I feel confident in saying that Le Guin is among only a small handful of authors who have had the creative fortitude required to tell hard sci-fi stories as layered and nuanced as that written in The Dispossessed.

Here we find an intriguing and brilliant physicist from a world and societal structure so alien to our own. And yet, despite a worldview that is at times jarring, Shevak is a character that is all at once uniquely and familiarly human. On the verge of a significantly impactful breakthrough, he decides to travel from his isolated, anarchistic, communal, and desolately barren moon and visit the incomparably resource rich capitalist society on the homeworld his ancestors fled generations ago.

Le Guin delicately picks a side and a perspective, a move I admire, but she does not shy away from positing fundamental limitations on the various societal factions and the influences particular worldviews may have on their inhabitants. Urras, the rich home world, reads as a distorted version of Earth, perhaps facing much of our all-too-familiar and evergreen evils such as greed, resource inequality, and subjugation, that comes with living on a planet of plenty. And yet the initially framed utopia of a government-less, decentralized reality, Anarres — one only likely to exist in such resource constrained environments that force collaboration as critical to group survival — quickly becomes exposed to realities that stress the core tenets of their existence and communal resiliency.

I cannot say enough about the skill of Le Guin's writing in bringing complex characters and ideas to life with such thought-provoking vigor. Her prose is beautiful. Her dialogue feels real. She is a master of speculative science fiction and for fans of everything from Camus' The Stranger to Chixin Liu's Three Body Problem, there will be something here for everyone. Those who enjoy it most will be readers who are seeking the hallowed ground of where these two concepts meet; philosophy of the many, the self, and personal meaning set within a quest for understanding just where one literally sits within the expanse of our nearby universe.

4.5 out of 5