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The Dispossessed
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| Author: |
Ursula K. Le Guin |
| Publisher: |
Harper & Row, 1975 |
| Series: | Hainish Cycle: Book 1 |
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1. The Dispossessed |
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| Awards: |
1974 Nebula Winner 1975 Hugo Winner 1975 Locus SF Winner 1975 Campbell Nominated |
| Lists: |
SF Masterworks The ISFDB Top 100 Books (Balanced List) Locus Best SF Novels of All-Time WWEnd Top Nominated Books of All-Time David Pringle's Best 100 Science Fiction Novels |
| Sub-Genre Tags: | Dystopia Utopia Soft SF |
| Member Rating: |
   (32 reads / 24 ratings)
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Synopsis
Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. he will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life. Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Anarres, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.
Excerpt
Chapter One
There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb, it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an, idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.
A number of people were coming along the road towards the landing field, or standing around where the road cut through the wall.
People often came out from the nearby city of Abbenay in hopes of seeing a spaceship, or simply to see the wall, After all, it was the only boundary wall on their world. Nowhere else could they see a sign that said No Trespassing. Adolescents, particularly, were drawn to it. They came up to the wall; they sat an it. There might be a gang to watch, offloading crates from track trucks at the warehouses. There might even be a freighter on the pad. Freighters came down only eight times a year, unannounced except to syndics actually working at the Port, so when the spectators were lucky enough to see one they were excited, at first. But there they sat, and there it sat, a squat black tower in a mess of movable cranes, away off across the field. And then a woman came over from one of the warehouse crews and said, "We're shutting down for today, brothers." She was wearing the Defense armband, a sight almost as rare as a spaceship. That was a bit of a thrill. But though her tone was mild, it was final. She was the foreman of this gang, and if provoked would be backed up by her syndics. And anyhow there wasn't anything to see. The aliens, the off-worlders, stayed hiding in their ship. No show.
It was a dull show for the Defense crew, too. Sometimes the foreman wished that somebody would just try to cross the wall, an alien, crewman jumping ship, or a kid from Abbenay trying to sneak in for a. closer look at the freighter. But it never happened. Nothing ever happened. When something did happen she wasn't ready for it.
The captain of the freighter Mindful said to her, "Isthat mob after my ship?"
The foreman looked and saw that, in fact there was a real crowd around the gate, a hundred or more people. They were standing around, just standing, the way people had stood at produce-train stations during the Famine. It gave the foreman a scare.
"No. They, ah, protest," she said in her slow and limited Iotic. "Protest the ah: you know. Passenger?"
"You mean they're after this bastard we're supposed to take? Are they going to try to stop him, or us?"
The word "bastard," untranslatable in the foreman's language, meant nothing to her except some kind of foreign term for her people, but she had never liked the sound of it, or the captain's tone, or the captain. "Can you look after you?" she asked briefly.
"Hell, yes. You just get the rest of this cargo unIoaded, quick. And get this passenger bastard on board. No mob of Oddies is about to give us any trouble." He patted the thing he wore on his belt, a metal object like a deformed penis, and looked patronizingly at the unarmed woman.
She gave the phallic object, which she knew was a weapon, a cold glance. "Ship will be loaded by fourteen hours," she said. "Keep crew on board safe. Lift off at fourteen hours forty. If you need help, leave message on tape at Ground Control." She strode off, before the captain could one-up her. Anger made her more forceful with her crew and the crowd. "Clear the road there!" she ordered as she neared the wall. "Trucks are coming through, somebody's going to get hurt. Clear aside!"
The men and women in the crowd argued with her and with one another. They kept crossing the road, and some came inside the wall. Yet they did more or less clear the way. If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling, there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life.
Some of them had come there to kill a traitor. Others had come to prevent him from leaving, or to yell insults at him, or just to look at him; and all these others obstructed the sheer brief path of the assassins.
Copyright © 1974 by Ursula K. Le Guin
Images
The Dispossessed in Blogs
- The SF Site Featured Review: Gifts
Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929, the daughter of a writer and an anthropologist. She published her first novel, Rocannon's World, in 1966. Her fourth novel, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, a feat she repeated with The Dispossessed (1974). The Earthsea trilogy established her as a master of fantasy as well as science fiction. She has also published poetry and short story collections, and she received the Pilgrim Award in 1989 for ... - The Day Before the Revolution by Ursula K. Le Guin
... story by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is about one day in the life on an old revolutionary woman. I Was Dis-Possessed! When I was a young and just starting out reading science fiction I read Ursula Le Guin's book The Dispossessed and, ... - The Dispossessed, by Ursula K Le Guin « The Instant Librarian
Fortunately, in Ursula K Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed, there are no evil computers out to destroy humans on a mission to Jupiter. Instead, there's a fiercely independent physicist named Shevek, and he's about to leave his home ... - The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
I would go so far as to say that world building is Le Guin's strongest achievement in The Dispossessed; even greater than her social commentary. The level of education on Anarres, or the sexual freedom are easy to digest as no character ... - The Dispossessed
Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession. The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin. - Words to live by: advice from 34 science fiction/fantasy authors
Shevek's speech to the workers in The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin again. Words to live by: advice from 34 science fiction/fantasy authors "I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens ... - Rob's Blog o' Stuff: SF Masterworks Meme
16 – The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin 17 – The Drowned World – J. G. Ballard 18 – The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut 19 – Emphyrio – Jack Vance 20 – A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick 21 – Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon ... - In which I discover Pamela Sargent, and a bookstore you should ...
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin 18.Bellwether by Connie Willis 17.Boneshaker by Cherie Priest 16.Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin 15."Souls" by Joanna Russ 15."Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" by James Tiptree, Jr. ... - Cool. A meme. A list: SF Masterworks « It Doesn't Have To Be Right…
16 The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin 17 The Drowned World, JG Ballard 18 The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut 19 Emphyrio, Jack Vance 20 A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick 21 Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon 22 Behold the Man, Michael Moorcock ... - Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Three short ...
These books are all early works, all very short, and all set in the same universe—this is also the universe of The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, Four Ways to Forgiveness and some other stories. Even when I was younger and had ...
