I'll focus frequently on a comparison to Dune (that kept recurring to me as I read), but it's worth noting that Atlas Shrugged, Anathem, and Foundation all share with The Dispossessed intentional socities that deliberately separate themselves from their civilization of origin. The tone of the protagonist in Anathem is one of puzzlement at the outside ("saecular") world. In Foundation, the attitude is one of anxiety as to whether the experiment will work and gratitude that, through the founder's guile, the new society has avoided becoming entangled in the rest of the galaxy's collapse. Atlas Shrugged comes closest to the tone of the protagonist and his society in The Dispossessed - a strongly moral, judgmental one. Despite being polar opposites in many ways, Rand and Le Guin also share an interest in the interaction of psychology and social systems, which somewhat betrays the mid-twentieth century careers of each writer.[1]
The Dispossessed is one of LeGuin's Hainish Cycle novels, the setting for which is a universe where every human world including Earth originated with the Hainish people, a million-year-old civilization that lost touch with its colonies thousands of years ago. Science fiction purists may complain that a) the trope of "humans are actually the descendants of alien colonists" is well-worn, and b) in any event no longer plausible given modern DNA ancestry and phylogeny work, unless Earth is the homeworld; then you have to explain where all the evidence of our previous technology was (either, more advanced aliens seeded us, or it was made of something quickly degradable, like ice as in Michael P. Kube-McDowell's Trigon Disunity series.) That aside, having multiple human worlds, each with their own unique cultural (and even biological) paths, gave Le Guin a nifty vehicle for "interacting alternate histories", in the best sense of that subgenre as an experiment in the impact of historical commitments. The twin planets of Urras and Anarres ask - what if Earth had a habitable moon, and a social/religious movement with echoes of Mormons, Mennonites, the Greek philosophy schools that often had their own islands (eg the Epicureans) and a leader who died before reaching the Holy Land - and that movement started their utopia from scratch on said moon. (I quite like that each world refers to the other as their moon.) There are also nations on Urras that make clear parallels to Earth's, more obvious to the geopolitical and cultural milieu in the 1960s - A-Io as an America with an overgrown military-industrial complex and a decidedly Victorian bent, and Thu as a communist dictatorship. Consequently, while it's easy to see the novel was written with mid-to-late twentieth century political concerns, this does not detract from its overall themes and it has mostly aged quite well.
The use of a science fiction setting to explore the intersection between politics, philosophy, and ecology is so obviously parallel to Dune that I was surprised there is not already literature (or even any extensive online discussion I could find) comparing the two. It's been said that Dune is Foundation told from the standpoint of the Mule, or that Dune is Star Wars for grown-ups. I find myself feeling less kind to Dune after reading The Dispossessed. Arrakis could be one 75% imagined planet in Le Guin's universe, and The Dispossessed is Dune for better-read grown-ups. Sand worms, spice, and sand trout - that's your ecosystem? On Anarres we learn about the taxonomy of the planet's native life and how it was influenced to evolve in such a way by the physical environment, from lichen, to the fragile plants of the desert landscape with only three land phyla, and how the people adapted the available organisms. The Dispossessed is the better novel, and there's no serious discussion to be had about the point. It would be hard to be surprised when you learn that the novel won the Hugo, Locus and Nebula.
And, whatever you might think of her politics, The Dispossessed is worthy of our respect because it more clearly grew out of Le Guin's reading in trying to do something in the real world - as someone protesting the Vietnam War, she began reading about real-world pacifist movements that directly inspired the philosophy in the book.[2] My main objections to Odonian philosophy are that it does not respect human nature enough - given how children are quickly moved out of their family units and raised institutionally, in Anarres would be a planet of people with borderline personality disorder. Also, while "shunning" (the Anarresti Amish- or Hopi-like method of dealing with most criminals and parasites) is adequate punishment in small scale societies, it absolutely breaks down beyond the level of a village, where we're above the Dunbar number and everybody no longer knows everybody. Interestingly, outside of the suppression of dissent, I mostly found myself identifying with the politics of the A-Ioti, and outside of the apparent phobia of emotional bonds (even in parenthood), with the personal morality of the Anarresti. Such a divide would likely have seemed strange to Le Guin or her original audience, and it's interesting how in the intervening half-century, some things have changed, particularly the acceptance of open minority sexuality and the agreement by many Americans on both left and even right that the state should not be part of the institituion of marriage.
Le Guin does an outstanding job of structuring the novel to serve the narrative and planting seeds throughout that bear fruit later. And some authors give us unreliable narrators, others - restrictive or omitting narrators. Example: in Wolfe's New Sun novels, the reader is (meant to be) startled when Severian casually mentions three novels into the series, that due to the Sun's dimness, people on Earth can now see stars in the daytime. I took this, as so many things in those novels, as a comment on the limitations of narrative. Perhaps similarly - perhaps not - the humans on the various worlds of the Hainish cycle universe have been separated long enough to be noticeably physically different. Urrasti (and the biologically identical Anarresti) are covered in fur. To be fair this is mentioned several times, but always (I suspect) intentionally in such a way as to be dismissible as metaphor - e.g., Shevek describes his young daughter as "furry" at one point, and I took that to mean her disheveled hair (on her head.) It's not until he meets the ambassador from Earth that he explicitly notes the difference - that Terrans only have hair on their heads! - and made me page back to some of the other comments about furriness. Assuming Le Guin was doing this deliberately, it's much more clever than Wolfe - there's no way to know you can see the stars during the day until Severian tells you, but you have to be complicit in your own deception to miss the Urrasti's furriness. (It also nicely simulates the vertiginous experience of suddenly recognizing the previously un-considered, un-noticed marks of one's own nation or religion or other in-group, when suddenly contrasted against a foreigner in front of you.)
Le Guin doesn't try to paint her ambiguous utopia as perfect. The feeling that humans are hard to organize in big groups, and that any political commitments we make will fall short or make us chafe somewhere, is communicated clearly. She seems comfortable recognizing that even in intentional social systems designed to maximize utility, the terms of the utility equation - wealth, justice, and leisure among them - cannot all be given equal priority. As noted in interviews elsewhere, she is comfortable admitting that the people of Anarres are poorer as a result of their system, but more moral. This is a tradeoff that every socioeconomic ordering has had to make in every civilization and her directness here is refreshing. Furthermore, she recognizes that human nature is not a blank slate and it comes up against the Anarresti "system" throughout the novel, and George Carlin's principle that among humans, "eventually, everything becomes a racket" is illustrated nicely by how the syndicates gradually become a bureaucracy, and social norms become laws. That said, Le Guin is brave enough not to denigrate the anarcho-syndicalism she explores with false equivalence. She is describing a system that she thinks would be an improvement over the various Urrasti nations, as well as our own; not just for the narrative motive of creating the conflict necessary in a novel but for genuine intellectual honesty, she does not conceal its expected shortcomings.
Returning to Dune: it's not clear that Herbert was a fan of the idea of feudalism and I took his use of it in Dune as a statement about the unfortunate natural tendencies of humans, that given half a chance, we'll revert to it. But he also doesn't exactly seem disgusted by feudalism either, and doesn't offer any serious improvement on it, other than just to submit to a messiah. And if we can take it as any indication, certainly the fandom of Dune is not filled with people decrying the dystopian injustice of the feudal system, but rather cheering for a different person to control it. In contrast, as an "honest utopian", Le Guin also writes better, more human characters, whose interactions with the system and each other naturally demonstrate how it works, rather than the repetitive ungainly thought-italics of Dune.
Finally - if I'm comparing The Dispossessed to Dune - the treatment of women in both novels could not be more opposite. In The Dispossessed, they're human, unrestricted in their emotional and social roles and experiences. In Dune they're either the Messiah's mother, or the woman he seizes as property with violence (Irulan), or (possibly most revealing of the author's psychology) weird older ladies whose rituals contain more than a hint of BDSM, who make the boy-protagonist crawl to them on his knees to be tortured.[3] Le Guin also treats sexual minorities as human, whereas Herbert, in real life, disowned his gay son. That seems as good a note as any to close on.
FOOTNOTES
[1] It should be noted that like the linguistic parallel of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, there is little evidence for a strong effect of social structure on psychology, and writers lost interest in the question. (But if mid-twentieth century psychoanalytic theories of society are your bag, you could do worse than reading Erikson's Childhood and Society, where he investigated and contrasted the relationship between the environment, social structure, and psychology of the Lakota of the high plains, and the Yurok of coastal northern California. Of note - he studied the Yurok with the famous Berkeley linguist Alfred Kroeber, who happens to be Le Guin's father - the K. is for her maiden name Kroeber.)
[2] The title of The Dispossessed was inspired by Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. As I haven't read it, my summary of the summaries I've scanned is that The Possessed is about nineteenth century Russian anarchists who've been "infected" with Western ideas; the Anarresti here could be thought of as their descendants, not exorcised of anarchist demons but rather exiled from their homeland. The Russian novel may be of interest to Slate Star Codex types interested in consciousness "software" a la Julian Jaynes spreading through a population, as in this one interesting though highly dubious account of it happening before an observer's eyes in the Andaman Islands. It also seems like it would be popular with modern Russian chauvinists in terms of their ideas of being "Eurasian" and being unique and separate from the West.
[3] Also of note is that Paul's mother is one of the BDSM nuns. Many male narcissists have difficult relationships with their mothers. And, not unrelated - similar fantasies about older women.
More discussion:
-
Essay on The Dispossessed at Law & Liberty, focusing more on the political arguments
Public conversation between Le Guin and Margaret Atwood
Genre classification and Le Guin's work
