The Hugos: The Dispossessed

Praise be to Heinlein, it's 1975 and I'm finally halfway out of the blasted seventies!

Praise also to Ursula K. Le Guin, but not from me. Not for this book.  Her previous Hugo winner 'The Left Hand of Darkness' also got my 'meh' review, and I liked this one slightly better, but not a full star rating better.   I felt about the same level of 'not GETTING this at all'.  I gave them both two stars out of five on goodreads.

How can I like 'The Lathe of Heaven' SO much more?  5 out of 5, deeply moving, awesome sci-fi.  The Hainish Cycle (of which The Dispossessed is a part) is NO Vorkosigan Saga.  No outer space thrills here, just a sociology lecture.  

'The Dispossessed' takes place around the year 2300 on the planets of Urras and Anarc-who-cares and feature diatribes about culture clashes of incompatible political and economic systems, what it means to own or not to own, and the faint wish of hope for a utopia that can never be... 

BAW-RING!  Very slow pacing, nothing to hold my interest, nothing I even RECALL about this book all this time later.  Fish-out-of-water physicist Shevek has a Vulcan name but there's no Star Trek fun here.  Nor is he a quirky laugh-at-yourself kind of physicist like those delightful nerds on 'Big Bang Theory'.  

Shevek's loaded down with the crush of his angst in two worlds without compassion where no one can see the value of his work.

I swear by all you hold holy, I WISH I liked this.  Le Guin is an amazing person, deeply gifted, well worthy of the esteem of the science fiction community.  

Nevertheless, BOTH her Hugos left me cold and disillusioned, wondering what I ever liked about her Earthsea books back in the day.

It's a book about US.  About our limitations as a species.  The miseries and the lonely isolation and the cruelty. There is NO good reason not to like this book.

But that didn't stop me! 

Despite how I come across here, I STILL think, outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.

Because INSIDE of a dog it's too dark to read.

The Hugos: The Left Hand of Darkness

Many of you may find this hard to believe, but it happened forty years ago, before sexism was eradicated...

Ursula K. Le Guin was the first woman to win a Hugo for best novel. It was in 1970, for 'The Left Hand of Darkness'.  Amusingly enough, it is chock full of ideas about gender, culture and politics in a sci-fi setting.

It is the year 4870 on the planet Gethen, where the humans have no sex. 

 

Yup, a whole culture of 'It's Pat' from Saturday Night Live.  Shudder now, both at the idea of THAT and the fact that Gethen is deep in an Ice Age.  Chilly!

Enter Genly Ai of planet Earth, an ordinary sort of dude with a wang and everything.  He hopes to convince the isolated world to join the advanced planets of the Ekumen, an interstellar community with a great cellphone plan.  Their ansible device allows instant calls up to 170 light years away.  But even if Genly succeeds in convincing them to join the larger society they won't visit much: they live in one of those dull, plodding Newtonian physics universes where nothing can go faster than the speed of light.  BAHRING!!!

The redoubtable Le Guin presents a well-realized fictional world with its own language, myth, social structure, incomprehensible customs, and what-have-you.  The physiology of the Gethen people was the only thing I remember as particularly interesting, but then, I am a pervert.

For a few days each month, their sexless bodies flip a hormone coin and they pair up to mate fervently.  Any individual can be both a father or a mother at different periods of their lives.

There's really not much sex in it for a book about gender.  Nor does it have much in the way of a satisfying conclusion, just some random thoughts about stuff.  It's got political intrigue and man vs the elements, though.  It didn't resonate very well with me.  I gave it 2 stars out of 5 on goodreads, proving only that the Hugos went downhill once they let GIRLS start winning them.

(I'm SO kidding!  This author wrote 'A Wizard of Earthsea' which I LOVED as a kid, and 'The Lathe of Heaven' which I LOVED a couple months ago.  Either of THEM would get a Hugo from the Mike's House of Not-Really-Having-Any-Hugos-To-Give-You.  Sorry.)