The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Anarchist utopia with receipts.
For you if
you want to live inside a serious thought experiment about what an anarchist society would actually require of its people
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Le Guin writes the thinking person’s revolution — a tale of twin worlds, one capitalist, one communal, both imperfect. Through physicist Shevek’s journey, she asks what freedom costs when no system is innocent. The Dispossessed is the rare utopia brave enough to be honest — anarchism with a conscience, science fiction with a soul.
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Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin(2018)
dir. Arwen Curry
Le Guin explains her own ideas, in her own words.
A decade-in-the-making portrait of Ursula K. Le Guin, made with her direct participation, tracing her life and the ideas — anarchism, utopia and its opposite, gender — running through Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed.
Why it’s here: Le Guin explains her own anarchist and utopian thinking here in her own words, not through a scholar's paraphrase — about as close as film gets to the primary source behind The Dispossessed. Punk in that she spent decades on the margins of 'respectable' literature by choice, refusing to soften the politics to fit in; pedagogical in that watching her reason through an idea is a different kind of teaching than reading the novel it produced.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
For the grown-up bookshelf
Same idea, written for a grown-up. Good for the adult in the room, too.
