The Dispossessed

A physicist from Anarres — an anarchist moon with no property, no money and no law, only custom and shame — travels to the wealthy, propertarian planet it seceded from, and the two systems are set against each other chapter by chapter. Le Guin’s own subtitle, An Ambiguous Utopia, is the whole argument: Anarres works, and it also calcifies, because a society organised around refusing coercion still finds informal ways to coerce. It won the Hugo and the Nebula, the second time she took both for one book.

Context: On the a16z Infra Reading List under Le Guin. The reason it earns a place on an engineering reading list is that it is a serious study of how a group allocates scarce work and scarce resources without a central authority — the social version of a problem distributed systems people spend their careers on.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Ursula K. Le Guin — the author.
• The Left Hand of Darkness — the other Hainish novel the list names.
• Utopia — the wiki’s utopia thread; this book is the deliberate ambiguous case.
• Scarcity — Anarres is a poor world, and the plot turns on what a drought does to a society with no market.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.
• a16z — the firm whose infra team curates the list.