Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace.
I started by reading a whole mess of utopias… — Ursula K. Le Guin
1.
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, compiled by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, is styled as kind of tourist’s guide to outlandish literary worlds. It comes in at over 2000 entries and 700 pages: a mock scholarly reference work, a tribute to the deep human urge to dream up other worlds (and draw maps of them).
Paging through, you might recognise names from childhood: Middle-Earth, Earthsea and Narnia. There is Oz, Brigadoon, Kôr, Lilliput and Brobdingnag, the Island of the Roc. Some of the more extensive imaginary worlds, like Tolkien’s, are broken down into sub-entries – Minas Tirith, Cirith Ungol, Pelennor Fields – syllables that are strange but comfortingly familiar to me, names bringing back the paradise of childhood reading.
Then there are worlds encountered later in life: Gabriel García Marquez’s jungle village Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its plagues of insomnia and amnesia and butterflies. The Pacific island of Gondal, dreamed up by the Brontë sisters. Many islands of course: Thomas More’s Utopia and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon are there; so are Lotus-Eaters Island and Caliban’s Island (see Prospero’s Island).
The Dictionary was first published in 1980, and since then has been revised to include newly invented places: Isla Nublar off Costa Rica, home to Jurassic Park, as the lumbering stegosauruses of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World receive an update with Spielberg’s bird-like velociraptors. Hogwarts has appeared in the 1999 edition, but Westeros will have to wait for a future update.
‘We agreed that our approach would have to be carefully balanced between the practical and the fantastic’, Manguel writes in the foreword:
We would take for granted that fiction was fact, and treat the chosen texts as seriously as one treats the reports of an explorer or chronicler, using only the information provided in the original source, with no ‘inventions’ on our part. (ix)
The straight-faced approach suits the literary genre of utopia. Thomas More’s 1516 tract, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon – like many others these are styled as literary hoaxes, insisting on the placeness of the non-place. Both contain detailed maps of a place that is hinting at its own impossibility (More even invents a utopian alphabet). They impersonate travelogues to locations as far away as possible from their first readers – the New World, New Zealand for Butler – as visions of utopia march in tandem with colonial history. Brave new worlds for some mean dispossession and enslavement for others (for Prospero’s Island – see Caliban’s Island).
With the circumnavigation of the globe, the antipodes become a likely space for imaginary worlds. The furthest point on the planet from where you are standing (in my case Princeville, Hawaii) is also a kind of secret twin. The antipodean is an opposite that is also a double, capturing something of how utopias work as distorting mirrors of their creator’s home society. They are spaces of transfigured norms, worlds structured by inversions, reversals, topsy-turviness, corrections and extrapolations of the actual (in Utopia, gold is used to pave streets; in Erewhon, illness is a crime and crime is an illness). Utopian travelogues posit alternate worlds that ask to be read against our own; but at the same time they could also be our own, metaphorically speaking: slightly tweaked, estranged or disguised versions of the present that make us see it anew, giving a vantage point beyond realism. This is why the utopian impulse to unsettle what is taken to be normal becomes so important in science fiction, famously defined by Darko Suvin as ‘the literature of cognitive estrangement’.
As more and more of the earth’s surface is mapped by Enlightenment modernity, speculative worlds are displaced into the planet’s hollow core (Jules Verne), the deep ocean (also Verne) or the African interior (H. Rider Haggard). Then into the past or future with time machines, shifted into alternate streams of history or relocated to other planets – all strategies used by bestselling 19th-century Utopianists like H. G. Wells, Edward Bellamy and William Morris. But these more otherworldly locales are not included in the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, since as the project developed, the list threatened to become endless:
Given the vast scope of the imaginary universe, we had, for practical purposes, to establish certain limits. We began by deliberately restricting ourselves to places that a traveller could expect to visit, leaving out heavens and hells and places of the future, and including only those on our own planet. (x)
Places that a traveller could expect to visit? For Narnia you go through a wardrobe, but how does one get to Middle-Earth or Earthsea? Then again, you know what they mean: both realms are somehow earthy, earthly (and contain the word after all).
Tolkien’s map is an allegorically tweaked version of the northern hemisphere, or Europe. The hobbits, from their Little England of The Shire, stride out to foil the designs of Fascists (or Bolsheviks, Communists, China?) further east.
Le Guin’s Earthsea is a world full of islands with wonderful names: Gont, Roke, Lorbanery, Jessage and The Hands. The topography is unusual but not impossible, given the archipelagos of the real world, whether in the Mediterranean, Caribbean or Pacific. Earthsea’s islands have a habit, David Mitchell writes, ‘of morphing into islands in each reader’s memory: the Hebrides, the Cyclades, the islands of the Seto Inland Sea, or Hawaii’. Le Guin herself recalled the Farallons off San Francisco, foggy rocks sometimes dimly visible way out in the grey sea:
When I was a child they were my image of the loneliest place, the farthest west you could go. And they have such a beautiful name. Los farallones means cliffs, crags; a lovely word, and in English it gathers echoes – far away and all alone…
(The Wave in the Mind, 24).
2.
Earthsea is well represented in the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, but because of the rules set out by Manguel (strictly non-extraterrestrial), Le Guin’s other, science fictional universe, the world of the Ekumen, does not appear. As Margaret Atwood remarks, the remarkable thing about this writer is that she conjured not one but two world-altering imaginative realms – one of fantasy and one science fictional – and did this in parallel.
The science fiction begins as follows, from the prologue to Rocannon’s World (which appeared in 1966 with a gloriously bad cover):
How can you tell the legend from the fact on these worlds that lie so many years away? – planets without names, called by their people simply The World, planets without history, where the past is the matter of myth, and a returning explorer find his own doings of a few years back have become the gestures of a god. Unreason darkens that gap of time bridged by our lightspeed ships, and in the darkness uncertainty and disproportion grow like weeds.
In trying to tell the story of a man, an ordinary League scientist, who went to such a nameless half-known world not many years ago, one feels like an archaeologist amid millennial ruins… (Hainish Novels and Stories vol. 1, 3)
Over many novels and short stories to follow, Le Guin elaborates this concept. There is an organisation – the League of All Worlds, later the Ekumen – that sends its scientists and observers to different planets, seeking to understand the various paths that civilisations and social organisation have taken. The word Ekumen evokes the ancient Greek oikoumene, meaning ‘the inhabited world’ (Medieval mappa mundi cartographers understood this as comprising the three continents of Europe, Africa and Asia). The word stem is from oikos – household, family, hearth – which also provides the root for words like economy and ecology.
Like a benign United Nations of space, the Ekumen is on a diplomatic mission to bring different humanoid societies into the League, linked by a simultaneous communication device called an ansible. The peoples on all these various worlds (we gradually learn) all descend from a civilisation called Hain. The Hainish were ancient interstellar colonists who ‘seeded’ various planets with human populations, setting up the premise for Le Guin’s grand series of thought experiments. What is the nature of human nature, given different environmental parameters, different social arrangements, and even different trajectories of genetic modification and organic evolution?
In her 1968 masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness, she imagines the icy world of Gethen (Winter), where inhabitants are mostly androgynous and ambisexual – there is no gender in the human sense. Once a month, in a kind of biological oestrus or sexual heat called kemmer, Gethenians briefly become either ‘male’ or ‘female’ and go to orgiastic, perfectly normal kemmer houses – but there is no way of knowing which way they will swing, so they occupy both roles many times in the course of a life. Trying to navigate all this is Genly Ai, an envoy from the Ekumen – or a Mobile as they are called: diplomat-observer-scientists who operate under very strict guidelines about how to interact with host planets, but are often drawn into political intrigues and danger.
In 1974’s The Dispossessed (subtitled ‘An Ambiguous Utopia’), Le Guin imagines into being the new world of Anarres – anarchist, feminist, egalitarian but arid and ecologically poor – that is locked into the orbit of the old world Urras: profit-driven, hierarchical, unequal, but lush and beautiful. 160 years before the novel opens, Anarres has been settled by idealistic revolutionaries and exiles from Urras. Now one of the Anarresti, a brilliant physicist named Shevek, wants to visit Urras in order to further his scientific research into the Principle of Simultaneity, and to re-establish contact between the two worlds. Shevek’s work will result in the ansible, the communication device that provides a technological underpinning for the Ekumen. And so even though The Dispossessed is the fifth Hainish novel that Le Guin published, it gives us the backstory to the cycle: in terms of internal, imaginative chronology, we are right near the beginning of her universe.
The book embodies (according to a roster of the 100 greatest science fiction novels), ‘the most thoroughgoing utopian vision in modern SF’. It is that unlikely thing: a halfway plausible, likeable example of a better world (‘one of world literature’s few utopias’, writes Mitchell, ‘built from the real “crooked timber” of humanity’). Though as the subtitle suggests, its utopian vision is by no means simple, stable or easily pinned down. Shevek’s journey (opposed by many on his home planet) is an inversion of the normal utopian travelogue: he is travelling not to utopia but from it, not towards the new world but towards the old. His voyage sets in motion a range of thought experiments that reach into all aspects of human life – family, sex, work, class, leisure, gender, education, food, shopping – as the norms of each world in this binary system keep estranging those of the other.
3.
I read The Dispossessed for the first time during the COVID pandemic, and several times since. It brought solace and became a guiding, almost talismanic work in thinking about other worlds of possibility, whether real or imagined. If George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is the 20th-century dystopia that continues to exert the strongest gravitational force in world literature, then Le Guin’s novel could be seen as its lesser-known utopian counterpart: two powerful speculative fictions orbiting each other in imaginative space.
With its Nearly as Fast as Light ships, Le Guin’s League of All Worlds might prefigure the warp speed Federation of Star Trek – but it is somehow less obviously Western or American. The NAFAL ships tend to have names like Mindful rather than Enterprise; and Le Guin’s protagonists, if you read closely, tend not to be Caucasian: they are brown, copper-coloured or (like Genly) dark-skinned. Her universe is shaped by a more global set of influences, especially Taoism and Buddhism, as well as the Native American societies written about by her father (an anthropologist) and mother (historian).
The extra-terrestrial thought experiments, in other words, are intimately related to earthly stories of dispossession and colonisation; but also (the more utopian dimension) to the cultural shockwave released by the European voyages of discovery and extended in time by the 19th-century disciplines of archaeology and anthropology: that things have not always been as they are (and could be otherwise again). ‘I’m interested in anthropology because I’m interested in human possibilities’, the anarchist thinker David Graeber once remarked, ‘and in a way, there’s always been an affinity between anthropology and anarchism, simply because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible. There’s been plenty of them.’
This is the challenge that Le Guin sets herself in The Dispossessed: to write an anarchist utopia. To imagine a better world but one without state control or centralised authority (though much of the plot turns on whether this kind of control is subtly reinstating itself on Anarres). Le Guin is, like Orwell, a profoundly anti-authoritarian writer, allergic to dogma, doctrine or any kind of party line. Reflecting on what led her to write the book, she remembers her involvement in protests against the Vietnam War, and then what came after:
But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak.
So, when I realised that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be. (Introduction, Hainish Novels and Stories, Vol. 1)
‘A whole mess of utopias’: a nicely counter-intuitive phrase. Not the rationalist blueprint of perfection (with totaliarian undertones) that has dominated the genre from Plato’s Republic to More’s island and Marx’s classless society. But rather an overlapping, plural, anarchic series of utopian imaginings: an untidy collection of thought experiments in what makes life worth living, and one that does not disavow the messiness of human relationships and psychology. Le Guin’s ambiguous utopianism admits the awkwardness, emotional clutter and novelistic detail of what happens when idealism takes shape in the story of actual lives, amid the multi-variables of finely drawn social worlds.
The hard-headed believability of places like Anarres, Urras and Gethen is the marvel of these books, though part of it emerges from Le Guin’s understated and controlled language. An ambisexual kemmer house is barely worth going into in The Left Hand of Darkness, which often reads more like a tightly plotted political thriller (Le Guin as Le Carré) and employs the ancient narrative method of relating the most outlandish things as if they were entirely normal (which, for the inhabitants of Gethen, they are). In these novels, the SF apparatus is generally unobtrusive and technology is not fetishized – throughout her career Le Guin was dismissive of the kind of masculinist science fiction where ‘gleaming spaceships’ hurtle out across the galaxy, ‘ships capable of blasting other, inimical ships into smithereens with their apocalyptic, holocaustic ray guns’ (Language of the Night, 88).
Though it took a while to find her more restrained and confident, cerebral voice. As the overblown prologue of Rocannon’s World suggests, in the early work the fantasy and science fictional strands are still tangled together. The result can be a little silly, or (like Star Wars) a bit kitsch: a pastiche of space age and bronze age, futuristic visions and furry creatures, dwarves and starlords. There was ‘a lot of promiscuous mixing going on’, Le Guin admits, looking back and putting it down to ‘beginner’s rashness’ and ‘the glorious freedom of ignorance’. But ‘red is red and blue is blue’, she came to realise, ‘and if you want either red or blue, don’t mix them’ (The Language of the Night, 112).
As the SF cycle develops in parallel with the Earthsea books, Le Guin slowly disentangles the two impulses: ‘Along in 1967-8 I finally got my pure fantasy vein separated off from my science fiction vein, by writing A Wizard of Earthsea and then Left Hand of Darkness, and the separation marked a very large advance in both skill and content’ (Language of the Night, 23). Ambisexual, ambidexterous: from here on she writes both right and left-handedly. The fantasy books become more self-contained and truer to their inner laws; the SF works become more austere, psychological, plausible (no more elves or invisibility cloaks), reaching maximum ambition and conceptual scope in the ambiguous utopia of The Dispossessed.
You can track Le Guin’s gradual absorption from genre fiction into the literary canon via her book covers. From the 1970s the jackets become less lurid and pulpy, more abstract and thoughtful – until eventually all the Hainish Novels and Stories are collected in a two-volume box set from Library of Congress, with a picture of her on each book. On volume one she is youngish and elfin, wearing loafers curled up under her on the chair, an androgynous SF blouse/trousers combo (with a more fantasy-like pendant) and holding (always likely to surprise you) a pipe. On volume two she is the elderly, legendary Le Guin, swathed in a medicine blanket: the Arch-Mage of Portlandia, who (a few years before she died) became a meme for remarks she made in a 2014 National Book awards speech:
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
The haircut remains the same across both book covers however: a pudding bowl bob which in its own way seemed to be making a steely, career-long statement about gender and science fiction.
In her introduction to the Library of Congress edition, Le Guin is not so sure about the ‘Hainish’ label. It implies a coherent fictional universe with a well-planned history, or methodical cosmos-creation with plans and timelines early on in the process:
I failed to do this. Any timeline for the books of the Hainish descent would resemble the web of a spider on LSD. Some stories connect, others contradict. Irresponsible as a tourist, I wandered around in my universe forgetting what I’d said about it last time, and then trying to conceal discrepancies with implausibilities, or with silence. If, as some think, God is no longer speaking, maybe it’s because he looked at what he’d made and found himself unable to believe it.
(Hainish Novels and Stories, Vol. 1, xi)
That said, Le Guin sometimes scolded writers too lax with what she saw as the strict demands and codes of the science fiction canon. In the 1977 essay ‘Do-It-Yourself Cosmology’, she inclines in the other, more stringent direction with regard to world-building and universe-creation:
As soon as you, the writer, have said ‘The green sun had already set, but the red one was hanging like a bloated salami above the mountains,’ you had better have a pretty fair idea in your head concerning the type and size of green suns and red suns – especially green ones, which are not the commonest sort – and the arguments concerning the existence of planets in a binary system, and the probable effects of a double primary on orbits, tides, seasons, and biological rhythms; and then of course the mass of your planet and the nature of its atmosphere will tell you a good deal about the height and shape of those mountains; and so on, and on. (103-4)
If you’re bored by the labour of figuring all this out, she continues, then you shouldn’t be writing science fiction: ‘A great part of the pleasure of the genre, for both writer and reader, lies in the solidity and precision, the logical elegance, of fantasy stimulated by and extrapolated from scientific fact’ (104).
Given that none of Le Guin’s science fictional worlds made it into the The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, I tried writing an entry for Anarres elsewhere, creating a page for this anarchist planet on one of the great utopian projects of our time: Wikipedia.