All throughout the rest of the book it feels like she fairly breaks down the strengths and weaknesses of both societies while also delving into them and providing insights about their workings that I have never heard before. While Le Guin definitely favors one world over another, she only reveals which near the end, and colors it as her opinion more than a fact. I myself fell into the first group, and cannot recommend this work of art more. However, for the first aforementioned book club group, it was an intense and one of a kind reading experience. It feels more like reading a philosophical dissertation/history book on the cold war than a fictional story. Its heavy use of metaphor and minimal concern for captivating plot means it is not really a fun book. This is not a beach read and requires a lot of work, or active reading, to be done by the reader as they go through the story. Let’s talk about the second group first the book is dense and requires work.

People essentially fell into two groups, those who devoured it and could not stop talking about it and those who could not finish the first chapter. The Dispossessed had a feast or famine effect on our book club. Both timelines alternate chapters and chronicles his experience with both societies. Shevek’s past timeline chronicles his time on Anarres and his present timeline follows his story on Urras. Shevek grows up on Anarres and finds the communist mentality stifling, so he decides to break a 100 year cold war/embargo and go to Urras to pursue his science. The second, a communist moon called Anarres that is Russia. The first planet is Urras, a capitalist planet with multiple states that is an allegory for the US. Shevek lives in a solar system with two inhabited planets, each refusing to communicate with one another. The story follows a brilliant physicist called Shevek during two parts of his life simultaneously, past and present. After winning its way onto the schedule, and having to wait an entire year to read it with the group, I got to read one of the best examples in my memory that some science fiction can be considered Literature.įirst, a quick rundown of what the book is for those who don’t know, its basically a huge metaphor for the US and Russia during the cold war.

The praise I found for this classic science fiction novel was astounding, and it rapidly became one of my front runners in our convoluted voting system for book club books.

When the book was originally suggested for the roster, I had no idea what it was, but I had heard only the best things about Ursula K. In October my book club wrapped up its final month of our 2016 schedule with The Dispossessed, by Ursula K.

The dispossessed book