The Dispossessed

"The Dispossessed is an important work for a number of reasons in terms of Le Guin’s ‘Hainish Cycle.’ The Hainish Cycle is a series of interlinked novels. The Dispossessed is one, The Word for World is Forest is one, The Left Hand of Darkness is one. There are other stories and novels. She imagines that, because of the ‘ansible’—which is invented in The Dispossessed —there can be instantaneous communication across vast interstellar distances. So all the different societies are able to be part of this league of worlds, and have trade and political relationships with each other. Part of the vision of the Hainish Cycle is that at some point, all of these planets were originally colonised by the Hainish in their distant past. So they have a kinship relationship across all these planets too. I would argue that she uses the Hainish Cycle to explore the diversity of how it’s possible to be human—both morphologically, because we have a non-gendered version on Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness , and the smaller, furred creatures in The Word for World is Forest —but also in terms of culture. There are different ways of drawing lines between who you are going to recognise as human, and even in the novels where it is known that they all have the kinship relationship, there are characters that refuse to acknowledge that, and claim that clearly their species is superior. So the difficulty of humans acknowledging kinship across cultural and morphological difference is something she explores with a lot of depth and sophistication across all these books. Yes. As I said, this is the novel in which the ansible is invented, the technology of instantaneous communication across huge distances. So it is a way to make cultural understandings at the centre of what it means for different civilisations to be in contact with each other. So that’s one of the reasons. I also think it’s a really important novel because, as its subtitle suggests, it has an ambiguous relationship to the notion of utopia. Both the anarchist society and the super capitalist society have their pros and cons, right? I think, ultimately, she’s more on the side of the anarchist society, or certainly I’m more on the side of the anarchist society, and that comes out in how I read the novel. But she does represent each as having ongoing problems that need to be worked through. What’s really interesting about how she treats that dichotomy is how she complicates it, makes it more than a binary. The anarchists have to deal with conditions of scarcity—that makes it a lot harder to have an egalitarian civilisation if there’s never enough for everyone. Nonetheless, they persist because of their commitment to their values. Whereas the capitalist society has a super-abundance, yet it has as much deprivation as the society based in scarcity; inequality is the biggest problem in the capitalist society. So I think that contrast asks us to think carefully about the assumptions we make about the relationship between human nature and the kinds of political systems that we’re likely to build. “The way we maintain a utopia is by cutting ourselves off from the outside” I think it’s an important novel for today because we’re at this moment of increased, polarised anxiety about migration, about how it is that people from really different cultural traditions can live with one another. And I think this novel is foregrounding the problems that we have to work through to reach an inclusive and equitable state rather than just positing some kind of magical, perfect society where everybody’s already solved these problems, and usually because somehow the issue of scarcity has disappeared. Very much. Another thing that’s true of Thomas More’s Utopia is that it’s isolated. The way we maintain a utopia is by cutting ourselves off from the outside. Walls are a symbol throughout Le Guin’s novel, especially the wall around the space port. Shevek’s going to the other planet breaks that isolation. I think that, combined with this being the novel in which the ansible is invented, really does suggest that one needs to be in cultural exchange, I think. This emphasis on questioning utopia as a model of perfection is not an idea that’s original to me. This comes from Tom Moylan’s work, which gave us a new and more complicated vocabulary for thinking about the utopian tradition in science fiction. Le Guin is one of the writers he talks about as what he called ‘the critical utopia,’ a utopia that still has its problems as this one clearly does. What you actually learn is that utopianism is not the model of how the society should work, but rather a commitment to the values a society should uphold, even though you are always in progress in trying to manifest this in a concrete way. But it’s what Le Guin refers to in this novel as ‘permanent revolution.’ That what is utopian is always asking questions, never letting society sediment into these rigid roles. Precisely what goes wrong with the anarchists is that the bureaucracy they need to manage distribution and scarcity solidifies into a power structure, and then they’re not as anarchist anymore, as their ideals would have it. The sense is that utopia is never a place you arrive at, but it’s a journey you’re on."

"The Dispossessed , again, is a political book, but it’s a little more dated in its way than the first two because it is to a certain extent reflective of the Cold War. The hero of The Dispossessed grows up on a planet which is one of two twin planets in a solar system far away from here, although a solar system where they do have contact with Earth. Einstein’s name is dropped in at a late stage in the novel. The planet where the hero grows up is essentially a communist-socialist utopia, and the twin planet that they see every day and every night hanging in the sky is a more capitalist society, much more similar to our western society. The parallels are deliberately not direct; the home-world is not the Soviet Union, the capitalist world is not the United States. Le Guin puts enough effort into it to show that these are new creations, although they’re creations that reflect other things, places that we may be more familiar with. Her point is not to make a moral judgment as to which of these situations is best. They both have their flaws; they both have their strengths. She’s much more interested in the moral and ethical and psychological aspects of what it’s like to grow up in a world where you can see another different world visible every day, and what that means for your sense of personhood, what that means for your sense of what is possible. The book ends on a strikingly optimistic note, after a tough journey getting there, about the importance of communication. It starts with a really impressive image of the only wall on the utopian planet: the wall around the spaceport, which is actually there to keep the rest of the world out rather than to keep the rockets in, as it were. The whole book looks at walls and their psychological equivalents and how they’d play out in this very imaginative and well-portrayed environment. Where can one start, really? I think if you’re looking for a writer who picked up the pulp tradition of science fiction and merged it with 1960s New Wave writing, and then instilled that with a deep concern for political issues, such as questions of ownership and power, then she was the person who was able to pick those things up and make them more relevant, not just to science fiction readers but to a wider readership—which is what we’re talking about today. So that’s why her name figures quite so strongly than the more ‘insider’ writers . . . I mean, the three names that I was expecting to see on the list that weren’t there were Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, who, between them, defined science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s. But I wouldn’t say that their work has shown a lot of staying power. They were writing for a particular audience at a particular time and it’s not proven to be as universally appealing outside the core science fiction community in a way that the books we’re discussing have been."

"She’s another great prose stylist. Yes. One of the things that Le Guin and Ishiguro share is a remarkable ability to describe the world as their viewpoint character sees it, in a way that reveals both the world and the character. What does the character notice, comment on, and think about, and what does the character fail to notice, comment on, or think about? That’s so important. That already is philosophical. To inhabit someone’s head and see the world through their eyes and see how their values shape what they see and what they don’t see and what they further ponder and what they ignore—that’s a way of helping us explore an alternative set of values. Le Guin does this brilliantly with the character of Shevek. Shevek is raised in an anarchist society. It’s on a moon, Anarres, that orbits a main planet, Urras. Anarresti society is pretty close to subsistence living. No one owns property. There’s no formal government, no laws, no jails, no military: basically you are pressured by your neighbors to do what’s right. You feel pride in serving the community in jobs well done. People provide you with what you need. One of the wonderful things about this book is that Le Guin, more plausibly than I’ve seen anyone else do, really imagines what an anarchist society might look like, what some of its flaws might be, and how it might not really be possible to be completely anarchist and fully to live up to those ideals, given human nature. But this society still comes close in some ways. “I think serious philosophy can take a variety of forms” Then Shevek goes to Urras, which is a planet similar to Earth, in that it’s populated with societies that are definitely not anarchist. He ends up in a wealthy society with a sharp division between the classes. He’s a leading physics scholar. He’s the first person to leave Anarres for about 200 years. The anarchists had deliberately shut themselves off from outside contact. Shevek leaves Anarres against his neighbours’ strongly expressed wishes—but with no police force, who’s to stop him?—and on Urras he’s immediately housed in a luxury apartment. He spends half an hour in the bathroom just fascinated by how you can turn on the hot tap and the water runs until you turn it off. There’s a soft carpet, and the bed is far softer than any bed he’d ever experienced before. The servant comes in. Shevek has no idea what to do with a servant. He doesn’t even understand that nudity is inappropriate. He’s completely naked. He strides up naked wanting to shake the servant’s hand. He decides to call the servant ‘sir’. They never use ‘sir’ on Annares but he thinks he should try to be polite. He hears a bird singing for the first time. There are no large land animals on Anarres, and later Shevek sees the long face of a donkey for the first time. Le Guin does a lovely job of briefly evoking the first time hearing a bird, with this sweet song coming in through the window and Shevek’s realising it’s different from a human song. It’s wonderful and wondrous. And it’s fascinating thinking through how someone from such a society might view a world like ours, with its luxury and its classism. Yes, she is. An ambiguous utopia, I think is what she calls it. You can tell she prefers Anarres to Urras. But she’s also clear about some of the shortcomings of Anarres and some of the good things about Urras. She thinks that there’s a kind of beauty on Urras that’s hard to find on Anarres, that the wealth and inequality create a capacity to do high level physics, for example, and for amazingly beautiful objects to be created, objects it would be hard to imagine existing in a fully egalitarian society where you don’t highly privileged people in power. Someone needs to buy the beautiful works of art and someone needs to pay to have people devote their lives to creating amazing things. She’s enough of a thoughtful philosopher not to have a simplistic view about this. Yes, there is something about the perspective of the naive individual. Klara and the Sun has some of that, too—that’s also a very inegalitarian society where some people have servant robots, and some people have cognitive enhancement, and others don’t. Klara has a very naive perspective on that. Oh, yes, absolutely. I agree with that completely. I think there’s an important question in the background here, which we touched on briefly earlier. You could say that science fiction is a good teaching tool —that it’s not really philosophy, but it’s good for popularising philosophical questions or getting people who might not otherwise be attracted to philosophy to think about philosophical questions. But serious philosophy takes the form of the expository essay, the journal article, the monograph. I don’t agree with that. I think serious philosophy can take a variety of forms. Consider a classic of recent moral philosophy, Bernard Williams’ essay ‘Moral Luck’ . That essay turns on an imaginary version of the story of Gauguin. Had Williams’ treatment of Gaugin been more detailed and more complex, it might have been even more philosophically interesting, as some subsequent commentators have pointed out. The more detail, the more we understand the complex dilemma that Gaugin faced, concerning his hopes for being a great artist and what the difficulties of leaving his family might be. Yes, I think that’s right. There’s a reason that philosophers sometimes reach for sketching mini-fictions in their writing. Those mini-fictions achieve something that can’t be as effectively achieved through more abstract prose. But as long as it remains a mini-fiction contained within an essay, it’s going to be somewhat impoverished as a fiction. I think we need to do both. It’s a kind of historical accident that philosophers almost exclusively write expository essays now. That’s not historically been the case. You mentioned Sartre, who’s a relatively recent example. But you also mentioned Voltaire . And Rousseau , and Nietzsche , and in their way, Zhuangzi and Plato too. I basically just agree with everything you’re saying. I like that definition of philosophy."

"Yes. I was rereading The Dispossessed recently, and it was so fantastic, because it has so many of the elements of what’s great about a deep world build. The best world builds are worlds that have great things in them and also terrible things – worlds that you want to improve but not destroy. I remember when my Terra Ignota books came out, lots of people wanted to argue with each other about whether it was a dystopia or a utopia, as if those are the only two options. It’s neither. It’s a world like our world and like the worlds in The Dispossessed , where there’s a bunch of stuff that’s great about it and a bunch of stuff that’s wrong with it. You are excited to see the steps that it’s taken toward being better and more fair than the world we live in, but you are also dismayed and distressed by the steps it has taken that lead to bad things. It’s so neat to revisit The Dispossessed and see how much it is an urtext for doing that type of world build. I was also looking at it again recently partly because, with Jo Walton, I was doing a study of which science fiction books get assigned in courses about science fiction at universities. We collected over 100 syllabuses to look at what gets assigned. Often the only book by a woman is Frankenstein . But if there is a second one, it’s almost always Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness , and it’s never The Dispossessed. Because the assumption of the creator of these courses is, okay, we have to have a book by a woman; let’s do the one that’s about gender, because that’s what women do. So it’s always the one about gender, and it’s never one of her many, many other amazing books – and The Dispossessed is such an amazing book. To see it on zero syllabuses, despite it being so influential, and often so much more in dialogue with the rest of what’s on the syllabus than The Left Hand of Darkness , was really striking. It made me want to revisit The Dispossessed and think through this incredible corpus of material – of deep, examined, philosophically rich, socially rich and gorgeously written material. What’s really neat in The Dispossessed is that we’re comparing two worlds that are right next to each other, because we have a world and then a moon on which people are also living. The moon has had an anarchist, collectivist revolution, and is living by a set of very strict, collaborative, cooperative philosophical principles, which leads to a life of equality, austerity, hard work, and many other elements. What’s that wonderful quote? – “But the decisions of a social being are never made alone”. Then the neighbour world is beautiful, and full of rich and gorgeous things compared to the world of great leanness and austerity, but also full of decadence and corruption and inequality – because when everybody who’s an idealist of that type leaves your planet for the moon, your planet gets philosophically pushed in the other direction. The book holds these two worlds up next to each other. Both of them have things that are wonderful and that the other one lacks, and both of them have ways that they’re going wrong that lead to oppression or violence or inequality – even in moments that are trying to aim at equality. So we ultimately realise that they will both do better if they resume being in real dialogue with each other, rather than going off to the extremes. We see two lovingly thought-through worlds based on a philosophy, and each of them has wonders we wouldn’t want to give up; but each of them also has flaws that we cannot, in good conscience, accept. The Dispossessed is a really good starting point, because its questions are about our society, so we’re ready to plunge into answering them. A lot of its questions are things that people in 2024 are newly thinking about. Current issues have made a lot of people think very seriously about socialist, communist and anarchist movements and the things that they supply for the world. There are UBI experiments, and questions of the ultra-rich exploiting Covid to become wealthier, etc. If one is thinking through reform or counterculture options, it’s a great moment to look at someone who’s really thought it through – and shown that when you embrace the ideal all the way, the work still isn’t done. You still have to do the hard work of making it work in practice, and trying not to develop new evils or reinvent old ones. There’s a really wonderful nonfiction book by the philosopher Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity , on living ethically in a compromised world. It’s looking at how much movements that are trying to improve the world in various ways tend to weaken themselves because of an obsession with purity. “X solution isn’t the perfect solution because it has Y problem. Therefore we will not pursue X solution. We will sit with no solution until we have the perfect solution” – or, “X solution would require working with Group B which doesn’t hold to the perfect ideal that group A holds to, therefore we will not have solidarity with Group B, even though 90% of what we seek is in common”. The Dispossessed is looking at how isolating a society from the contrary worldview, and not discussing or collaborating, not having the other to hold a mirror up, is harmful – even to the movement that is more in the right than the other. It gives us very, very current and very lively tools for thinking through why collaboration and compromise are often more valuable tools than purity and isolation, for those who are really sincerely working to make the world better. So it’s a really good jumping in point, because it’s really easy to access the issues that it’s about. The rest of the Cycle is not even necessarily these same planets, but in the same universe, in which multiple planets are in contact with each other and affected by that contact. I was trying to think through the question, can you have one world where a whole bunch of these almost-but-not-quite different societies are co-existing and overlapping? In the Terra Ignota system, when you come of age, you choose which of eleven-ish options for a government and legal system and philosophy of law you want to sign up for. Then you are governed by that, and your next-door neighbour or your spouse or your roommate or your siblings might have chosen a different one. Each of them governs their own citizens’ actions, and protects their own citizens. People often say this is impossibly complicated, and no society could ever deal with having multiple legal systems at the same time. Actually, medieval Europe had multiple overlapping legal systems at the same time – one system for the church, a different one for the nobility; and it had different legal systems depending on whether Roman law was being applied where you were… If the Middle Ages could handle it, so can the future. This is a solved problem! We also deal with this when people live as expats in other countries: the laws of that person’s home country are part of what governs them, and the laws of where that person physically is at that time is another part, and the governments work it out between each other. So I’m positing a whole world where that is the model, and everybody lives as if they are an expat. That is not any more complicated than real legal systems that the real world has had in past and present, but it means that you can have a lot of people who feel strongly and passionately about their really excellent legal system that represents their philosophy, that they have chosen and signed up for, whose ideals they love and respect. And they’re in an argument with somebody who’s in a completely different government and completely different philosophy, but who might be sharing the same living room. Yes. I outlined every single chapter of all of it, from the very beginning, before I wrote the first sentence of the first book. One giant plan, and it was executed exactly as planned. I’m at the extreme end of how much authors plan in advance! By the way, book one and book two were one longer book cut in half. That’s why book one does not have a satisfying ending. Book two has a satisfying ending, and so does book three, but book one does not because I was given very little time to cut it in half and make something semi-satisfying. So I urge you to think of them as one book, in which the first half is all set up and the second half is all payoff. As I described, it’s a symphony. It has movements, but you need to have an idea of what the end chorus is that you’re building toward as you introduce each of these harmonies."

"I could have populated this entire list of five books with Ursula Le Guin novels ! The Left Hand of Darkness, Rocannon’s World , and particularly the Word for World is Forest – which is the first of her adult novels that I read, and remains my favourite. I remember sitting in a screening of Avatar when I was working as a film critic and just thinking, “You’ve stolen everything !” The entire film felt like a rip-off of that one book! And then there’s her short stories, which have more ideas in them than most people’s novels. The Dispossessed is as much a political and cultural thought experiment as it is a novel, though it is also extremely entertaining to read and moves really nicely, with characters that you really relate to. It’s about two worlds, a planet and its moon. One is a society very much like our own, patriarchal and capitalist, and constantly various parts of it are at war with various other parts of it. And on the moon, colonists from the first world have seceded to set up their own anarchist, entirely equal society. Everyone is free to explore their own interests and ideas, as long as they spend time giving back to and supporting the society as a whole – so there’s an element of commune ideals. She was exploring the anarchic ideas that were swirling around when she was writing the book – in 1974, so these ideas had been around in the ether for seven or eight years – well, longer obviously, but in the wider culture. The Dispossessed is about taking this political concept and picking it apart forensically: what exactly would life be like, if we could do it – if we were living in an anarcho-syndicalist world? Would it work? Would everyone be on board? The cynics would obviously say no, it would fall apart immediately. Ursula Le Guin is much more intelligent than that. Neither world is inherently good; neither world is inherently bad. It’s just about exploring the differences between them. It links back to Dune in a really interesting way: the Fremen, though they have certain power structures, are essentially anarchists, and they live by their wits, by whatever they can scavenge and grow. And the Sietches are very commune-ish, though he was actually writing before that idea became big. So I think the two books have a fair bit in common. Le Guin must have read Dune – everyone must have by 1974 if they were working in science fiction. Whether she approved of it, I don’t know. I mean, Le Guin is smarter than any of us. And as wonderfully intelligent and thoughtful and self-made as Frank Herbert was, I think Le Guin goes deeper into the areas that she finds interesting, and her work cuts deeper. But Dune is more entertaining! So it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Yes, absolutely! It could just be another country almost. The world building is quite subtle in The Dispossessed , as it is in Dune in a funny sort of way – in both it’s quite light touch. You don’t get descriptions of spacecraft and of futuristic feeling cities, etcetera. In Dune the great antagonists are the Harkonnen, and their world of Giedi Prime is a key location – and we know almost nothing about it. We know that it’s dirty, and we know that it’s oppressed, but for actually visualising it we’re left completely to our own imaginations. The Dispossessed is quite like that as well. The world building takes place internally, almost; the worlds are being built inside the characters, and in their experiences and their politics, their emotions and their ideas. That’s where the big world building stuff happens."