Ursula K Le Guin - The Dispossessed

My notes on the anarchist moon colony Anarres in The Dispossessed:

Anarres was once an uninhabited moon of the planet Urras. Urras is similar to our Earth, with a flourishing biome, lots of plants and animals, and populated by capitalist humanity. 

If Urras is the land of plenty then Anarres is... the opposite. The only plants that can be grown here are holum trees (source of most of the Anarresti diet). No land animals. There are seas and fish in them, however.

The first batch of humans settled on Anarres about 7 generations before the book (some 150 years). They were revolutionaries from Urras and followers of their anarchist leader Odo. Odo, however, never lived to see her anarchist utopia come to fruition - she died on Urras.

Anarresti insults/scoldings: "Don't egoize!", "You propertarian!", "What a body profiteer." 

An Odonian saying: "Excess is excrement."

The Anarresti diet is largely holum-based. Derivatives such as fried bread, fried cakes, and pickles exist.

No one on Anarres has a "job". Each person does what they are naturally drawn towards - and these usually happily coincide with useful things such as childcare or cooking or weaving. You can also go to DivLab (division of labor office) for postings which tend to be temporary. 

To assert, by his talent, the rights of any citizen in any society: the right to work, to be maintained while working, and to share the product with all who wanted it.

There is no week (with its Judeo-Christian/pagan god-worship connotations) in the Anarresti calendar. Instead they track days by decads, blocks of 10 days.

Every 10th day the Anarresti take a break from their usual work to do "dirty" but necessary jobs together (e.g. cleaning). Friends sometimes ask for the same 10th day posting to work together.

Anarresti do not own property or money. Living quarters, typically dorm-style, are obtained by registering with the department of housing. Couples can request double rooms. Food is served at the "commons" and extra helpings, while not denied, are frowned upon.

Anarresti who don't work or contribute to society are call "nuchnibs". "They make fun of him, or they get rough with him, beat him up; in a small community they might agree to take his name off the meals listing, so he has to cook and eat all by himself; that is humiliating. So he moves on, and stays in another place for a while, and then maybe moves on again."

Names for the Anarresti are computer-generated at childbirth.

Odo's writing on work:

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for Joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well — this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

-

(Bookish aside: have you seen the art for the Folio Society edition of this book? It's beautiful...)

-

So... the story is about an Anarresti theoretical physicist, Shevek. Who by the way, was modelled on J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Shevek has come up with a Theory of Simultaneity - which has far-reaching consequences in Ursula K Le Guin's Hainish universe - it leads to the invention of the ansible, a device for instant communication between worlds. Of course he doesn't know it yet. And his people, the Anarresti, don't have a use for it. Him. (Anarres is sealed off from Urras.)

Shevek decides to go to Urras to give his work to the public. Little did he know that the Urrasti would try to claim ownership of his work and try to extract profit from it.

As with The Left Hand of Darkness, much of the book is politicking. Or rather a non-political type realising how deep he is in politics. But most of the time, it's Shevek confronting the immense differences between anarchists and capitalists.

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him.

And like Left Hand, The Dispossessed is another slow-burning Le Guin book. The first 40% of the book was a little slow, left me cold, but all of a sudden I found myself absorbed in the world - even dreaming and thinking about it, days after finishing the book. 

You can read The Dispossessed for free on the Anarchist Library.