mooncake (ACP 🎉🍰)One of the things I love about The Dispossessed is that LeGuin doesn’t pretend that once anarchist society is established it’s all roses and freedom and happiness because she jumps right into all the contradictions of living in a society conceived of as a revolution and keeps on interrogating that. It’s great! Even the bits at the end that are heartbreaking but also familiar because, yeah, we’ve all dealt with that even in the spokescouncil model blah blah blah bleep bloop
Yeah it was great for that. Also challenging lots of preconceptions. In many places my first reaction was ‘hmm not sure I like the sound of that..’ Like the dormitories, the absent parenting, the kids just being assigned a name. And then over time I’d start thinking ‘wait, exactly why don’t I like that idea?’ Like is there objectively something wrong with it or just because of the particular cultural hegemony I’ve grown up in.
Which contradictions were you thinking of?