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The Dispossessed is an anarchist novel from 1974. It's very strange. I don't like it overall, but I have a lot to say about it.
First, I'll explain the premise: there's a seemingly utopian anarchist planet called Anarres, and a statist planet called Urras. Anarres was settled by anarchists from Urras, as a sort of "we'll give you your own planet so you can stop disrupting our law and order here" bargain with the government, and in the 160-ish years since then they've had little to no contact with each other besides a bit of trade.
The book follows an anarchist physicist who immigrates to the statist society for reasons, and it alternates between chapters following him on Urras and chapters following his life on Anarres, from early childhood to the time he decided to leave.
The proper nouns confused me a bit, as there seem to be many different ones for related things. The anarchist planet is Anarres, and its inhabitants are Anarresti, but the language is Pravic. The philosophy they live by is Odonianism (named after the thinker who sparked their movement). The anarchists are sometimes called Odonians. The statist planet is Urras, but the main country that's shown is A-Io, and its language is Iotic. Its people are sometimes called Ioti. What's the "A-" prefix? It's not just called Io, but everything around it is named like it is?
In the case of Iotic, it makes sense that it's not named after the planet because there are other countries on Urras, even if they don't play a large role in the story. But in the case of Pravic, it's only spoken on Anarres, and it was explicitly invented by the settlers of Anarres for use in their new society, so it should be named after them.
Also, the species of people that inhabit Urras and Anarres is called Cetians (named after their star). (They are not humans, but are similar.)
The Anarresti also use a unit of time called a decad, which took me a long time to figure out how long it is. At first I thought it was a misspelling or old spelling of decade, but it's actually 10 days.
Anarres adheres completely to the gender binary, which was disappointing to me after the last several books I read showing societies with more gender freedom. Just like our current world, everyone is assigned a binary gender at birth based on their genitals, and no one thinks of deviating from it. On the bright side, their work isn't divided based on it, but there do seem to be a ton of misogynists on Anarres, especially in the childhood chapters with passages like:
"Women think they own you. No woman can really be an Odonian. ... What a man wants is freedom. What a woman wants is property. She'll only let you go if she can trade you for something else. All women are propertarians. ... It's the kids. Having babies. Makes 'em propertarians."
That character gets only mild pushback for such horrible words.
They had come up to the hilltop for masculine company. The presence of females was oppressive to them all. It seemed to them that lately the world was full of girls. Everywhere they looked, waking, or asleep, they saw girls. They had all tried copulating with girls; some of them in despair had also tried not copulating with girls. It made no difference. The girls were there.
In that one, "they" includes the protagonist.
To be fair, the characters in the above scenes might be children. I'm not sure how old they are. There's something a few paragraphs back that suggests they might be 11, but later in the same chapter I think they're 18? And there's no explicit time break...
There's also a scene later in that chapter where the protagonist sexually harasses a girl.
It's especially strange that there's so much misogyny on Anarres (even if never from adults), since one of the key differences between Anarres and Urras is that on Anarres women are equal to men, whereas on Urras they are subordinate and not allowed to hold positions of power.
The Anarresti also seem to be obsessed with sex, and to have a strange relationship with homosexuality. Early it's mentioned that "Like all children of Anarres he had sexual experience freely with both boys and girls" but after this, homosexuality seems to stop existing. Every adult on Anarres is either single or in a heterosexual, monogamous relationship.
I'd also like to highlight the word "children" in that quote; it's not clear how old they are when they start having sex, but since they might be 11, I'm uncomfortable with it. I'm also uncomfortable with the word "all". There can't be no one on the planet who isn't interested in sex, let alone as a kid.
Oh yeah, speaking of how the anarchists don't get to choose their gender or lack thereof, they also don't get to choose their names. Their names are randomly generated by a computer, which made me laugh aloud to find out. Imagine a society full of anarchists stressing their individual freedom and not one person refuses their randomly generated name!
Their names don't indicate their gender, which leads to a funny scene where an Urrasti scientist is expessing his views on how women can't do science and then finds out an Anarresti scientist he respects is a woman.
The Anarresti are full of fear and hatred towards Urras and everything on it. They don't want communication, they don't want to (or don't think they can) spread anarchism, and hate the protagonist for exchanging papers with Urrasti physicists to make scientific progress. In the beginning when the protagonist is leaving Anarres, some people come to try to stop him, they throw rocks at him and in the process kill someone who was standing next to him. No one bats an eye. There are no consequences for this murder. Bizarre.
Over time it's shown that Anarres is less practically anarchist than it seems. They have an organization, the Production and Distribution Coordination, which at first seems a bottom-up system of coordination, but actually holds absolute control over what communication is allowed to be sent to and received from Urras, and they absolutely abuse their power, sometimes refusing to let the protagonist send his scientific papers to Urras. This is the only one of the flaws in the anarchist society that's actually portrayed as a flaw. People even physically assault the protagonist for wanting to send papers, and even harass his wife and kids who are uninvolved.
A large part of the protagonist's time on Urras (to which he was invited as an honored guest, being a famous scientist) is spent stressing over the fact that the world run on greed seems to be quite prosperous, as he's only exposed to rich society, he thinks for chapter after chapter about trying to find some poor people and see how they live, but never does. His lack of action was boring and unadmirable to watch. Eventually it's sort of a coincidence that he gets a contact in a resistence movement on Urras.
One of the things that's just strange and bewildering about this novel is the way it narrates events, often in summary. There'll be a paragraph summarizing months of his life, and then a scene in real-time detail, and then another paragraph summarizing months. Often after reading a summary I think "wow, those events could've made a good chapter all on their own".
The book is very rambly in general. I feel like you could remove 80% of scenes and keep the plot intact. I don't feel like the extra bulk is used well to add depth to the characters, either. So many characters are only used a few times.
Characters are mentioned by name without ever explaining who they are. 5 or 7 lines of dialogue in a row with no attributions, and I lose track of who's speaking. Often there's even 2 lines in a row from the same speaker, broken for who knows why! Sometimes I just gave up trying to follow a conversation and skipped it.
Often the narration refers to characters with situational descriptions, like "the younger man", instead of by their names. This is really pointless and confusing. At one point there's a long conversation at the start of a chapter (which is completely disconnected from the end of the previous chapter on the same planet) between "the bus driver" and "the passenger", I at first thought the passenger was the protagonist, but it goes on for pages and pages without ever referring to him by name so I started to think it was someone else, I got so bored of the maybe-irrelevant rambling I started skipping pages, but then I think it actually was the protagonist? Whatever.
There's a scene where the protagonist rapes somebody. The book isn't trying to say that it's okay (he was drunk), but it's still extremely gross. To me raping anyone puts a character past being acceptable as a protagonist, in fact I'd prefer not to read about rape at all, but having a character do it and then ask me to still root for him is really, really gross.
And what makes this even crazier to me - along with all the misogyny on Anarres - is that the author is a woman. I'd expect that a woman would be less likely to write about a man raping a woman and then still treat him as a hero, or to put so much misogyny in a society that's supposed to represent her ideology, even if imperfectly.
There's another aspect that makes me feel like the book was written for the sexual gratification of men, which is that on Urras in several scenes it's said that women have their breasts bare and the protagonist enjoys looking at them. Men are never sexualized.
The book ends after the protagonist has sparked a resistance movement in A-Io which led to a large protest that was massacred by police. We never find out the aftermath. The only other thing he accomplished while on Urras was finishing his grand physics theory that could unlock faster-than-light travel and sending it to all inhabited planets, but we don't find out the aftermath of that either. The protagonist escapes and goes back to Anarres, and the book ends before he lands, despite it being a huge suspenseful question what's going to happen to him, as he's viewed as a traitor for leaving and fears a violent reception.
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