The story of a man from a functional anarchy which isn't all that functional, who discovers the theory behind one of the key technologies in the Hainish or Ekumen universe - the ansible, a device that can instantly transfer information but not matter over any distance.
The technology is a McGuffin, as the story revolves around his adventures traveling from his small, anarchist moon, to the large militarist planet it circles, all as a part of getting the theory he has discovered propagated. As with all of the Hainish cycle, this novel plays with social forms and people's place in society.
This is deceiving, see below.
Well written. I actually prefer it to the more well-known TheLeftHandOfDarkness. -- JamesBullock
Prose is good.
Characterization is excellent.
Plot is good. It suffers from a deception about what the plot is. Readers get the impression that it's about Shevek's trip to Urras, the capitalist planet, but it isn't. Nothing of any significance occurs on Urras even though half the book takes place there. On the contrary, everything of any significance occurs in the past, on Anarres, and in space, on the voyage back to Anarres. The Urras thread exists solely to familiarize readers with an anarchist point of view. It does that job extremely well, marking UrsulaKLeGuin as a great author.
It is common for authors to create independent threads, which they proceed to interleave in chronological order. UrsulaKLeGuin is beyond such a beginner's mistake. She eschews chronological order (alternating past and present), eschews independent threads (there is no plot in the Urras thread), and interleaves them due to necessity only.
Ideas in TheDispossessed are good. The book deals with issues of social organization, freedom, power, revolution, anarchy vs. socialism, idealism. However, the author has a poor grasp of many concepts essential to anarchism, both in theory and especially in practice.
For instance, the issue of anarchist education is not dealt with in anything like the detail of power and freedom. Additionally, le Guin's conception of anarchist schooling is at odds with its practice in Free Schools, a century-old institution.
Other essential concepts which are grossly distorted in the book include such basics as: sharing (she defines sharing as depriving oneself for others' good), cooperation (Shevek is told to become "the best"), property (confuses it with possession), egalitarianism (the weak and the strong are forced to do just as much, regardless of subjective hardship), community, and even freedom.
One also becomes annoyed at le Guin's psychology. Nowadays, there exists a consensus among psychologists that a strong ego is somewhere between a Good Thing and absolutely necessary to mental health. In addition, anarchists have always distinguished themselves from run of the mill communists by their valuation of individual freedom. It seems perverse to have a so-called anarchist society where individuality is suppressed through psychological mind-games.
One suspects that Anarres isn't a functional anarchy because UrsulaKLeGuin doesn't have the knowledge necessary to conceive of one.
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