Author Ursula K. Le Guin has left us, and we’re now all Dispossessed

Enlarge / Ursula Le Guin at home in Portland, Oregon, December 15, 2005. (credit: Dan Tuffs/Getty Images)

Before Donald Trump ever uttered a word about building a wall, author Ursula K. Le Guin, who passed away on Tuesday, wrote of a world that had built one-a wall that divided two ideologies:

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

-from The Dispossessed

I read Le Guin's The Dispossessedwhen I was 16. While the author's six-part Earthsea book series had a lasting effect on me as well-it influenced, among other things, my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns-The Dispossessed came at a time when I was starting to become more aware of how science fiction could be political and social allegory as much as great space adventure. Newly displaced from the city I had spent most of my life in and settling into a new town, I spent the months before my senior year of high school at the library and used book stores. I largely spent my nights holed up reading books my parents assumed were light summer reading: Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, Asimov's Foundation books, and various forms of Vonnegut. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, a book I would read later, further demonstrates how completely Le Guin synthesized earth-bound philosophical questions with interplanetary travels.

The Dispossessed held a mirror up to American capitalism and culture in the form of the planet Urras and contrasted it with the anarchist-syndicalist "utopia" of the Odo on Urras' moon, Anarres. Of all the books I read in my youth, that one stirred the greatest amount of internal debate. I was politically aware before, in the way teenagers who go to model Congresses and stage mock presidential debates are politically aware. But the "extremes" of The Dispossessed were a direct assault on what I had been taught about the way the world works, while at the same time foreshadowing language I would hear from all political sides later in life.

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