I don’t normally read sci-fi. It’s the names. In this novel everyone is called Shevek and Rulag and Bedap and god-knows-what...
These weird little non-words irritate me. Why can’t anyone conceive of a distant future full of space travel in which people are called Brayden and Maddison? That’s what primary school rolls tell us the near future, at least, has in store.
At least le Guin explains the funny names – in her utopian society, everyone gets assigned their names at birth by a computer, instead of an ID number.
At first the book seemed a bit ponderous. In a galaxy far far away, a planet and its moon circle one another. The planet is full of nations at war and nice shopping strips. The moon is full of thorny bushes and dust storms and a bunch of exiled idealists who went there 150 years before to build their utopian anarchist society. There’s been no official contact between the two societies ever since.
An alien physicist lives in the utopian society on the moon. He does a weird kind of alien physics that might lead to a sought-after instanteous interstellar vehicle. Everyone is keen for a piece of this action.
This is where things changed from ponderous to irritating – or even a bit spooky. Surely sci-fi’s main promise is a complete escape from real life? But instead I found the alien sitting around with his wife – his pregnant wife - whinging that some journal had rejected his paper. His pregnant wife made sympathetic noises but secretly just felt tired and hot. Yeah, yeah. Then the alien’s wife had the baby and the alien decided to leave the utopian society and go live in the capitalist society on the main planet. Leaving the alien’s wife at home, alone, with the baby.
Things were so exactly like my actual life at this point that I expected the alien to ring up the moon and announce he had lost his wallet and could his wife Western Union him some cash ASAP…which fortunately didn’t happen. For a start, there is no money on Annares, the moon. Utopians, like royalty, don’t carry cash.
Reading this book, I was charmed by the way the future dates so quickly, that in this distant solar system where you can scoot between planets on a big spaceship, you also can send a Telex or buy a postcard, using coins of course, because who’s ever heard of a credit card? And I was eventually seduced by the believableness of the relationship between the alien and his wife, the little personal tensions that impeded his life’s work. Despite the ever-so-seventies concerns of capitalism versus a kind of communism (except not, it is more like very organised anarchism), I got very into The Dispossessed.
Now that I’ve finished it, I miss it. I may dig out some more sci-fi – particularly if I can find any in which the protagonist is called Steven.
If this book was a person, it would be my husband, Will, wearing long alien robes and calling himself Willek.
In a nutshell: a brilliant physicist is forced to choose between his dusty, utopian home and the riches of a capitalist planet.
The Dispossessed scores six chocolates out of a possible ten.
These weird little non-words irritate me. Why can’t anyone conceive of a distant future full of space travel in which people are called Brayden and Maddison? That’s what primary school rolls tell us the near future, at least, has in store.
At least le Guin explains the funny names – in her utopian society, everyone gets assigned their names at birth by a computer, instead of an ID number.
At first the book seemed a bit ponderous. In a galaxy far far away, a planet and its moon circle one another. The planet is full of nations at war and nice shopping strips. The moon is full of thorny bushes and dust storms and a bunch of exiled idealists who went there 150 years before to build their utopian anarchist society. There’s been no official contact between the two societies ever since.
An alien physicist lives in the utopian society on the moon. He does a weird kind of alien physics that might lead to a sought-after instanteous interstellar vehicle. Everyone is keen for a piece of this action.
This is where things changed from ponderous to irritating – or even a bit spooky. Surely sci-fi’s main promise is a complete escape from real life? But instead I found the alien sitting around with his wife – his pregnant wife - whinging that some journal had rejected his paper. His pregnant wife made sympathetic noises but secretly just felt tired and hot. Yeah, yeah. Then the alien’s wife had the baby and the alien decided to leave the utopian society and go live in the capitalist society on the main planet. Leaving the alien’s wife at home, alone, with the baby.
Things were so exactly like my actual life at this point that I expected the alien to ring up the moon and announce he had lost his wallet and could his wife Western Union him some cash ASAP…which fortunately didn’t happen. For a start, there is no money on Annares, the moon. Utopians, like royalty, don’t carry cash.
Reading this book, I was charmed by the way the future dates so quickly, that in this distant solar system where you can scoot between planets on a big spaceship, you also can send a Telex or buy a postcard, using coins of course, because who’s ever heard of a credit card? And I was eventually seduced by the believableness of the relationship between the alien and his wife, the little personal tensions that impeded his life’s work. Despite the ever-so-seventies concerns of capitalism versus a kind of communism (except not, it is more like very organised anarchism), I got very into The Dispossessed.
Now that I’ve finished it, I miss it. I may dig out some more sci-fi – particularly if I can find any in which the protagonist is called Steven.
If this book was a person, it would be my husband, Will, wearing long alien robes and calling himself Willek.
In a nutshell: a brilliant physicist is forced to choose between his dusty, utopian home and the riches of a capitalist planet.
The Dispossessed scores six chocolates out of a possible ten.
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