I reietti dell'altro pianeta

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Paperback, 340 pages

Italian language

Published Aug. 16, 2014 by Mondadori.

ISBN:: 978-88-04-64249-7

(34 reviews)

"C'era un muro... Come ogni altro muro, anch'esso era ambiguo, bifronte. Quel che stava al suo interno e quel che stava al suo esterno dipendevano dal lato da cui lo si osservava." Sui dei fronti del muro, due pianeti gemelli, Urras e Anarres, illuminati da uno stesso sole ma divisi da una barriera ideologica antica di secoli. Urras è fittamente popolato, tecnologicamente avanzato, ricco, florido, retto da un'economia liberista. Da qui sono partiti nella notte dei tempi i seguaci di Odo che hanno colonizzato l'arido Anarres, fondandovi una comunità anarchico-collettivista che non conosce concetti come proprietà, governo, autorità. In questa società apparentemente perfetta nasce Shevek, genio della fisica alle prese con un'innovativa teoria del tempo, un vero "cittadino del cosmo" che dedicherà la vita ad abbattere il muro che separa da sempre i pianeti gemelli. Un'ambigua utopia, come recita il sottotitolo originale del romanzo, "I reietti dell'altro pianeta" è una …

55 editions

callan reviewed The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

the ambiguous utopia

5 stars

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.

moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Review of 'The Dispossessed' on 'LibraryThing'

5 stars

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.