What We Gain By What We Give Away

Tau Ceti boasts two habitable worlds, the planet Urras and its moon Anarres. (The Anarresti regard Urras “the Moon”, but since Anarres’ gravity is noticeably less than that of Urras it’s evident that Urras must be the larger world.) The political situation on Urras is much like that on Earth, with various nation-states and hierarchical governments – some of which resemble quasi-Victorian robber-baron capitalism, at least one of which resembles Soviet-era authoritarian socialism. Nearly two centuries ago, the political structure of Urras was rocked by the rise of Odonianism, an anarcho-socialist philosophy. The social tensions arising from this were eventually resolved by the mass settlement of Anarres by the Odonians of the time – after which the two societies largely went their own way, with a small amount of trade established via treaty.

Though Anarres is habitable, it’s not as hospitable as Urras, and it may be a long, long time before it is. Nonetheless, the Odonian society there has survived, proving the viability of a society which acknowledges no formal hierarchy or property rights. However, whilst fiscal currency does not exist, social currency very much does: the approval or disapproval of one’s peers can be a tool of social control in its own right, and successive crises have allowed a conservative faction to gain extensive soft power, which they can exert through the gentle expression of quasi-official disapproval of unsanctioned activities.

Take, for instance, the example of Shevek, a physicist who we first meet as he makes his way to the space port for a trip to Urras, a proposed journey which has so outraged his peers (who have been primed to be outraged in this manner by individuals with high social capital) that an angry mob forms at the gates and lobs stones at him as he leaves. Shevek, however, believes in the necessity of his trip: he thinks that true anarchism does not build walls, and that includes the wall that has been built between Anarres and Urras.

If Shevek can use the resources placed at his disposal by the A-Io government on Urras to complete his theory, he could break down more walls than that: his theory could become the working basis of a proposed device called an “ansible”, which would allow instantaneous communication across any distance. Perhaps this would be the seed that would allow the disparate worlds of Tau Ceti, Terra, Hain and beyond to become a true family, rather than distant cousins. But just as Anarres’ property-less, anarchist society seems unusual to us, A-Io’s propertarian, “archist” society seems bizarre to Shevek. As a stranger in a strange land, can he prevent his theory from becoming one more form of private property?

---

The Dispossessed is a revered book in Ursula Le Guin’s bibliography, and rightly so – and it was recognised as a major work from its original publication, picking up the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula award. Interweaving the tale of Shevek’s trip to Urras with the backstory which brought him to the point of departure to begin with, it is a true work of social science fiction, since whilst space travel and ansibles are part of the scenery here, the real thrust of the novel is its exploration of a functional anarchist society (in the backstory sections) and its examination of how someone raised in such a society would react to encountering a society that is more like ours.

You could legitimately question whether the Odonian society on Anarres only works as well as it does because Anarres is an inhospitable world where everyone needs to voluntarily contribute to the greater good in order to survive, and thus in many respects collective needs and self-interest are essentially in alignment, and if Anarres were as rich and abundant a world as Urras, maintaining the Odonian ideal would be more difficult. Likewise, you could point out that the Odonians have managed to survive because their only foe is the environment itself; though the Urrasti are no friends of theirs, the Urrasti have never made any serious attempt to subvert, conquer, or disperse them, and the Odonian way of life does not really provide any credible means of stopping such banditry were it to happen.

However, Le Guin’s also thought of that, and made sure that the point gets raised here and there in the novel itself. Indeed, more or less any time when reading the book I thought “that doesn’t seem like real anarchism” or “that seems to be an actual problem”, it later turned out to be something Le Guin had accounted for; she’s not going to show you here anything she has not carefully thought through the implications of. She doesn’t necessarily have any immediate answers, but the fact that she doesn’t helps the book rather than hurting it. Sure, if the facts of the setting were different, Odonian society probably would have turned out different – but those are counterfactual speculations that the characters are not dealing with. Writers of more flat-out utopias are often tempted to either tie off these objections with glib platitudes, or stack the deck in favour of their utopias in a blatant way. Le Guin here stacks the deck against Anarres, and she does not pretend Odonianism has all the answers.

You see, the subtitle of the book is “An Ambiguous Utopia” (emphasis mine), and Le Guin means it. Odonianism is clearly several strides closer to what Le Guin might consider the ideal than the societies of Urras are. The lack of strictly delineated gender roles in the world of work, the lack of official hierarchy, the end of private property in favour of communally meeting everyone’s needs, the acceptance of homosexuality and bisexuality, all of these are to the good.

That said, life isn’t perfect on Anarres; people there face real difficulties, and not all of those problems are external threats imposed by the environment. The accumulation of social capital and the development of a creeping orthodoxy reinforcing it is depicted; Le Guin is completely aware that the society she describes will not remain free and un-hierarchical but itself, but requires regular renewal to prevent this; that, in fact, is part of the major thrust of the novel.

There’s also some issues which Odonianism does not seem to have a satisfying answer to. Early on, a bully in a voluntary work camp beats Shevek into unconsciousness. He faces no apparent censure for this. Whilst a punitive, carceral society is obviously undesirable, a society which allows people who have sufficient social cachet (either in wider society or in more limited circles, like the work camp the bully works in) to get away with shit like this is clearly a society with a problem.

Similarly, it’s apparent that Anarresti society still retains some forms of gender essentialism, which in other authors you might say “well, that’s how people thought at the time”, but when it comes from the author of The Left Hand of Darkness I think there’s more scope to interpret it as deliberate, an unexamined prejudice imported from Urras by the original settlers. Most particularly, the rape of children and women is described as being the sort of infraction where if you don’t seek sanctuary in a mental health facility immediately you are liable to get killed by a mob – no mention of rape of men there – and there’s some discussion of sexuality and relationships which similarly makes essentialist assumptions. (That said, the novel does have a slightly muddled handling of rape. At one point Shevek attempts to sexually assault someone, though I think this is in part meant to be an illustration of how the propertarian ways of Urras are threatening to corrupt his social conscience, but I’m not sure the novel quite explores the aftermath of the incident enough to really get this across.)

The Dispossessed is part of Le Guin’s Hainish cycle, as was most of her non-fantasy novels at this point in her career. Specifically, it hails from a bit before the time of The Word For World In Forest; the ansible is right on the verge of being invented here, in Forest it has been invented and is gradually percolating through the human diaspora. The Dispossessed and Forest mark a notable departure in Le Guin’s depiction of the Hainish universe too; both products of the early 1970s, they saw her making the decision to drop the “mindspeech” concept which had previously been a big part of the early Hainish novels up to and including The Left Hand of Darkness.

Le Guin makes no attempt to explain this; she merely notes that it’s a discontinuity in the timeline and moves on, taking the stance that whilst the Hainish novels are loosely connected, they don’t have the sort of overarching course that, say, the Earthsea books do; they’re all a bit more self-contained than that, looser continuity and outright retcons between books are fine, and it’s best not to make a fuss about this. I will say, however, that I think yanking mindspeech was particularly the right call for The Dispossessed. The existence of telepathy would, after all, be such a fundamental shift to how people interact with each other that it would throw all the social analogies Le Guin is working with out of whack, and it’s sufficiently far beyond plausibility that it would inherently make the worlds of Urras and Anarres seem like fantastical never-can-bes, not conceptual possibilities, which is what Le Guin is trying to frame them as here.

The Dispossessed also represents a shift from the novels which came before it in the sense that, out of all the Hainish novels Le Guin had produced so far, it’s the one which most effectively presents “pure” social science fiction and eschews the sort of action and adventure aspects which she’d leavened it with previously. Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions were all adventure stories with strong social elements, after all. The Left Hand of Darkness revolves around an intrepid wilderness trek; The Word For World Is Forest is about a massive planet-wide revolution.

There’s action in The Dispossessed, mind – at one point Shevek gets caught up in a bloodily-suppressed strike, and war breaks out between two of the nations of Urras in the background – but action does not shape the wider tapestry of the book nearly as much as it does in Le Guin’s preceding work. This makes The Dispossessed a potentially tricky book to get into, especially if you are in the mood for something a bit less cerebral and literary and a bit more exciting and fast-paced. (It took me until now to get around to reading it, having bounced off it as a teenager.)

That said, I do think it is well worth the read. Unlike The Left Hand of Darkness, which is fascinating for its depiction of genre but is hampered by the fact that the conversation on the subject has moved on rapidly since its original publication, many of the political ideas explored in The Dispossessed remain relevant to this day.

Le Guin an author who, whilst you read her, gives you the impression that she’s much cleverer and wiser than you are. She doesn’t do this in a flashy show-off fashion that’s intended to make you feel like a dunce next to her, however: it’s more that she’s so full of genuine insight and fascinating ideas that she makes you feel smarter than you were when you started reading. Even if you don’t agree with her line of reasoning here, you’ll need to actually wake up your intellectual muscles and exercise them to figure out why. If you do agree with her and see the Odonians as having a better, kinder, more just social structure than those on Urras, she isn’t here to smugly clap you on the back and reinforce your prejudices: she’s here to remind you that there’s problems down the road which cannot be ignored, and if you want that better society you’re going to need to figure out how to maintain and improve that better society.

In other words, she doesn’t hold onto her wisdom like it’s her property, a thing which elevates her above you; she shares it with you and wants you to meet her on the same level. In this she exhibits the best qualities of the society she describes here – one which is clearly imperfect, but also clearly worth moving towards.