The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin is a heavily lauded book by an author held in high regard. AKA the perfect recipe for disappointment. There were lots of things that were interesting in this book, but ultimately, I had a lot of issues with it, which leaves me with this ambivalent review.

Things I liked: interesting socio-political world building, cool space stuff like desert planets and forest planets and space ships, a queer-normative society imagined in the 70s, which, bravo - that’s a risk, an anarchist-socialist society imagined fully, and a protagonist who was able to analyze the society he lived in as well as those of others.

Things I didn’t like: wooden characters and stilted dialogue, science was too science-y, way too many “thesaurus” words, too little emotional involvement with the characters, unbelievable interpersonal interactions due to the lack of character depth.

LeGuin wrote ambitious in this novel. She thought extremely creatively, but sadly, for me, I just couldn’t make an emotional connection with the humans in this book, and that is always a recipe for disappointment for me. The political ideas on this are very interesting, and if you are into science, math or physics, perhaps you will find the physics part more compelling.

⚠️CW: riots, state violence, gun violence, death, war, famine