Waste Books

Join us this month as we discuss Ursula K. Le Guin's anarchist utopian space novel, The Dispossessed! Overview With all this talk about walls, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is a timely masterpiece for science fiction. Her novel chronicles the physicist Shevek who travels from the utopian but inhospitable planet of Anarres for the earthly Urras where the landscape is verdant but capitalism and hierarchy dominate society’s mores. Rather than present a fable filled with hyperspace travel, exotic alien species, and intergalactic threats to peace, Le Guin utilizes the freedom of the genre to experiment with societal alternatives rather than provide our society with brash escapism. Shevek’s home planet of Anarres is an anarchist culture where possessive pronouns are nonexistent, play and work are indistinguishable, and nothing has a monetary value. But even this perfect world starts to reveal its limitations in the exclusionary practices of those who resist the planet’s groupthink. Shevek is seen as a thr