Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed is a very hard book to write about. It's clearly great literature, but exactly why is hard to pin down.

The Dispossessed centers on the story of Shevek, a physicist and idealist, but the true characters of this book are the twinned planets of Urras and Anarres. Urras is a world much like own our, of nations and government and money, a garden planet riven by dominance and war. Anarres is a dry and dusty moon, home to an exile civilization of revolutionary anarchists. The story takes place in alternating chapters, an Urras track beginning with Shevek's escape from Anarres to Urras, and an Anarres track following his life and growing dissatisfaction with his homeworld.

This is a book about revolutionary anarchism, about the radical potential for humans to be truly free. But what separates it from most utopian literature is Le Guin's reflexive critique of Anarres. Most utopian literature is about a plan; "if you designed a society like, this is how it'd be perfect." Le Guin shows us a society that is freer and more egalitarian than any that exists on Earth, backed up by a rational language that makes even thoughts of ownership and dominance difficult to express, but she is also wise enough to show how the revolution has become conservative and fearful, how social norms replace law, how the dominance games of politicians and academics still play out in the absence of formal power, and how true freedom must begin and end in the spirit.

The Urras plot concerns Shevek's final work on a Theory of Simultaneity and Sequency (the caps are deserved), a unified theory of physics which would make faster-than-light travel possible, along with the ansible communicator from the rest of Le Guin's Hainish cycle. Fictional physics on this level aren't really my cup of tea, but the book takes a solid run at how cosmology, and how we perceive time, matters as a fundamental basis for society and ideas like property and profit. Shevek's idealism won't let him give his invention to either the grubbing 'invisible parliament' of his own world, which opposes new ideas, or the profiteering and warmongering Urrasian academics who host his stay. There's a war and a great strike, but somehow the action on Urras seems unreal and irrelevant, compared to the dust and hard work of Anarres.

Stepping back to look at the big picture, The Dispossessed covers a lot of the same territory as Left Hand of Darkness, with a lone ambassador coming to another world, but I think The Dispossessed does a better job by giving us some context for Shevek, and his principled opposition to walls and barriers of all kind, especially walls that exist in the head and heart. Le Guin's talk of Simultaneity and Sequency is also about the question "can two people really meet?" and "how do we know when become ourselves?"

This was also a solid year for the Hugos as a whole. The Mote in God's Eye could've easily won in any of the past five years or so. Flow My Tears The Policeman Said is one of my favorite Philip K Dick stories. I haven't heard of Fire Time or Inverted World, but both sound fascinating.