The Dispossessed (SF) - Ursula le Guin ****

I ought to hate this book. I was writing something about instantaneous transmitters and wanted to include Ursula Le Guin's ansible. I had read somewhere that its development and how it worked was explained in this book. It turns out it gets two mentions, each all of two lines long in 319 pages. But I don't care - because it's a great book.

I confess, I've never really read Le Guin apart from a not particularly enthusiastic attempt at The Left Hand of Darkness. The science fiction I largely read when I was younger was from the 1950s greats and the 1960s new wave, and while I read their later work too, and have started picking up on some newer writers, there's a big gap in my experience, including pretty well everything Le Guin wrote.

The book does have some science going on - the main character is a physicist developing a theory on time (hence the ansible cropping up), which seems mainly to be based on the block universe - but it's not really what the novel is about. It's far more an exploration of political systems. Our hero, Shevek, lives on the desolate Anarres, where humans can live, but are always fighting for survival. But he begins to find out more about and even to correspond with the twin planet Urras, which is lush and beautiful, eventually breaking with tradition and visiting it.

The drama comes from the juxtaposition of very different political systems. The main country on Urras is decadent capitalist, though the planet also has a Soviet-style communist country. Anarres is anarchist communist - not only is there genuinely no personal property, there are no laws, no rules.

Cleverly, in making the contrast between Anarres and Urras, Le Guin brings out the faults in both systems. It might seem at first that, despite the hardships, the anarchist Anarres is a paradise, because Le Guin manages to come up with a structure that would allow anarchy to work practically as a regime - no mean feat - but in reality humanity likes rules, and they are actually there, concealed and unspoken, until Shevek begins to break them.

It's absolutely not my kind of science fiction, and yet I found it both fascinating and enjoyable. I just wish I also now knew more about ansibles.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Search This Blog