Book Review: Fifty years later, Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel about a utopian anarchist is as important as ever.

A little more than half way the deprivedUrsula K. Le Guin’s inexhaustibly rich and wise science fiction novel about a physicist caught in the middle of society, the protagonist Shevek, born and raised in an anarchist community, is forced to live with the ostentation of capitalist society. I got drunk (for the first time) at a night party. On a planet that isn’t your own. There, this brilliant but bewildered scientist is cornered by a plutocrat who asks him cheeky questions. What is the point of Shevek’s effort to create a general theory of time that reconciles “aspects or processes of time”?

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Shevek explains that time in our perception is like an arrow, moving in only one direction. But in the universe and atoms, it goes in circles, cycles, repeating an “infinite repetition”, that is, a “non-temporal process”.

“But what good is this kind of ‘understanding’ if it does not lead to practical technical applications?” asks the rich man.

The tensions between theory and reality, scientists and society that Le Guin explores here have not diminished in the 50 years since. the deprived It won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Nebula Award. The science in this 1974 novel (now republished with a celebratory and poignant foreword by literary writer Karen Joy Fowler) is vague, physics explored through metaphor. But Le Guin’s portrayal of a scientist caught between contradictory and wholly convincing worlds remains thrilling, even frightening, in its precision.

On the collectivist planet Anarres, a famine-ravaged desert region, Shevek’s quest for a general theory of time is thwarted by scientific bureaucrats who fear that his discoveries will prove counter-revolutionary. After planning a diplomatic escape to lush Urras with the deep pockets of a capitalist, Shebek learns that his work is considered an appropriation, a commodity. This perspective changes him. Shevek realized that he was behaving like a patriarchal “propetarian” in Uras. Drunk and lonely, this gentle man uses language without possessive pronouns and seizes women as if they were his own. It is an act that later disgusts him and leads him in a revolutionary direction that will affect every world reached by humanity.

Le Guin, who passed away in 2018, leaves it up to readers to decide what to make of this change. Although the arrow of time has moved forward rapidly since 1974, the cycles and cycles of Le Guin’s masterpiece continue to suggest both the present and the future, with their urgent humanity.