hevek is an outcast in a communal culture. A brilliant physicist, he is
despised by his neighbors for encouraging contact between the anarchist
communities of Anarres and sympathizers on the hated capitalist home world,
Urras. Shevek is troubled by isolationism and contempt in a society founded
on universal brotherhood. Worse, a tough work ethic enforced by their harsh
desert world has led to a creeping bureaucracy and even majority tyranny.
Social laws and punishments are emerging unnoticed out of public opinion,
eating away at the ideals of an egalitarian movement that had culminated in
a mass emigration from Urras to Anarres two centuries before.
Blocked from getting his message across, Shevek takes the dangerous step
of going to Urras, knowing he might not be able to return. There he's
dazzled at first by the home world's luxury and lush beauty; but the
Urrastis have "bought" him. They're enabling him to work unfettered in
exchange for what they want most: his breakthrough comprehensive theory of
time, which will make possible instantaneous travel and communication--and
so domination--across space.
Shevek realizes his only chance of finding friends on Urras is among the
dispossessed, those who, like himself (and all Anarreans), have nothing. He
escapes into a world hidden from him since his arrival, the slums inhabited
by the despised poor. Welcomed as a symbol of those who once escaped
persecution, Shevek joins a general strike and a mass demonstration; but the
movement is ruthlessly suppressed and Shevek nearly joins the uncounted
dead. Now a fugitive insurrectionist, Shevek's only hope is to risk
being stoned as a traitor back home. He must find a way back to Anarres.
A search for utopia
Sometimes philosophy makes the best science fiction. There may be no
better way of taking the measure of a society than to posit a second
society, fundamentally different in morals, ethics, and customs but as
richly textured as the first, and then spend a novel exploring one from the
point of view of the other. Ursula Le Guin is a master at this art. She uses
careful construction of key characters, thorough development of societal
attitudes, and an unaffected, intimate narrative tone to create living worlds
with complex cultures. In The Dispossessed, as with The Left Hand
of Darkness, she immerses a single member of one society into the
depths of the other.
Le Guin uses two parallel story lines in alternating chapters to tell
Shevek's story, a reflection of Shevek's work on the simultaneity of
time--all of time exists in unity even though it seems to proceed
sequentially. One plot line follows the action on Urras. The other starts
with Shevek's childhood and builds toward the crucial realization that his
society is becoming enslaved by public opinion, and because they're
convinced of their righteousness they can't even see it. This understanding
parallels the unmasking of the Urrasti rich and his embrace of the
dispossessed. The slow development of Shevek's disillusionment with Anarrean
culture, but not with communal ideals, brings into focus at the critical
moment the emotional complexity of Shevek's reaction to the crises on Urras.
The Dispossessed, which earned both a Hugo and a Nebula award, is
an outstanding example of how to explore society as an organism that's fed
by human interactions, reshaping and reshaped by the people and ideas that
comprise it.
