Conservative anarchists and other follies

[bloodygranuaile]

 BSpec's next book club book is Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, the first book in what is somewhat erroneously referred to as the Hainish Cycle. I've read two other works in this "cycle," The Left Hand of Darkness and The Telling, both in college. I remember liking The Left Hand of Darkness better, but it's been so long I'd have to reread them both to tell you why.

 

The Dispossessed is about a physicist named Shevek who lives on the moon. The moon, called Anarres, is a supposedly independent non-state nation of sorts, a planetwide anarchist civilization that pretends that it isn't really a mining colony for the planet it circles, Urras, and allowed to exist only on Urras' sufferance as long as it quietly trades ores for other needed supplies. Anarres was settled 150 years or so prior to when this story takes place, basically buying off an entire anarchist movement based around the theories of a revolutionary named Odo.

 

Anarres is small and Shevek is a really brilliant physicist, so he is in contact with other physicists back on Urras, mostly in the big capitalist country that the initial Odonian settlers had come from. Shevek gets the idea into his head that Anarres and Urras have been enemies for long enough, and that he should go to Urras to work with the physicists there, and to learn about Urras as it is now and hopefully to unite the two planets in brotherhood and all that. This doesn't go over too well with the people in Anarres, but they eventually can't really stop him, so off to Urras he goes. On Urras, Shevek is, quite predictably, in completely over his head as far as figuring out what the State really wants from him, why they are allowing him to come and stay at the University, what of life in that country they're hiding from him and why, etc. etc. It all turns out to be worse than Shevek could possibly imagine but in ways that will ring very familiar to any politically active reader.

 

In true Le Guin style this book is very philosophical; the characters spend a lot of time arguing about morality and society and Odonian ideology, which is frankly really interesting and I wish I knew more about what anarchist thinkers Le Guin is drawing from when she develops Odo's quotes and theories. The driving question behind a lot of Shevek and his buddies' actions seems to be whether or not custom and public opinion on Anarres has gotten out of balance enough with individual initiative that it constitutes having accidentally created a state or bureaucracy--i.e., whether the "permanent revolution" that Anarrian society was supposed to be founded upon has ended, and the people have become conservative. Of course, Anarrian conservativism still looks pretty good compared to some of the stuff we find out on Urras; Shevek's complaints about the academics who keep blocking his research into his arcane branch of theoretical physics ends up coming off as very much "first world problems" even though Anarres is generally considered the less developed world. (The Odonians weren't anprims ideologically, but the Moon is a harsh planet to live on and they had to do some lifestyle simplification in order to survive on it.)

 

There's a lot to unpack here about soft power, the role of the individual in society, the weight and inertia of social stagnation and the difficulties of permanent revolution, the way that class difference and inequality are hidden and thus more easily perpetuated in a capitalist society, the colonialism inherent in the Cold War, gender, nationalism, academia, and many other things. There's also fun stuff, like that the worst insults on Anarres are "propertarian" and "profiteer," and a few things that kept getting thrown in for what seemed like just vague sci-fi-ish-ness that I kept forgetting about, like that Anarrans and Urrasans are furry? It's not very central to the story the way that the sex malleability stuff is in LHoD; it's just there.

 

There's also a lot of philosophizing about family and parenthood and adult relationships that I admit I'm less interested in than I probably should be, since that's all very important to the human condition, but I'm childfree so it's less interesting to me than the issues around academic gatekeeping and where are the lines between quality control and just trying to control other people's academic inquiry.

 

There's also a lot of fun linguistic stuff, in a very particular tradition of SF/F worldbuilding. In this case, the Anarrans speak a "rational" language that was basically made up via computer during the settlement, which is... a thing. One function of this language is that Anarrans don't use possessive pronouns for basically anything, including family relationships.

 

One thing I liked about this book more than was probably warranted is that I got the ridiculous 1974 edition from the library, with its sort of trippy stained-glass-looking cover. It's very '70s, especially the typeface for the title, but it's also sort of medieval-looking, especially considering the academic dress of the figure (probably Shevek) on the cover. The copy is so old that the inside front cover has a list price of $7.95, even though it's a hardback. This comes out to just under $40 in 2017 dollars, so I guess it's an expensive book! The Anarrans would disapprove.

 

Looking forward to chewing this one over with some nerds, although book club isn't until December. I honestly didn't intend to read this so fast, but I had three hours at the car service center on Saturday, which is where I got through most of it.