Escrito em 1974 pela brilhante e premiada Ursula K. Le Guin, Os Despossuídos é uma ficção científica incomum, utópica e distópica, sobre dois planetas gêmeos separados por conflitos e desconfianças, e um homem que arriscará tudo para reuni-los.
Urras é um mundo de abundantes recursos dividido em vários estados-nação. Em meio a extremos de riqueza e pobreza, dois deles estão em guerra para estender sua influência – e seu sistema político – sobre os demais. Anarres, por sua vez, é o planeta recluso e anarquista gêmeo de Urras, cuja visão utópica de seus colonizadores acabou criando uma ilusão de sociedade perfeita. Essa ilusão só é quebrada quando Shevek, um jovem físico brilhante de Anarres, descobre a Teoria da Simultaneidade, uma ideia que pode acabar com o isolamento de seu planeta e, ao mesmo tempo, avivar as guerras do planeta vizinho.
Seguindo o estilo de Le Guin, este livro aborda questões …
Escrito em 1974 pela brilhante e premiada Ursula K. Le Guin, Os Despossuídos é uma ficção científica incomum, utópica e distópica, sobre dois planetas gêmeos separados por conflitos e desconfianças, e um homem que arriscará tudo para reuni-los.
Urras é um mundo de abundantes recursos dividido em vários estados-nação. Em meio a extremos de riqueza e pobreza, dois deles estão em guerra para estender sua influência – e seu sistema político – sobre os demais. Anarres, por sua vez, é o planeta recluso e anarquista gêmeo de Urras, cuja visão utópica de seus colonizadores acabou criando uma ilusão de sociedade perfeita. Essa ilusão só é quebrada quando Shevek, um jovem físico brilhante de Anarres, descobre a Teoria da Simultaneidade, uma ideia que pode acabar com o isolamento de seu planeta e, ao mesmo tempo, avivar as guerras do planeta vizinho.
Seguindo o estilo de Le Guin, este livro aborda questões de fundo sociológico, como liberdade, desigualdade, individual versus coletivo, e temas políticos cruciais, como anarquismo e polarizações políticas. Embora seja fruto da influência da Guerra Fria, este livro continua cativante e extremamente atual. Situado no mesmo universo ficcional de A mão esquerda da escuridão, outro clássico da autora, Os Despossuídos recebeu o prêmio Nebula em 1974 e os prêmios Hugo e Locus em 1975.
I first read this book 20 years ago in a German translation and liked it a lot, but I didn't get a lot of it. Now, reading the English original and having had more of a political education, at first I was: "Is this book as good as I remember it?", but then, I enjoyed it even more.
I love that it's not an unbroken utopia and the ending leaves some things open. I also liked how it shows how power-laden relationships and positions can inadvertently creep back into a society that's not supposed to have them.
I read The Dispossessed when I was way too young to "get it" and I honestly remembered very little except for the scene at the beginning where Shevek lands on Urras and the guard getting hit in the head and killed by a rock. I'm glad I decided to pick it up this time around - at the end of last week, students were asking me about some positive/utopian sci-fi that wasn't all about battles and/or white dudes, and this one immediately came to mind.
I've been thinking about the relationship of individual to larger collective/org and how that relates to work for a while as I've been trying to navigate some personnel matters that come down to trying to get staff to stop thinking about their individual fulfillment/sense of purpose and start thinking about the collective fulfillment/purpose of the library+college. MPOW is also going through an organizational restructuring right …
I read The Dispossessed when I was way too young to "get it" and I honestly remembered very little except for the scene at the beginning where Shevek lands on Urras and the guard getting hit in the head and killed by a rock. I'm glad I decided to pick it up this time around - at the end of last week, students were asking me about some positive/utopian sci-fi that wasn't all about battles and/or white dudes, and this one immediately came to mind.
I've been thinking about the relationship of individual to larger collective/org and how that relates to work for a while as I've been trying to navigate some personnel matters that come down to trying to get staff to stop thinking about their individual fulfillment/sense of purpose and start thinking about the collective fulfillment/purpose of the library+college. MPOW is also going through an organizational restructuring right now, and it's been a wild ride to see where the past is copied and pasted on the present even as we hear about an orientation to the future. The discourse about work, time, and perception in this book were weirdly calming and relevant to this ongoing stuff (similar to The Seep and its meditations on change).
Anyway, many smarter people have had smarter things to say about this book than I do. It's interesting to think about Anarres as a possible partial model for what life might look like in a society as automated as the technosolutionists tell us we're going to have. Not that THEY care, but maybe someone else can, lol.
A lovely exploration of a utopia that Le Guin managed to make seem both appealing and plausible without shrinking from the sacrifices that it entailed.
At times the weird temporal structure of the book confused me, though it does make sense given the principal character's work. And there are moments when the utopians' political talk starts to feel like author lecturing reader - though really only moments, this isn't one of those books that bludgeons you with its rhetoric. It is one of those that I've spent as long thinking about after finishing as I had spent reading it, because there's more substance and subtletly to its politics and sociological observation than you might expect after I've thrown the "utopia" label at it.
