The Dispossessed: Politics and Ecology

[unspeakablehorror]

A little over halfway through the novel now. So one thing you get to see in the Dispossessed is people both living in and arguing for different political and economic systems. Which despite the didacticism, is still a nice change of pace from most science fiction, which usually keeps such concerns secondary or else in line with government propaganda.  This can be unintentional at times, but regardless of the intention, it tends to promote uncritical acceptance of our unimaginably violent status quo. The Dispossessed doesn't do this. It might seem strange that I consider the didacticism a negative quality given my interest in the political and economic themes--however I disagree that such ideas need to be presented in a dry or didactic way. I think if one wants to primarily teach, nonfiction is a much better medium for that. I feel stories are better at spurring us to ask better questions than they are at giving us answers to those questions.
 

Anyway, the protagonist is an anarcho-communist, but when he travels offworld to Urras he travels to a capitalist country, and he also meets a guy from a communist country. There are also many flashbacks to the protagonist's anarcho-communist upbringing on his home planet Anarres. I wonder if we'll see the communist country at all. So far the protagonist, Shevek, has travelled to the capitalist country on Urras but didn't accept the offer to visit the communist one.  In any event, Shevek has many conversations about politics with other characters, but we also see how the different political factions affect worldbuilding and characterization.

I think the biology of Anarres is interesting. Shevek's partner Takver is essentially a marine biologist, and one of my favorite scenes in the story is where her work is discussed because it also adds to the scifi aspect. Due to the difficulties of maintaining the Anarres ecology, no land vertebrates exist on the planet (which is actually a moon of Urras).  We learn that the settlers of Anarres only brought very limited plant and animal life and due to worries about sustaining the ecology on arid Anarres. And so the only vertebrates on Anarres besides humans are fish. They also don't have insects, only worms--they have neither fleas nor bees (or any other pollinators), so all crops are hand-pollinated. This has more of a hard sci-fi feel to it for me because it better reflects the difficulties and limitations of building an ecology they can live within essentially from scratch. So I get the impression that in terms of wildlife, the fish are the most extravagant example on Anarres. 

Becky Chambers did a much more basic version of this kind of scifi ecology worldbuilding in Record of a Spaceborn Few, but somehow the humans on the generation ships still feel like they live more extravagant lives than the ones on the moon of Anarres. Certainly they seem to be able to easily make bean flour desserts whereas dessert is mentioned as being relatively rare on Anarres. I don't recall if Chambers ever discusses what they used to sweeten the desserts on her generation ships.  Not to mention that the lifestyles of the Chamber's Martians are implausibly extravagant. I don't care how rich her Martians are, money does not change the laws of entropy and so Elon Musk the 7th would not be having prime rib steak in a Mars dome city, lol. 

In fact the Mickey7 series by Edward Ashton is one of the only scifi stories besides the Dispossessed I've read where I didn't feel the author was just blatantly handwaving the ecology question. In fact one of the only things that I thought was a bit unrealistic in the first book, the fact they raised a limited number of rabbits for meat which was distributed to high performing workers, was explained in the second novel to actually reduce the total calories available and was done purely for morale reasons. The ecology limitations make sense in the Mickey7 novel since several years of the story is in a sublight spaceship and the rest is on Niflheim. And the humans can't eat anything on Niflheim and are thus entirely dependent on their own crops (which don't grow well in the harsh environment). So feeding those crops to rabbits which they then eat is going to inevitably lose them calories. Sweet potatoes are also frequently mentioned as an important food, which makes sense because: they're chock full of vitamins, naturally sweet, relatively filling, and the entire plant is edible. The only thing that mars the otherwise highly plausible hard scifi aspect of the Mickey7 series ecology is their implausibly perfect recycler, which is capable of taking all biological substances and producing an edible paste that can be subsisted on (of which the only disadvantage is not being tasty). In this respect The Dispossessed feels more realistic since its ecological worldbuilding doesn't involve such handwavy tech.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is one of my favorite aspects of The Dispossessed. I love when the hard scifi aspect of scifi is applied to ecology too and not just the tech. It's the intersection of the chaos of biology and the implacable physics of entropy. I love when scifi authors acknowledge entropy.

Oh, and also I really appreciate the more socio-political and economic side of this LeGuin story, which is hard to find in scifi. One of the reasons I've tried to branch out from reading fantasy and scifi almost exclusively like I used to is that I feel other genres of fiction may have a little more political spread than those genres. Though maybe not as much as people like to believe, which is not a compliment of scifi but rather a critique of the literary establishment and how stories are produced in general.