A Short Review of The Dispossessed after rereading the novel.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I love The Dispossessed; it is one of my all-time favorites. I reread the novel this time because I will be teaching it next week in my English 378 (Science Fiction Lit) class next week. The novel is as amazing and as beautiful as it was the first time I read it--and how many years ago that was, I can't remember. Shevek is one of my heroes.

It is one of the novels I reread regularly, usually at least once a year. I teach it as a utopian novel, and as a thought-experiment. What might a society without laws, without a government, and one meant to teach and instill equality and community, be like? How might it function? How does one preserve and protect the rights and freedoms and initiative of the individual and that of the community? How does such a society survive against the all-too-human drive for order and control?

Can Shevek, the Einstein of his people, of his age, achieve his quest, both public and private? He seeks two Grails. The first, the persona, his right to pursue his life's work as a physicist, and to find a community of equals, fellow scientists like himself? This community is essential for him to proceed, to achieve his life work of a theory that can change everything. The second, the public, to preserve his society as it was intended, and to end its isolation. Can Shevek, a man from Anarres, where this anarchist society was founded 170 years ago, achieve his double quest on Urras, the mother world, rich and bountiful, a utopia to many, yet a world of competing nation states, of archists?

Today, the novel seems just as timely, if not more so, than when it was published in 1974, 43 years ago.



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