Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
The Dispossessed annoyed me. From where I sit, LeGuin's principal weakness is an inability to understand and therefore do convincing portrayals of villains. Her society on Annares was too carefully set up. The utopian communal ideal was a nice one, but she set it in a marginal environment where there was just about enough to go around. It simply wasn't possible to be significantly better off than your neighbor in material terms. It would have vanished like a moth in a flame in a more abundant environment.
And the society of Urras, the system's other habitable planet, felt like the main inspiration was the sort of thing depicted in old copies of The Masses, with top hatted capitalist owners oppressing slave workers in the name of profit. When Shevek's servant throws off his careful mantle of obsequious silence and begs Shevek to "help free them from the masters", I nearly tossed the book across the room in disgust. It simply didn't work for me, and I couldn't believe it. (And back when I first read _The Dispossessed, I was far more left wing in my beliefs than I am now, and far more likely to swallow such a notion.)
I felt LeGuin was stacking the deck and visibly pulling strings to make a particular point, and the book suffered because of it. It's more annoying to see that when it's someone like LeGuin than it is with lesser writers, simply because LeGuin is so good, and I expect better.
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Dennis
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Very well put, Dennis. I had some similar thoughts about how perfectly marginal Annares was - it made her Libertarian society there conveniently plausible. I didn't throw the book. But it's interesting that I've totally forgotten how it ended. My favorite of hers is
The Lathe of Heaven which definitely impacted me more than
The Dispossessed.