ORP: Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed"

I first read Ursula's book, The Dispossessed, back in the mid to late 1970's. On the surface the story is about a physicist who discovers the Grand Unified Field Theory linking gravity, electromagnetism, and weak & strong nuclear force into one comprehensive theory. This scientist comes from a planet settled by a utopianist group and travels to the main planet that this planet orbits to visit other scientists etc. One does expect there to be some socio-political ideas explored in this book, but I was surprised at how philosophical and deep the novel gets right from the beginning of the story. The planet the scientist is from has as it's governmental form an Anarcho-syndicalist construct. Anarchism, in its theoretical form, is a very close cousin to Libertarianism and now that I am reading this novel to my son, Sam, I am re-reading the story for myself and I am finding the concepts in this novel resonating with my views on a number of topics.

Here is a great summary of this novel from another blogger.

Here is how the story opens (emphasis mine):

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...

Thus begins the novel. Perhaps all the concepts in the book are obvious to some, but I think that everyone should read the story as a springboard for meaningful discussion about the many ideas represented in the novel.

Novo Visum,
Neue Ansicht.