The Dispossessed.

I answered questions from our fantasy baseball staff for a new Insider post today.

I’ve been an avid reader for most of my life, but often became burned out on reading when I was younger because I wanted to read something different from what was being forced on me in school. The drudgery of assigned reading in junior high school and my first two years of high school left me reading very little for pleasure, something exacerbated by a gift of a Commodore 64 around that same time that found me absorbed in games rather than pages. It was my chance discovery of a science fiction book that got me back on the reading track when I was 15, a spine that jumped off the shelf first because of the author’s name, Isaac Asimov*, and then because of the description of the book, which hooked me right away.

* I was familiar with Asimov’s name for a number of reasons, from the sci-fi rag that bore his name to the long out-of-print Realm of Algebra, which I used one weekend in sixth grade to learn the subject, because my school was switching me to a different math class. Any other famous sci-fi author’s name wouldn’t have had the same effect on me in the bookstore.

I wasn’t aware at the time that the book, Foundation, was an important work in the history of science fiction, or part of a long series. I saw what sounded like a cool story and bought the book, which prompted a stretch of reading for pleasure that ran right through college, through the entire Foundation series, then other Asimov titles, then the Dune series (pro tip: stop after book one), Lord of the Rings, the entire works of Kurt Vonnegut to that point, and even a dozen or so novels by Philip K. Dick, along with a handful of one-off works in the sci-fi and even fantasy genres.

There came a point in my early 20s, however, when that paroxysm of reading slowed to a near-halt. I gave up on fiction, for reasons I don’t even remember, and was only reading a book a month, if that. And when I gave up on fiction, I gave up on science fiction more or less for good. It wasn’t a conscious choice, nothing driven by disdain for the genre, but perhaps an association of science fiction with my own childhood that made me switch to more traditional, mainstream literature. There were exceptions, including the book that provoked my second wind as a reader, the first Harry Potter novel; I read that on a business trip to California in the fall of 2000 and have read over 600 novels since then because J.K. Rowling managed to reawaken in me the love of a great story, the desire to get lost in a dazzling plot with descriptions so vivid that I could be consumed by the words. (To this day, the only time I’ve ever had a dream that put me in a book was one where I was just a regular student at Hogwarts, witnessing the story as a classmate rather than a reader.) But even Rowling’s work didn’t push me to read more fantasy novels; I shifted to the classics, many of which appear to have been influences on the Harry Potter novels, and left science fiction almost completely behind me.

The closest I’ve come to sci-fi in the interim, aside from the two titles on the TIME 100 (Neuromancer and Snow Crash), are dystopian novels, those that depict an alternate society, sometimes set in the future, but nearly always incorporating some element of science into their visions of authoritarian regimes or personal struggles for identity and freedom. My interest in dystopian novels also dates back to that first fling with sci-fi in high school, when I read 1984 and Brave New World and Wells’ The Time Machine, but has never stopped even though the genre includes its fair share of solipsistic duds. (Its sister category, utopian novels, is even worse in that regard.) Reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We earlier this year made me seek out other highly-regarded titles in the catgory, which led me back into sci-fi and to The Dispossessed, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel by acclaimed sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Not only was it an excellent representative of what a good dystopian novel can accomplish, it balanced the fiction and the science beautifully, reminded me of what I once enjoyed so much about the genre.

Le Guin’s setup in The Dispossessed differs from those of all of the dystopian novels I’ve read previously. She’s set up two sibling worlds with antithetical societal structures, neither of them clearly utopian or dystopain. Shevek, the physicist and lead character, was born on Anarres, the large moon orbiting the planet Urras. Anarres was colonized by dissenters nearly 200 years before the events of the book, dissenters who called themselves “Odonians” and practice a form of true communism they refer to as “anarchy,” using the literal sense of the term (without government) than the colloquial one (chaos). Over several generations of isolation from Urras, the people of Anarres have organized into syndicates to allow for fundamental economic activities, but within those syndicates, there exist cliques and fiefdoms that stymie Shevek’s attempts to develop his science further (and his friend’s endeavors to develop his art), resembling authoritarian regimes in their denial of anything deemed subversive or unnecessary. Shevek chooses to become the first person from Anarres to visit Urras since the Odonians’ departure, hoping to expand on his research into “temporal physics” and to find the freedom the people of Anarres had lost.

Most dystopian novels focus on tyranny by a single, usually totalitarian government, but Le Guin doesn’t take sides between Anarres and the pseudodemocratic regime Shevek visits on Urras. (Urras also has a Soviet-style regime, Thu, and puppet states where the two superpowers fight proxy wars.) Anarres has a social safety net, no inequality, and a high degree of mobility. Urras has an actual government, with poverty, conspicuous consumption, disease, and waste, but offers a kind of liberty that Anarres lacks – until it becomes clear that Shevek’s ideas may challenge the government there, at which point he encounters the limits of Urrastian liberty and has to make a choice that will affect the histories of both worlds.

Le Guin succeeds so well here in crafting a philosophical treatise within a novel because she focuses more than anything else on the “fiction” part of science fiction, notably the plot. There are science aspects to the work, primarily the settings – and her imagining of an inhospitable world of Anarres is superb, to the point where you can feel the dust on the pages – and the many references to Shevek’s physics work and its importance for interstellar travel, but those details are superficial, laid on top of a very serious work about freedom, especially that of choice. What does it mean for a human being to be free? Is it intellectual freedom? Freedom from want, unless others are also wanting? Freedom from envy? Freedom to choose one’s work, one’s partner, one’s abode?How petty can one despot be and still despoil one man’s freedom?

The Dispossessed won both of the major awards for the year’s best science fiction novel, although the correlation between the Hugos and the Nebulas is so high as to render the two redundant. I did pull the list of Hugo winners and found a number of interesting titles, including the most recent winner, the comic novel Redshirts, which I’ve already picked up based just on the description. With only ten read out of 62 total winners, I imagine this will help keep me busy even as I’m winding down my sojourn through the classics.

Next up: I’ve only got about a thousand pages to go in Victor Hugo’s The Wretched (Les Misérables).