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A review by tucked_snuggly
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
adventurous
hopeful
reflective
4.0
The frontispiece is a map of Anarres and Urras, which had me exited before I had even read the first sentence; I love to see a map at the outset of a novel. (They’re usual in LeGuin’s novels, but that doesn’t change my feelings.)
LeGuin’s writing is great for how she so totally immerses the reader in the world of the story right from the start. I always find myself scrabbling for some mental purchase at the starts of Hanish novels, but once I find it I’m locked in. Like the other Hanish novels, the culture of Anarres and Urras feels so thought out and believable that it gives the work an anthropological feeling. You can imagine they’re really out there, orbiting Tau Ceti.
I realized (maybe kinda late) that the form the narrative takes matches up with the temporal physics Shevek is working on the whole story. The Urras chapters have the reader experiencing time linearly, so the new one picks up right where the last one left off. However, the Anarres chapters are scattered in time, they always take place much later on from when the last left off. Shevek’s Simultaneity Theory posits that all time has already happened, each moment being like a page in a book, so there could be moments disconnected from one another—like in the Anarres chapters. The critics of his theory say that that’s not how time is experienced, so it can’t be correct—time is experienced as linear, like the Urras chapters. This kind of thing is great!
LeGuin’s writing is great for how she so totally immerses the reader in the world of the story right from the start. I always find myself scrabbling for some mental purchase at the starts of Hanish novels, but once I find it I’m locked in. Like the other Hanish novels, the culture of Anarres and Urras feels so thought out and believable that it gives the work an anthropological feeling. You can imagine they’re really out there, orbiting Tau Ceti.
I realized (maybe kinda late) that the form the narrative takes matches up with the temporal physics Shevek is working on the whole story. The Urras chapters have the reader experiencing time linearly, so the new one picks up right where the last one left off. However, the Anarres chapters are scattered in time, they always take place much later on from when the last left off. Shevek’s Simultaneity Theory posits that all time has already happened, each moment being like a page in a book, so there could be moments disconnected from one another—like in the Anarres chapters. The critics of his theory say that that’s not how time is experienced, so it can’t be correct—time is experienced as linear, like the Urras chapters. This kind of thing is great!