The Dispossessed

Like many others I gave up reading, this is a book about nothing. The story describes the life of doctor Shevek, from infant to adulthood, revealing how he becomes a brilliant and famous physicist.

So he was a child, who had a few friend. They liked to talk. Then he graduated, went to college, had his first sexual experience. And so on. The sci-fi aspects are irrelevant so far as I read.


Read: 15%, 2:05/13:25 hours

One of the best books I've read in a while. Still cant believe this is the first book by Lê Guin that I read - a mixture of Clarke and Zamyatin.

Despite the sci-fi background, it has an incredibly human and acurate description of earth politics. Pragamatic, says it as it is. Ursula is regarded by many as a leftist, by I reckon she is simply a humanist.

J'avais lu quelque part qu'Ursula K. Le Guin avait démontré que la science-fiction ne pouvait pas seulement s'appuyer sur les sciences dites exactes mais aussi sur les sciences humaines. C'est exactement le cas dans ce superbe roman qui décrit une pseudo-utopie anarchiste où les valeurs de liberté, de collectivité, de partage et de bien commun sont mises en avant. Je parle de pseudo-utopie car comme le sous-titre du roman, An Ambiguous Utopia, l'indique, ce monde idéal ne l'est pas forcément tant que ça, et les excès du modèle prôné par les fondateurs de cette société ont aussi des effets pervers que le roman ne néglige pas.

Ce livre est à la fois un passionnant roman de science-fiction, la description d'une utopie imparfaite et de son exact contraire, et une brillante réflexion sociologique et politique. Tout ce que j'aime dans la science-fiction, tout ce qu'elle doit être à mes yeux.

I am a total noob, only dipping my toes into sci-fi. I am 100% sure that my intelligence and knowledge is not equipped enough to give this book the analysis it deserves. I am only here to mention a few thoughts I had whike reading the book. I have nothing to compare it to. I haven't seriously read about capitalism, socialism or anarchy anywhere else before.

For those who haven't read the book, it takes place in a fictional world where of 4 planets. Urras, Anarres, Terra, Hain. Of these Urras and Anarres are twin planets, earths and moons of each other. On Anarres is a newly formed civilization by the Anarchists of Urras, who mass migrated generations back.
In Anarres, there is no hierarchy or property. People don't own, they share. Consider the consequences.

I have always associated anarchy with chaos and violence. The anarchists in this book are peaceful people, whose survival depends on their solidarity. There is no chaos, there is order.

This book does not deny that, the functioning of it's society is dependent on the limited population and adequate resources, that it will not survive a tipping of scales. It is utopia. A perfectly functioning society, given certain prerequisites are followed.
People who have a better grasp of sociology, might appreciate this better. Nevertheless the concept is thought provoking.

Personally I found it difficult to find a connection with the characters. The are cold and distant. That is the whole point within the story too. There is some sort of delineation happening between love and relationships, that I didn't quite understand. What kind of love is it, in a world where one can't say “You are mine.”?
It's not “your smile is beautiful”, it's “the smile is beautiful”, because possessive word don't exist/are not used.

I haven't read a utopian novel before, and have always wondered how it would be. This one I found is only a prettily dressed dystopian. It makes you realize thay the negative elements in our society exists for certain unavoidable reasons.

The book is easy enough to understand. Appropriate as a foray into sci-fi.

Me ha parecido una maravilla de libro. Lo he disfrutado mucho a mis 42 a??os, y estoy convencido de que lo habr??a disfrutado todav??a m??s cuando iba al instituto. Las sociedades enfrentadas que se nos presentan en la obra, tan relacionables con posturas filos??ficas y pol??ticas reales, nos hacen plantearnos y cuestionar muchas cosas. Creo que es un libro perfecto para debatir posteriormente en grupos de clase o de lectura. Adem??s, a pesar de tratar temas que pueden ser pesados y poco interesantes para algunas personas, lo hace de un modo tan ameno que creo que cualquiera puede engancharse y disfrutar la historia hasta el final. Pasa inmediatamente a mi lista de lecturas favoritas de todos los tiempos.

I started this book without looking much into what it's about and got something I didn't expect from a sci-fi novel. This book tends to be very introspective. It brings a lot of direct commentary on social structures (capitalism/socialism) within a sci-fi setting. Overall it was interesting and I became invested in the characters. I recommend it if you're looking for something different to read, but it can feel slow at times if you're expecting a traditional sci-fi story.

This was my first Le Guin and, having just finished it, I am still processing it. It is scifi of its era, very philosophical, exploring ideas about humanity and human thinking more than adventures in space which is how we think about scifi in the ‘modern' age.

This book is about society - a socialist ‘utopia' on the moon and its capitalist ‘sister' on the planet below. It is about anarchy, about how people rely on one another for their survival even if they don't want to.

It is very dry, like all philosophical scifi that I have read, though this was better than Asimov for me - I could not get on with how he wrote - I found Foundation very boring to read.

This, like Dune, is a book that warrants rereading.

It's a shame (but maybe not a surprise) that Huxley and Orwell get all the love in the world of utopian fiction because The Dispossessed really should be considered (as of now) the apotheosis of the genre. Le Guin doesn't give herself the easy way out, and every time you think you have her perspective figured out she introduces more subtly, and more complexity, but never too much for you to handle - it's artful.

It's hard to find faults in the book, it's dense with beautiful ideas and even more beautiful prose. The only fault one could find in the book is that it contains so many great sentences in a row that unless you're vigilant to remain appreciative, you're likely to stop noticing them. Any of Le Guin's sentences in any other novel would be a rare gem, the kind that makes you stop for a second to digest and appreciate. But here - they are like pebbles on a beach.

One of the things that's amazing about this book (There are too many to list) is how well Ursula manages to wind together the threads of the “Big Ideas”: Anarchism, Mysticism, Taoism, Science, Technology, with the threads of “Small Ideas”: Love, Work, Play, Relationships, etc.. Creating a beautiful tapestry that somehow seems to contain everything that you could ever care about (and more).

If you haven't read this book, read it now! (It might change your life)

I'm afraid I can't give this book a proper review, because I haven't read it since 1993. It lingers in my memory as a book I didn't like, so I've never read it again.

However, when I look back at my 1993 diary, I find to my surprise that I described it as “impressive” and “interesting” at the time. Well, I already knew that Le Guin was capable of good writing. I think the problem is that I read fiction for entertainment, and I didn't find it sufficiently entertaining. Also, it seems to be a book about contrasting political systems, but it wasn't clear to me what political points it was trying to make.

Thus, I ended up neither entertained nor educated. Maybe you'll profit more from the book than I did; good luck.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.

-- Ursula Le Guin, in her 2014 National Book Awards speech

The beginning is a bit slow but boy that second half of the book flies by! I'm much more used to action-packed sci-fi, so I wasn't expecting something so philosophical. But I loved it. The themes this book touches on are extremely relevant today. There were times I disliked Shevek, but overall I think he's a character that will rattle around comfortably in my brain for a long time. I'm definitely hooked on this author now! ❤️ 

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the biggest names in science fiction that I've never read anything by – until now. The Dispossessed exists in Le Guin's “Hainish Cycle” world, although there is no required order for the the series as each book is self contained. The world The Dispossessed includes a pair of worlds – a planet and moon. The planet is like Earth in the 70s, with major power in a communist and a capitalist power. The moon, however, is a communist utopia where there is no violence, need, or want and everyone pursues what they want. When a scientist from the moon is brought to the planet, the superpowers battle over scientific control while struggling to change.