The Dispossessed (Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
- First Published: 1974
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Science fiction—utopia
- Time of Work: Several hundred years in the future
- Setting: Anarres and Urras, planets orbiting Tau Ceti
- Genres: Long fiction, Science fiction, Dystopian fiction, Utopian fiction
- Subjects: Politics, Revolutionaries, Gender roles, Communication, Future, Other worlds, Time, Utopias, Anarchism or anarchists, Physics or physicists, Societies
- Locales: Anarres (fictive), Urras (fictive)
The Plot
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia is one of several of Ursula Le Guin’s works chronicling the evolution of a “League of all Worlds” governed by principles superior to those of known political and colonial systems. Although The Dispossessed takes place in the League’s prehistory, the novel’s loving portrait of a working anarchist society on one world develops in detail the principles of noncoercive social organization.
The novel chronicles the life of Shevek, a physicist reared on a world settled by the followers of an anarchist...
[The entire page is 1212 words long]
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