I finished the Earthsea series recently. Embarrassingly, I have always gotten Ursula Le Guin confused with Madeleine L’Engle, and what I read of L’Engle’s work seemed fine, but not entirely to my taste, so I never got into Le Guin in my youth. Earthsea struck me as insightful and gentle in a way I don’t always want, but sometimes find very appealing (and a nice contrast to Kuang).
So, I went to our bookshelf and found that my wife had an old copy of The Dispossessed. She had told me that it was just okay when she read it as an adolescent, and it’s … still just okay. Reads a bit like Bradbury’s deliberately anachronistic futures in a few places, which is entertaining, because it’s only because technology has gone in different directions than it was expected to. Culturally, that’s a bit weirder, because there’s an attempt to think through a truly egalitarian society which only mostly works (there’s one scene of sexual violence late in the book which lands very strangely now, and doesn’t make a lot of sense to me given the rest of the context of the perpetrating character). But it’s very much an exploration of the idea of anarchism more than a pure story, and it’s pretty neat that it basically does what it needs to do: imagine a radically different set of social norms to enforce anarchism, and also consider how those would gradually erode the basis for anarchism in the society and replace it with power structures which maintained the illusion of freedom and equality.
Not a great book, but effective, in its way. But then, it’s relatively easy to write a book which leaves people thinking that the ideals of anarchism are noble, but that it would be massively challenging and unstable to set up. If nobody’s taking your imagined society as an end they could reasonably hope to aspire to, it’s not going to get the sort of scrutiny it might if it seemed more imminent. So it’s possible for the imagined society to be shallowly conceived in certain ways, and readers won’t notice.
