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When I was in college I met a guy in a bar who called himself a pacifist anarchist, and I remember thinking it was a great word for idiot at the time. This is keeping in mind Proudhon’s wonderfully common sense idea of anarchy as a natural progression, from rule over the many by the few, to an individual ruling himself. His argument ran thusly: historically we start with a monarchy, a tribe ruled by one leader. This isn’t satisfactory, so then we end up with governments with a Parliament to balance the power. This is still unsatisfactory, so we turn to representational democracies. This is still unsatisfactory, and will continue to be so until each person is completely free and rules only himself. Still, I have no faith this kind of thing would result in any kind of maintainable pacifism.
Ursula LeGuin, however, manages to create an impossibility: a pacific anarchist society. The Dispossessed is a Utopia book, one that asks not if a Utopia is possible but how. It doesn’t paint fanciful pictures, or talk about ideals while it ignores the way people behave, and it understands that even Utopias have their discontents. Despite its common sense, despite the fact that her unglamorous, hard-won Utopia has such a little spot in the world she created, Ursula LeGuin leaves us, by the end of the novel, with hope—but not for a utopia, exactly. It’s more a hope that something will work, that people will find a way to work together despite their different desires.
Anarres is the location for LeGuin’s Utopia. It is the moon of Urras, settled by people who left Earth in order to pursue the society envisioned by Odo (this world’s Marx—no relation to Deep Space Nine). For 150 years, the society has survived. Whether or not it lives up to Odo’s expectations is a bulk of what the novel deals with, and in doing so, very effectively shows the limitations of the kind of the-many-over-the-few thinking liberal communists often have: individualism becomes distasteful: in art, in society, and particularly for our protagonist, Shevek, in science.
You may have been wondering where the science fiction was going to come in. Shevek is a gifted temporal physicist who has hit the ceiling of what his society has to offer. He quickly surpasses his teachers; he’s allowed very limited communication with the much more advanced physicists on Urras. He is a genius, a prodigy, born into a society that has no use for his gift. When the story begins, Shevek is going to Urras. The story of his trip there, and the story of how he came to go there, is the whole of the novel.
Shevek is, LeGuin assures us, a true anarchist and Odonian. He loves his society and deeply respects the ethics upon which it is founded. He spends his development wrestling internally with the coexistence of his ethics and his gift, and by the end of the novel he has a solution for them, if not for his society. He keenly feels his duty to his community, and understands their needs; he is a moral man. Despite this, it is difficult to get work done in the society in which he lives. It is hard for a person with a singular hobby in his society; one is constantly being reassigned to different work posts in order to prevent power from slowly accruing. Also, vision in one’s field is viewed as egotistic—deviating from the norm is actively discouraged. Urras is held up as everything that can go wrong with a civilization. Despite his moral repugnance of it, Shevek can only really complete his work on Urras. That is not the entire reason for his going.
Compared to the nuanced portrayal of Annaresti society, the capitalistic, legalistic, warfaring world of Urras often seems drawn in broad strokes, satirical without being humorous. It isn’t as thought-provoking, and provides little illumination in what drives those at the upper echelons of such a society.
What is very interesting is how the two different fields of temporal physics serve as a corollary to the two different kinds of society: on the one hand there is sequentialism—the idea that time progresses, that one moment gives way to a successive moment (Shevek thinks of Zeno’s paradox early in the book, you know, the one about the arrow never reaching its target because its always only halfway to halfway to halfway there). On the other hand is simultaneity—time is a book whose pages are already written, with clearly implied determinism. As Shevek puts it: “You are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has already hit the tree, and if you are a Sequentialist it never can.” Similarly, you have on the one hand, people like Vea, who wish to be free, and who don’t care about hurting anyone. And you have the people of Anneristi, who have developed their social conscience to act as their laws, to the detriment of individual thought.
Just as Shevek wants to find a way for his ethics and his gift to be true, a world in which the best of Urras and Annares to exist, he wants to find a mathematical formula that makes both theories two. His success leads to the invention of, poetically, a communication device, the ansil. Reminding us that the key to the world Shevek dreams of is just this: open communication between different individuals and societies.
I have a total hard-on for hard sci-fi. What is hard sci-fi? In my mind, what science fiction is supposed to be, science fiction that’s heavy on science and whose science is heavy on fact. Witness my love for Larry Niven. Pretty much the only and entire reason I love him is for his science. His plots are potboilers, his characters are cartoonish, and his anthropological speculation is downright childish (in the future people will have sex all the time! With everyone! And people in low-gravity places will be tall and greatly resemble Tolkien elves!), but the scientific puzzles he wraps his stories around are totally enjoyable.
Greg Bear is playing on a whole different level. Science is integral to his plots, same as Niven, and hot damn is it good science. Eon is based around the discovery of a meteor that seems to come from the future—not ours, but that of a parallel universe which is almost exactly like ours, except that in the meteor’s corresponding parallel past, no meteor appeared. Got it? Whatever, I’m moving on. If this isn’t interesting enough, the meteor contains several man-made rooms, one of which is infinite (ok, in the process of infinite expansion, if you want to be specific). Yeah. And was constructed using the tension between the parallel universes. At this point, if you’re like me, you’ve abandoned this recommendation and headed to the bookstore to buy Eon. The only thing I’ll say on the hard science front is he doesn’t get very involved with the details of this interesting stuff, not the way that Neal Stephenson does. I dig this about Neal Stephenson, but it sometimes makes his plots a bit unwieldy and unaesthetic. Greg Bear is aware that he has a story to tell. And the story is just perfectly constructed. You almost never get a plot like this in sci-fi, where events are spurred on by complex situations and which are consistently unpredictable, the way they are in real life. And as a bonus the token super-genius of the story is a Latina chick, who is, let’s just say, a very cool customer.
This being said, I found the future anthropology a bit meh. The only science fiction writer I can think of off the top of my head that does really interesting anthropology is China Mieville. Perhaps the dearth of compelling anthropology or sociology in sci-fi because of its soft scientific nature. I mean, Asimov couldn’t even handle sociology qua sociology, and had to turn it into a hard science in order to put it into his stories at all. So in Bear’s book we get this whole closed-down emotion, information-addicted society who are able to resurrect themselves into new bodies that don’t poo or cry. Which is a little bit we’ve-been-here-before and which isn’t nearly as interesting as an infinitely expanding room inside a meteor constructed from the tension between parallel universes. Although you’ve got to give the man credit for creating a group of post-apocalyptic neo-Luddites who call themselves Naderites, after Ralph, which, heh.
Also I find it a bit puzzling how he handles the Russians, excuse me, Red Soviets. While one of the most interesting people in the book, Minsky, is a Russian, he only becomes so when he rejects his culture, and every other Russian is an overpolitical intellectualphobe prone to Khmer-Rouge by way of Keystone Cops-style purges. I’m guessing he’s not a super-big fan of communism? I mean, me neither, but it was drawn in kinda broad strokes.
The characters, while not cartoonish, are solid but not fantastically compelling. The ostensible protagonist, Patricia, is given an ill-defined family and lover (they get about five pages of facetime; the meteor’s rooms have more personality than all three of these guys together) to try to save from doom, which is what drives her every action. But the drive, due to the lack of characterization on her part and (particularly) on the part of her people, is pretty empty. And we don’t lose anyone when the Earth blows itself up—all the characters are on the meteor by then, and makes the catastrophe feel pretty empty—although Battlestar Galactica didn’t lose any main characters in its apocalypse either and managed to make the loss of their world(s) a lot more palpable (actually, I think a lot of Battlestar writers must have read this book, because Hoffman is such a Roslin).
Anyway, those quibbles don’t really matter, because the plot is a fucking monster and we are just captive princesses along for the ride here. But it’s the sense of scientific vision that really captivates you—that humans are capable of creating impossible things and making themselves better, of freeing themselves into better worlds. Despite the presence of a realistic cynicism in human nature, the book ultimately redeems your hope for it in a way that isn’t fashionable anymore.
So I read this book when I’m living in Cambodia, and I’m like, wow, I wonder where Geoff Ryman got all this stuff from. This village is so similar to a lot of things here—the omnipresence of seamstresses and tailors, the bad teeth, people of different ethnic and religious origins living in the same village—they even use riel as currency. The only thing not Cambodian is there’s some Russian cultural stuff thrown in, and they’re in a country called Karzistan, which is so close to Kazakstan I thought it was actually set in the real country of Kazakhstan. And then I realized that Ryman’s other books and novels, are often set in Cambodia. So this village is basically a village in Cambodia, only Ryman is calling it Kizuldah. Which—OK, you know, I’ve got to quibble. I know it’s sci-fi and fake communities abound. But why make up Kizuldah when you could have just, you know, set it in goddamn Cambodia? Like Takeo or Ratanigiri or something?
