Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

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'
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2141
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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