The DISS-possessed Is What I Would Call It If I Thought It Were Bad (But I Don't)
I’ve read a lot of thoughtful writing about Ursula K. Le Guin recently (like here ), so I figured it’s as good a time to jump into her work as any. I had read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (online here ), and picked up and enjoyed the first Earthsea book, so I went for this lovely 50th anniversary edition of The Dispossessed: If you’re unfamiliar like I was, The Dispossessed concerns the scientist Shevek leaving his anarchist commune homeworld of Anarres to become a guest lecturer at a foreign university. The world of Anarres is typically completely cut off from foreign interaction, especially with the hyper-capitalist hellscape of A-Io that martyred Annares’s Marx-like philosophical progenitor named Odo, exiled its founders and first citizens, and hosts Shevek now. He has made a discovery about the simultaneous nature of time, on par with the theory of relativity, and he is determined to share it with other worlds. A...