This book was repeatedly mentioned in Scott Branson’s Practical Anarchism, so I’ve wanted to read it for a while. It took me three tries, but I finally followed through and just finished the audiobook.

It is a fascinating book for the way that it dares to imagine a way that society might be different than what we know now. Wikipedia says that the original subtitle was “An Ambiguous Utopia,” and that tracks with what I read, in that the book isn’t blindly naïve about the anarchist society that it lifts up. There are still bad people acting in bad faith, there is poverty and famine, and one of the themes of the book is about the risk of getting entrenched in old ways of thinking, even if those “old ways” are the ones portrayed as being better than “other ways.” (As an aside, the protagonist of the book is also imperfect, most notably in an act of sexual assault that he’s more or less absolved of by the narration, which is the part of the book that least sits right with me).

As an act of imagination, I really appreciate what LeGuin does here, even if I don’t feel totally invested in the broader universe she’s contributing to, and even if 1970s science fiction feels creaky for someone used to more modern stuff. I’m glad I read this, and I may want to come back to it.

• The Dispossessed
• Ursula K. LeGuin
• Practical Anarchism
• anarchism
• Scott Branson