Over the last few weeks I’ve posted about some of my Christmas – New Year viewing and reading. Obviously the holiday’s been over for some time now, but it’s still appropriate to talk about Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (first published in 1974) in that context, because I picked it up in a secondhand bookshop in Picton, while waiting to cross from the South Island to the North on the Cook Strait ferry.

A fact that resonated when I began reading, because The Dispossessed is a tale of two worlds, Anarres and Urras, that lie in close proximity (Anarres is, in fact, the moon of Urras) and whose people were originally one. Now, by choice and treaty, dealings between the two are restricted to a closely controlled trade, all of which is limited to one spaceport. In terms of a setting, it’s as if NZ’s North and South Islands decided to limit all their dealings to a trade that could only occur in Picton, and where the traders and sailors from the North Island could never go beyond the port limits.

The reasons for this division in The Dispossessed is political, with the people of Anarres having departed persecution in Urras to establish a libertarian-anarchist society on its moon, with the basis of the agreement being that they would never return. For those who associate libertarianism with the thought and writings of Ayn Rand, I note that the society of Anarres is modeled more closely on the ideas of William Godwin and Prince Kropotkin’s famous treatise, Mutual Aid.

The Dispossessed is centered on the character of Shevek, an Anarres’ physicist whose work on the Principle of Simultaneity offers the potential to revolutionize interstellar communication and travel. It is written in alternating sections. Those in Anarres chart the course of Shevek’s life, leading to his revolutionary decision to self-exile to Urras in order to develop his work more fully. The second storyline is set in Urras, following that fateful decision.

The Dispossessed is a character study, exploring the personality and thought and influences that shape Shevek and his work. It is also an exploration of social and political difference, including how those differences shape and are shaped by misogyny, sexism, and sexual mores. The book also establishes two distinct worlds within Ursula Le Guin’s larger interstellar civilization, a loose affiliation of worlds that will become known as the Ekumen. In addition, the narrative explores the scientific thought underpinning the Principle of Simultaneity.

In other words, The Dispossessed works at several different narrative levels and in my view represents Ursula Le Guin at the height of her powers, as does her equally famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness. The latter has been one of my favourite books for a long time, but The Dispossessed has now joined it on the favourites’ shelf.

The edition I bought was published as part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series, a title that is apposite to the work, imho. I also note that The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed both won the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for Best Novel, deservedly in my view, as both are outstanding works of fiction.

The edition I acquired in the Picton secondhand bookshop was a paperback, 336 pages, brought out in 1999.