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Let's Read: The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin

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bibliophile20 bibliophile20's picture
Let's Read: The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Another experiment, although this as more of a thing by the resident book-lover than as the forum mod--book discussion threads! For this forum, I'm going with books and fiction that have direct transhuman or EP related themes. The book to discuss for this thread is Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. I only recently read this book, partly at the instigation of a friend, partly so I would have fiction to recommend to others on how Anarcho-Communism/Anarcho-Syndicalism might work--and the pitfalls that they might run into as subsequent generations are raised and taught. I found it fascinating; a well-written depiction of a multiple-century-old functioning An-Comm/An-Syn society, where the children don't even manage to comprehend the concept of "imprisonment" or ownership, but avoiding the Mary Suetopia issue of giving it serious and earnest flaws, thanks to being run by human beings. There is censorship, courtesy of a reactionary and closed mind-set of the majority of the population. There is unconsenting hierarchy, due to the focus on the community over the individual, the excuse of the needs of survival, and the formation of crony cabals within the syndicates. At the same time, the presence of those flaws, and the recognition by the main characters that these are not what their society was meant to be, highlights the ideals of their home to even greater heights. And, I'll admit, that the entire time I was reading the book, I kept thinking, "oh, man, oh, man, I'd love to see what these people would do with just one CM." So, has anyone else read it, and what did you think of the depictions of anarchism vs. democracy, and the other themes of the book? One thing that I find most interesting is the concept of social decay as applied to an anarchist society. You see this all the time in other literature and in real life history--you have the founders of the society be bold, idealistic, with the determination to see things through... and then, having built things, their successors and descendants, having not had those formative trials, but having simply inherited what their predecessors built, don't really believe in it, or don't understand how it came to be. The Chinese call it the Mandate Of Heaven; over on TVTropes, it's called the Cycle Of Empires. But here, for this book, it's shown in an interesting fashion. Without structures to corrupt, people build them unconsciously, just to be able to corrupt them.

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -Benjamin Franklin

consumerdestroyer consumerdestroyer's picture
It just shows the kind of
It just shows the kind of genius and insight that Le Guin has into the multidimensional nature of human cognition, social dynamics, political ideologies, etc, etc. that she can pen so (IMHO) flawless a treatise on both the utopic elements of dystopias [b]and[/b] the dystopic elements of utopias and have almost any human mind consuming it come out the other side wondering at what kinds of solutions might be possible without having actually resolved it. She opens an infinity in minds in part, I feel, because she doesn't stop to answer anything. She tells a story (and a damn good one), and what she cares about as a writer seems more geared towards exploring than hitting someone over the head with anything. If things hit one on the head when read Le Guin, it's because in life one often has that experience, and Le Guin can write [b]life[/b]. Living, breathing worlds with pain and beauty and mundanity and the epic and hope and despair and everything in between and beyond, told not from behind an impish mask, but from within a trickster's soul (the kind of trickster that helps out the mortals to fuck with the gods). While she's confided in interviews her private sympathies for socialism and anarchism in particular, I love that she's so willing to make no sacred cows in part because it's all sacred. Her genius criticisms are made with love as her love is tempered with her genius, and if you really want to see her in top form outside the Hainish cycle, I [b]cannot recommend enough[/b] her deeply mystic and poetic (and feminist/socialist/humanist/anarchist in existence [b]and[/b] in essence) translation of the [i]Tao Te Ching[/i]. That, to me, is the cryptographic key through which all of her fiction can be read to show that she is among the top American writers who have ever lived...and she's still alive! It makes my heart soar, and I know I'm going to cry like a baby when I hear she's died. I picked up [i]The Wild Girls[/i] put out by the fabulous (and intensely, beautifully radical) PM Press at an anarchist book fair a while back. It's just a bit of her short fiction and poetry with non-fiction interview and essay content, a slim little volume, but I found myself going back to the titular piece again and again [i]and again[/i]. She captures me like few other living American authors do (for totally different reasons, fellow eternally-youthful-no-matter-the-chronological-age sci fi literati Gene Wolfe is another, and they both gush about each other on book jackets enough that you can tell they think the world of one another), and I always readily spit both names into the faces of anyone who snidely tells me "genre fiction" can't be literary masterpiece-level.