Episode 45: The Dispossessed

Our friend and comrade Hilary Strang joins us this week to discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and we’re talking about anarcho-communism and utopia. Hilary is the director of the MA Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago and the co-host of the podcast Marooned on Mars with Matt and Hilary, about the works of Kim Stanley Robinson and leftism: https://anchor.fm/marooned-on-mars. The book is about the physicist Shevek and his encounters on the planet Urras, where he experiences egoizing on the part of “propertarians,” who are definitely bad guys because, you know, property.

We discuss the sci-fi tradition of utopian worlds, anarchism and communism, the problems of scarcity/inequality, and the structure of the family. For more on Le Guin and utopia, we recommend Darko Suvin’s “Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies” from the journal Utopian Studies.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Marooned on Mars on Twitter @podcastonmars, Tristan @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.