We humans really fail at the system level, don't we? Try as we might to make a fair collective of independent individuals, we invariably end up crushing those individuals in the process of distributing our homemade booty of choice according to increasingly corrupt rules and guidelines that keep changing in favour of those who happen to have the power to write them down.The Dispossessed are everywhere. That they dispossess in their specific lives depends on the quirky path of history. It never s...

Why America Is Full of Toxic Bullshit and Why Ambiguous Utopias Need to Check Themselves Before They Wreck Themselves Going Down the Same Fucked-Up Path by Ursula K. Le Guin.this excellent novel-cum-political treatise-cum-extended metaphor for the States lays its thesis out in parallel narratives. in the present day (far, far, far in the future), heroically thoughtful protagonist Shevek visits the thinly-veiled States of the nation A-Io on the planet Urras in order to both work on his Theory of

“My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed ourselves first. There are no forests left on my Earth.” The Dispossessed is a phenomenal novel and there are many important aspects of it that warrant a thorough discussion; however, the above quote really stood out to me and will becom

You question a lot of things when you read this book. Loyalty, freedom, desire to own, work, family concept .... I think the author has written a great book.

‘You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.’Reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin was likely the biggest literary event of the year for me. This endlessly quotable book gripped me on every level and the way Le Guin can examine and explain ideas is so fluid, especially how she crafts such functioning worlds for her characters and ideas to move around in. Told in a rotating timeline with the past ev...

Thoughts on The DispossessedOf the various layers of content in The Dispossessed, the most obvious is the socio-political: capitalism vs. anarchistic-communism. The claim often made is that, even though her heart is with the latter, she nonetheless treats the two structures impartially. The claim or presumption is to be found in the reviews of fantasy/science fiction devotees, those with a particular interest in anarchism and, I suspect, also those who simply read it with an uncritical eye.I don...

Oh, Ursula. No longer will I love you in a vaguely ashamed manner, skulking through chesty-women-blow-shit-up-also-monster! book covers in the sci-fi/fantasy aisles with a moderate velocity as though I am actually trying to find Civil War biographies but am amusingly lost amongst all these shelves, that's so like me, need a GPS for Borders. Today, I will begin loving you publicly, proudly, for you are the Anti-Ayn Rand. You do not skullf**k Ayn Rand and make her your bitch, no, too easy. You tak...

Some books really make me think long and hard about life. This was one of them. I first inhaled it on a transatlantic flight a decade ago and felt that Le Guin, as usual, made my brain run on higher speed than it typically does. I was too intimidated for words back then, but I’ll try now, after a second, slower read spanning a couple of weeks, with time for brain to stop and think and really appreciate what I read. “It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and se...

More than two months have passed since I've closed this book. While my traditional reviewing habit was one of immediately rushing to the closest laptop after reading the last line and sharing my excitement or the lack thereof in some hopefully original way, I felt a need to really let Le Guin's words sink fully into my mind and make them my own. (Actually, I've mostly just been very lazy in the reviewing department lately, but "letting words sink in" just sounds a little better.) But when it com...

“There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed was a difficult book for me to review. On the one hand, I like the ideas Le Guin explores and the fact that she doesn't take shortcuts. Her depictions of utopia, for instance, are interesting and thought provoking, but at the same time they're obviously flawed. That's not a surprise. Still, it's

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed. Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Dispossessed' represents the high orbit of what SF can do. Science Fiction is best, most lasting, most literate, when it is using its conventional form(s) to explore not space but us. When the vehicle of SF is used to ask big questions that are easier bent with binary planets, with grand theories of time and space, etc., we are able to...

This discourse on dystopias won Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and National Book awards, and almost every single one of my Goodreads friends that has read it has it tagged with a 4 or 5 star rating. So clearly, the problem here is with me, because I really hated this book -- and it isn't because this book is dated or aged poorly, because the Cold War era slant of this book plays perfectly to a modern audience considering the current state of Russian-U.S. relations. I'm giving it two stars b...

As a semi-retired actor, there are many literary characters I'd love to play, and for all kinds of reasons. Cardinal Richelieu and D'Artagnan spring immediately to mind, but there are countless others: Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin (Perdido Street Station), Oedipus, Holmes or Watson (I'd take either), Captain Jack Aubrey (I'd rather Stephen Maturin, but I look like Jack), Heathcliff, Lady Macbeth (yep, I meant her), Lady Bracknell (nee Brancaster), Manfred, Indiana Jones. But none of them are people...