Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

The story of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is told in alternating time periods: present, past, present, then mostly past leading to the present. In a section of the Milky Way Galaxy several light years from Earth, a genius 38-year-old physicist named Shevek is transported from his native home, the anarchist society moon of Anarres, to the mother capitalist and sexist planet of Urras. (Women must shave their heads and are forbidden male jobs.) There he will be awarded the Seo Oen prize in physics nine years late for his book "Principles of Simultaneity". He will also live among other scientists at Ieu Eun University while polishing his theory, the idea of which has two basic applica- tions: instantaneous communication through light years of space and instantaneous travel through same.

Shevek sees his theory as a means to international communi- cation and, therefore, brotherly communion. The warmongering Council of World Governments (CWG), however, sees it as a means to further profiteering by sending war ships to enslave their Hainish competitors and the people of other planets.

Shevek himself is the product of Odonian society and culture, whose ancestors 170 years earlier exiled themselves from Urras, guided by the communistic plans and principles of the late female anti-government revolutionary, Laia Asieo Odo (698-769 in Urrasti years). Odo's plans, which were based on the rich natural resources of Urras, can barely be maintained on the dry, cold, windy and bleak d

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y superior, Sabul, who alters and then claims co-authorship of Shevek's superior scientific work as his own. Sabul represents "convention, moralism, fear of social ostracism, fear of being different, fear of being free" (p. 332). Anarres must also provide the above-named basic needs--which included committed sexual partnerships--regardless of its lip service to freedom and collective rights vs. individual rights, or it will eventually collapse of its own dead weight, as did the Soviet Union--as will almost any government where state rights supercede individual rights. No matter Shevek's zeal to compel national politics on both sides to give way to international relations for the common good, he cannot dismiss basic individual needs or conjure more food and water on Anarres. Indeed, Shevek can only fully concentrate on his mission when he finds a female partner to share it. And when he knows hunger for the first time on Anarres, his messianic zeal is displaced by satisfying his stomach: "Frustration, anxiety, famine! said his forebrain, seat of intellect; but his hindbrain, squatting in unrepentant savagery back in the deep skull's darkness, said Food now! Food now! Good, good!" (p. 262). Le Guin also pokes fun at the Odonians'

Category: Literature - U