The Dispossessed

The first hundred and some pages resisted all effort at interest. UKLG is a dry writer. I know she is beloved by many, but this is my second fiction from her (first was Left Hand of Darkness), and I'm left with the same feeling that I am interested in the story in spite of the pacing, structure, and characters.

It is bizarre to say, but Dispossessed has a little kinship with Atlas Shrugged. Rand's tome is also a thin-to-barely veiled excuse to talk about philosophy and economics. Dispossessed is certainly better than that in most measurable ways. It's shorter, much better written, and has a lot more interest in interrogating ideas and stressing them.

I mentioned in my review of Everything for Everyone(?) that I have no interest in the anarchy idea and typically find it dumb. When it comes to fiction, part of that disinterest is the idea of a post-scarcity world. It is difficult to imagine and doesn't pass any reality testing, in a way that I find difficult to suspend disbelief. Dispossessed does not take place in a post-scarcity utopia and is interested in how an anarcho-syndicalist world would navigate things like droughts and resource shortages. That's interesting!

I think UKGL's Anarres manifests a lot of my concerns with a totally stateless world. The absence of government is an illusion, and factionalism and cults of personality still spawn as a part of human nature. We see that Anarres has no actual protections for this, only protections on paper. Sabul is able to accrue power and exert outsized influence on his world by virtue of being an expert, and this results in suffering. Shame, which is the primary enforcement tool of the Anarrean norms (think on that), does not impact Sabul at all. I don't think we ever see Shame deployed against a power-holder in Anarres, only the people struggling against the power holders.

And that's the problem with a Stateless world in which shame and fear are the enforcement mechanisms. Anarres portends to be a quasi-utopia, still navigating scarcity, where individuals can do whatever they like (with the possible exception of rape of a woman or child, I don't think there's mention of rape of a man). Deviations from this are shamed, bullied, or beaten to accept therapy. We see this break at least one character after they write a play that is poorly received. This world does have laws, but they are unwritten. My suggestion is that the unwritten law is more dangerous than the written law, because it is immutable by anything but, if optimistic, time.

An unwritten law, when questioned, can be waived away easily, “there are no laws!” One of the Odonianisms is, “to create crime, create laws.” That's something that sounds deep and moving until someone is raped or beaten near-death or run from every town because they hold an idea or an association. The power-holders in this world are creating laws, but they are calling them norms and acting as if they are mutable.

To an extent, this is a deviation from what I understand to be Odo's initial setup. I don't think Odo means “write” when she says “create,” and would thus still consider these as laws. But that's all semantics, because in the reality of Anarres in the story we find it, the society has failed to resist laws and hierarchy and operates within these structures, veiled now against critique and change.

I like all of this. It is the most realistic working on these ideas that I've read in fiction. UKGL is poking these academic ideas with sticks and seeing where they break and where they hold. One of my favorite bits around this idea is when the utopia is hit with a (I think multi-year) draught, and the scarcity of it all begins to warp people.

I think UKLG's Anarres is successful within a window of scarcity: things must be scarce enough that mutual aid and sharing is required and beneficial, but not so scarce that people's survival instincts trigger. Well enough!

There is a passage around page 312 where a character talks about having the job of counting people as numbers, and making lists of who will eat and who will starve. I thought this had tremendous potential and wish we'd have seen this instead of had a character tell us they did it at one point. I want to be in that character's head while they're navigating that crisis. Nearby this passage, another character is describing actions taken during the famine - plotting of food raids, food supply lines, etc. I loved the logistical discussion and the picture of this society's resort when scarcity begins to crunch it.

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A big part of the book involves the main character trying to figure out his unifying theory and then figuring out what to do with it. The middle section of the book has a lot of interesting ideas on this — scientific research co-opted by States, control of ideas, scientific communities being quasi-Stateless in times of peace. I wonder how much of this is inspired by the atomic sciences and specifically the process of scientific research around the atomic bomb. Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb (an incredible work of non-fiction) explores these themes in our history. There was an earnest belief that ideas, if explored, would be found unusable or as a deterrent. Scientific naivety combined with the fear of the threatened State.

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In terms of the book itself, I pained myself to read the first half. It simply does not move with any swiftness and has ideas that are only vaguely interesting. There's a lot of world building that is written in the driest possible prose. It got a lot better in the second-half, which is where the book really does become an excuse to poke and prod at these ideas. The plot in the second half is basically nonsense but the idea exploration is quite good.

Speaking of the plot in the second half — where'd it go?? There is a deus ex machina the size of a civilization or two, and then the book sort of clatters to an abrupt end with nothing resolved. I'm not someone who needs everything to be resolved, but it'd be nice to be left with the impression that the author didn't leave half the manuscript on a park bench somewhere.

It feels unfinished. I think the problem with writing a book to poke and prod at philosophy is that once your poking and prodding is done, you have to figure out what your story is. I don't think the book has a good idea of its story. The alternating timeline chapters bemused me, but ultimately they add nothing at all to the story other than a false feeling of suspense. I wonder if it was written chronologically and then shuffled because, if read straight through, there really is very little of interest happening.

That said, I found it very thought-provoking and it made me turn some ideas around in my head that I've previously been dismissive of.

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One last note: my copy of this book is RIDDLED with errors. One every few chapters, it seemed, to the point where I became on high-alert for them. I think these are with the publisher, not the author. They almost feel like OCR errors; for example one error on pg 148 is ‘life' instead of ‘like,' another on pg 181 is ‘them' instead of ‘then.' These errors were really distracting and annoying.