commander said. He was a short, iron-colored Terran, cool and businesslike. “If you’re ready to go, we’ll start launch procedure.”
“Yes.”
The commander nodded and left. Ketho came forward to stand beside Sehevek at the port.
“You’re sure you want to walk through this wall with me, Ketho? You know, for me, it’s easy. Whatever happens, I am coming home. But you are leaving home. “True journey is return. . . .’ ”
“I hope to return,” Ketho said in his quiet voice. “In time.”
“When are we to enter the landing craft?”
“In about twenty minutes.”
“I’m ready. I have nothing to pack.” Shevek laughed, a laugh of clear, unmixed happiness. The other man looked at him gravely, as if he was not sure what happiness was, and yet recognized or perhaps remembered it from afar. He stood beside Shevek as if there was something he wanted to ask him. But he did not ask it.
“It will be early morning at Anarres Port,” he said at last, and took his leave, to get his things and meet Shevek at the launch port.
Alone, Shevek turned back to the observation port, and saw the blinding curve of sunrise over the Temae, just coming into sight.
“I will lie down to sleep on Anarres tonight,” he thought. “I will lie down beside Takver. I wish I’d brought the picture, the baby sheep, to give Pilun.”
But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been.
*Papa. A small child may call any adult mamme or tadde. Gimar’s tadde may have been her father, an uncle, or an unrelated adult who showed her parental or grandparental responsibility and affection. She may have called several people tadde or mamme, but the word has a more specific use than ammar (brother/sister), which may be used to anybody.
e-book extras:
A Study Guide to The Dispossessed
By Paul Brians
Introduction
After World War I, the writing of utopian fiction gradually declined, until the genre almost disappeared in mid-century, to be replaced by dystopias (descriptions of ultimately evil places) like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). However, in the mid-seventies there was a spate of new utopias written by Americans inspired by the upsurge of social reform begun in the late sixties and continuing into the new decade. The most famous examples are Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, Samuel R. Delany’s Triton, and this novel, though there are many other examples.
What differentiated these new utopias was their attempt to evade the traditional criticisms of the old utopias like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: that they were static, boring, and unattainable. After all, utopias are not required, by definition, to be perfect. There seemed no reason to believe that all of humanity’s problems could be solved through improved social organization; but it seemed possible that some of them might be.
It is important to understand that one of the main functions of utopias, since Plato and Thomas More, has been to function as a critique of existing society, providing a kind of benchmark against which the flaws of real cultures can be more clearly revealed. Their proposals for reform have not always been seriously meant.
The original paperback edition of The Dispossessed bore on its cover this description: “The magnificent epic of an ambiguous utopia!” This description struck so many readers as apt that An Ambiguous Utopia became thought of as a subtitle for the work, and in recent printings it has even been adopted as the official subtitle. Le Guin has said she was attempting to work out how an anarchist society would function in reality. She was particularly inspired by the work of American pacifist/anarchist/reformer Paul Goodman.
Anarchism, which grew out of French social philosophy of the eighteenth century, posits that many of humanity’s problems come from living under governments. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had begun The Social Contract by writing “Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains.” One solution to this paradoxical situation was to inaugurate representative democracies; but the anarchists found even this solution too confining, for they argued that all governments, whatever their official form, quickly become plutocracies (societies governed by the rich). Many socialists and communists argued that the path to reform lay through collective ownership of the means of production to ensure that there would be no rich. The transition to full economic democracy would be managed by a centralized, all-powerful government. Anarchists argued that such centralization could never lead to the hoped-for decentralized egalitarian society: centralization leads only to more centralization, they claimed. If people want freedom, they must claim it directly.
Anarchists differ a good deal