Book Review: The Dispossessed

Ursule K LeGuin is much more of a genius than I gave her credit for.  I have been a fan of Earthsea since I was a kid, and have read every book in the series: most of them twice, some 3 times.  I recently picked up a volume of Annals of the Western Shore from the discount bin.  Then I read the other books in that series.  And then I read about her in Wikipedia.  So I read a book that I had purchased as a 12 year-old but had never read.

The Dispossessed stars a physicist.  He lives on a habitable (but dry and inhospitable) moon that orbits an earthlike planet that is very rich.  The moon's population are the descendants of Odo, an anarchist rebel from the home world.  Eventually, the home world got so sick of the anarchists that the rebels were offered the moon.  So they left.  But how might an anarchist society fare after 200 years?  In LeGuin's hands the anarchy breaks down into bureaucracy.  Our hero is an anarchist among the bureaucrats that call themselves anarchists.

The story is both a personal journey for him and a societal journey for the propertarian (a word she uses with alacrity) and anarchist societies.

Like Orwell's 1984, the parallels between this future and our present are striking, disturbing, eye-opening, and refreshing at the same time.  I can understand Occupy Wall Street better now on a personal level.  The economics and politics made good sense to me before, but I understand it personally better then before.

It seems that LeGuin does nothing poorly.  The Dispossessed belongs on a Kindle, a shelf, or at the very least, in each of our brains.