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A review by nooralshanti
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
1.0
Well, I forced myself to finish this. It was extremely pointless and boring. And... I'm pretty sure that U.K. Le Guin meant for it to be very thought-provoking, and it kind of was, but only because it was so boring and mind-numbingly meaningless that I was forced to think about better ways of representing some of the ideas that she was randomly throwing into this book.
It's one of those books where an author tries to represent Capitalism and Communism, as if they are the only two options. She kept calling it Anarchism, but I didn't see any anarchy in a society full of people who were content to have every aspect of their lives ruled by computers telling them where to go and what to do. She kept almost getting to this point, but never actually touching upon it or confronting it clearly. The society on Anarres was most definitely controlled by someone, they had just consented to let that someone be hidden, in the shadows, behind the computers. But the book never really went there. And then it never really managed to deeply criticize the capitalistic society either, the one on Urras, because Shevek spent his entire time there doing a whole lot of nothing.
So in the end it was meant to be an exploration of capitalism and anarchistic communism, but it wasn't. If you counted up the words I'm sure you'd find the majority of the words in this novel were spent on Shevek's "physics"-based thoughts. There are literally pages upon pages of him thinking through not real science, just paragraph after paragraph of meaningless supposedly scientific theorizing. And let's face it. No one wants to read about real science, let alone this boring non science, this nonsense.
I found most of the things that offered even a glimmer of the interesting were kind of quickly glossed over, they weren't the point. But what was?
It's one of those books where an author tries to represent Capitalism and Communism, as if they are the only two options. She kept calling it Anarchism, but I didn't see any anarchy in a society full of people who were content to have every aspect of their lives ruled by computers telling them where to go and what to do. She kept almost getting to this point, but never actually touching upon it or confronting it clearly. The society on Anarres was most definitely controlled by someone, they had just consented to let that someone be hidden, in the shadows, behind the computers. But the book never really went there. And then it never really managed to deeply criticize the capitalistic society either, the one on Urras, because Shevek spent his entire time there doing a whole lot of nothing.
So in the end it was meant to be an exploration of capitalism and anarchistic communism, but it wasn't. If you counted up the words I'm sure you'd find the majority of the words in this novel were spent on Shevek's "physics"-based thoughts. There are literally pages upon pages of him thinking through not real science, just paragraph after paragraph of meaningless supposedly scientific theorizing. And let's face it. No one wants to read about real science, let alone this boring non science, this nonsense.
I found most of the things that offered even a glimmer of the interesting were kind of quickly glossed over, they weren't the point. But what was?