Recommendations from our site
“Le Guin has 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?” Read more...
Science Fiction and Philosophy
Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosopher
“The Dispossessed is an important work for a number of reasons in terms of Le Guin’s ‘Hainish Cycle.’ I also think it’s a really important novel because, as its subtitle suggests, it has an ambiguous relationship to the notion of utopia. 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.” Read more...
Sherryl Vint, Literary Scholar
“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. 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.” Read more...
