Dispossessed
by Ursula Le Guin
List Price: $13.95
Pages: 400
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 006051275X
Publisher: Perennial
A multiple award-winning author, editor, and anthologist, Ursula K. LeGuin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California -- the daughter of writer Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber. She went to Radcliffe College, did graduate work at Columbia University and attained a 1953 Fulbright Fellowship. Le Guin married historian Charles A. Le Guin and has three children and three grandchildren. She has lived in Portland, Oregon since 1958.
Throughout her illustrious literary career -- 19 novels, short stories in nine collections, two volumes of translation, 13 books for children, three collections of essays, and numerous honorary degrees, teaching posts, and awards -- Le Guin has held to the highest standards in her writing, taking risks that would bring great rewards and praise from her contemporaries.
Having received countless awards -- a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award to name a few -- Le Guin has also had three of her books become finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Le Guin's first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, propelled her instantly to the forefront of her field. Since then, she has used the context of her work to delve into such issues as gender roles, morality, and the individual's ordinary grief. Working in so many forms -- from poetry and prose to screenplays and voice text for recordings -- Le Guin has transformed the genre in which she works countless times over. An intensely private figure like many of her characters, Le continues to create her fantastical worlds for all ages.
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Q: In The Dispossessed, you portray the aliens as kind beings compassionate to the novel's hero. Why is it important to you that they receive help from the aliens? Do you think the first aliens we meet will be benevolent?
ULG: Do I think the first aliens we meet will be benevolent? No. Honestly, I don't think we're going to meet any aliens, nice or nasty, first or last -- not any time soon. Space travel and other world beings are wonderful ideas, very useful to story tellers; you can say things about us and our world by talking about other beings and other worlds -- imaginary ones -- that you couldn't say any other way. But it has nothing to do with predicting an imminent possibility, and nothing to do with belief. You know, I write about dragons, too, for the same reason, but I don't think dragons exist outside the human mind ... The imagination is our most useful tool, and it's most useful when it isn't taken literally!
So, the aliens being imaginary, being part of a made-up story, they are what the story needs, what fits into the story best.
Q: Did you make a timeline of events before you began writing The Dispossessed? How do you keep track of the numerous causes and effects throughout the novel? Did you write it linearly at first and then shift the time around?
ULG: I did a lot of work on The Dispossessed before I began to write it -- reading the pacifist anarchist writers, figuring out how the anarchist society of Anarres might work and what the history of both planets was, and learning a whole lot I didn't know about the study of time, both by philosophers and by physicists. So coming to the story with all that fairly heavy baggage, I had to plan out to some extent where it would all go ... which meant having a fairly clear idea of the shape and movement of the book (I am uncomfortable with the word plot, I don't think most of my stories have plots.)
So I started off with the first chapter where Shevek is a baby trying to own the sunlight, and wrote happily on, expecting not to get to Urras till half way through the book ... Surprise! Chapters about going to Urras, what happened on Urras, kept insisting on crowding in and getting written. I usually write perfectly linearly, a to b to c ... but here came k, and q, and w, all saying, "Write me! write me!" So I argued with myself in my notebook. Wouldn't it be very artsy and self-conscious to write the book in this zigzag fashion -- alternating the two time periods, two different worlds -- Who do you think you are? William Faulkner? Huh? But the book was right: it had to be written that way. And I wrote it that way. Then the final surprise came from my friend Darko Suvin, who read it in manuscript, and said, "But this has twelve chapters and it has closure, it is (at least apparently) all nicely tied up in a package at the end. This is all wrong for a book about anarchism!" Of course he was right, which is why the book has thirteen chapters, and at the end everything is up in the air -- it could go any number of ways -- no doors of possibility are shut. That is, of course, essential to the nature of this story and its subject. The doors stay open!
For more information, visit www.ursulakleguin.com.
Excerpted from Dispossessed © Copyright 2009 by Ursula Le Guin. Reprinted with permission by Perennial. All rights reserved.
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