Great, fascinating book.

The moral, political, and narrative complexity here. It was difficult to read, but a gift to me.

The Dispossessed is one that shines because of its message more than the plot or characterization. There are lots of long, philosophical conversations about ownership, capitalism, the inequality of gendered experience, and anarchism. The protagonist Shevek is a vessel for Le Guin's mind. 

Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the best of our time and her intellect being captured in her numerous works is the only solace for our loss. 

Warm-hearted, harrowing, inspiring, cynical, highly political and highly accessible. It's pretty extraordinary when a book makes you realise "oh, THIS is where that incredibly stirring quotation is from" - not just once but multiple times. 

Le Guin's capacity for imagining the true workings of an anarchocommunist society which is grounded and mundane and has, like any society, its flaws - while still highlighting, with jarring effect, the more hidden monstrosity of the alternative - is incredible. But more than that, and what makes it so winning, is the likeable and deeply engrossing personal narrative, with a protagonist who is an outsider in two societies and yet any reader cannot fail to warm to.

The only flaw for me was

the scene of sexual assault, which I don't think should have been excluded necessarily, but it reads on its surface as if Le Guin is suggesting any man getting too drunk, despite the better way that he was raised, would do such a thing, and I was expecting a reflection on this within the narrative afterwards which did not come - that felt odd.

 

Le Guin remains decades ahead of her contemporaries and modern writers alike in the thought she puts into the societies of her fictional worlds.  The dynamics of Urras and Anarres are fascinating, and the book turns an appropriately critical eye on both.  Unfortunately, all this is weighed down by a true clunker of a story.  Shevek is a boring and emotionally unconvincing main character; I didn't care about whether anything he did succeeded until the ending, which is far too late.  (Also, he's a rapist.  Fucking hooray.)  Huge chunks are him farting around in past or present while the book vaguely gestures at really intriguing conflicts it could explore and then doesn't.  The last 10% gets interesting just in time for the book to be over.  The side characters are complete blank slates, so it's nigh-impossible to get attached to them either.  I can see why some people love this book, because it does a few things exceptionally well.  It's a very cool story to talk about in abstract--but actually reading it is a monotonous slog peppered with occasionally compelling scenes and disturbing misogyny that the book never calls out.  Come for the ideas it posits and nothing else.

An incredible thought experiment about an anarchist civilization able to grow and thrive on a planet's moon. 

A philosophical, political, and scientific masterpiece. 

finished this book and immediately handed it off to a friend out of the need to share such a brilliant read. it’s hard to compare le guin’s works, because they are all so phenomenal that i could never pick a favourite, but more than any other works of hers i felt particularly surprised by the wry humour in this book. as always, the message is political, personal, thought provoking - it seamlessly gives us a world so entirely foreign to everything we know, then makes our world seem like the strange one. she writes about Anarres like it’s a real place she’s been to, not an impossible planet a universe away, and yet in its neighbour planet Urras, and the major city A-Io, we see every city we’ve ever visited. Shevek is a perfectly imperfect, if at times boring or hard to follow, protagonist, and all the background characters are both charming and deeply confusing at times. Le Guin writes of revolution in a way so perfectly and painfully accurate, creates a utopia with more flaws than we could fathom, shows the reality that comes with the fight for freedom and justice. never one to ignore intersectional inequalities, Le Guin ridicules ingrained power structures on class and gender lines, all while focusing on an alternative to capitalist life so imperfect it becomes hard not to believe in. 

the book also, in a much less important but still fun way, has a great connection to other Hainish cycle books, showing the battle fought for something later taken for granted (the ansible), and demonstrating the ultimately cyclical nature of time - in the end, for all Shevek’s hopes and dreams for the world, what ever really changes? 

immm going crazy i would give this 6 stars out of 5 if i could... this definitely makes le guin one of my favorite authors. this book made me think so much, and want to write too, but also think that i could never write anything as good as this. life changing. i kept thinking about it in the moments i couldn't read.

A mind-stretcher! I learned a lot reading this. Immense worldbuilding. I don't have the knowledge set to judge the fictional physics, however.