freezepop

"There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, the idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing more important than that wall."

I knew this book was going to hit hard from the opening paragraph above, and it did not disappoint. I've enjoyed Ursula Le Guin's work before--The Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorite books—and I absolutely see why The Dispossessed is considered one of her crowning pieces. The setting for this book is a planet and its moon—Urras, the planet, is a lush world not dissimilar from Earth, which is home to several capitalist countries and at least one socialist country; and Anarres, the moon, which is a dusty, resource-scanty place home to a society of anarchists who fled from Urras just under two hundred years ago. The core of the novel concerns Shevek, a theoretical physicist from Anarres who chooses to relocate to Urras.

 

Le Guin captures truly great sci-fi because this work is so imbued with curiosity. Le Guin is asking questions at the heart of any great sci-fi work: What defines humanity? What can we achieve, and how is it done, and what does that mean for society? What is society? What does it mean to be alone? What does it mean to be part of a whole? To me, sci-fi can't be truly sci-fi without a measure of philosophy, and The Dispossessed has this in droves.