongs to her Hainish Cycle, and sits earliest in that history: the ansible, the instantaneous communicator that every later book depends on, is the thing Shevek's theory makes possible.
Le Guin was the daughter of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, and she read anarchist thought seriously, Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman in particular, rather than using it as set dressing. The book has been adopted by actual anarchist groups as a text, which is unusual for a novel that spends so much of its length on the movement's failure modes.