The Unaccountability Machine attempts a grand project of diagnosing and curing the malaise of the 21st century: namely, everything is getting worse anThe Unaccountability Machine attempts a grand project of diagnosing and curing the malaise of the 21st century: namely, everything is getting worse and it seems like nobody can do nothing about it. Davies' theoretical approach is to explain and use Stafford Beer's cybernetic management theories against Milton Friedman's neoliberal doctrine that the primary duty of the firm is to maximize shareholder value. I'm not sure it quite works, but it's a brave attempt. The initiating idea is one of accountability sinks. Think about getting bumped from a flight due to a system outage and complaining to the desk agent. It's not like they can do anything to help. They're just a face there to insulate the airline from customers who can no longer make their connections. Information should be flowing, but it instead it's stopped.
The first thing is explaining Stafford Beer and cybernetic management. Beer was one of those mid-century British prodigies, going from philosophy to the Army in WW2 to psychology to operations research to management consultant to public intellectual. His enduring contributions were two books, Brain Of The Firm and The Heart of the Enterprise, the acronym POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does), and a consulting hand in Chile's Project Cybersyn, a centrally planned economic operations center that was overtaken by Pinochet's coup.
[image] Project Cybersyn
The key parts of management cybernetics, according to Davies, is that any system managing another system must have sufficient variety to handle the kinds of information coming from the managed system. Secondly, according to Beer's Viable System Model all systems have five interacting components: operations, coordination, regulation, intelligence, and identity. I'll confess that even as someone with a sympathy towards cybernetics, I'm not full convinced. The phrase "sufficient variety" conceals the complexities of what organizations are paying attention to, and applying the viable system model is to a real enterprise is far from easy. With cybernetics, I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' observation about astrology or tarot, in that it doesn't really matter what the rules are (even pure nonsense can work), as long as there are sufficiently many of them in enough fineness to reveal the shape of whatever lies beneath.
But taking cybernetic seriously, the problem is one of economic management, namely how to match inputs and outputs across the billions of human preferences that make up the economy. Davies is an economist, but a critical one, who regards the '-ist' as exemplifying an ideology rather than academic rigor. Economic modeling is powerful, but makes dangerous simplifying assumptions. To whit, individual preferences are atomic, and the effects of complexity in systems can be ignored. While economics is extremely powerful in a policy role, it is also shockingly bad at dealing with things like real accounting practices as done by businesses, time, and debt.
Economic as a discipline fostered a series of moves which represented the triumph of the capitalist class (those who own things) over the managerial class (those who make decisions), with the working class already placed on the ash-heap of history. These moves are most strongly identified with Milton Friendman, and the doctrine that a company's primary and indeed sole duty is to maximize shareholder returns. All sources of information get crushed down into a single number, the stock price, which floats on the whims of speculators. Further, the practice of the leveraged buyout means that companies are forced to ignore everything that isn't generating cashflow to service increasingly high debt obligations. And the neoliberal wisdom of the market means that there's no one to appeal to: this is just how the world works now.
I'm not sure that Davies' advice to adjust the information and incentives is sufficient. Power speaks, and it's no accident that capitalism won and forced the working classes to absorb all shocks to the system. But he offers an insightful and novel prescription, like some new drug extracted from a rare and ancient flower deep in the rainforest.
The Dawn of Everything is a tour de force. Graeber and Wengrow aimed high, to redefine human history and our own understanding of our present and poteThe Dawn of Everything is a tour de force. Graeber and Wengrow aimed high, to redefine human history and our own understanding of our present and potential as a species, and they for the most part succeed.
Grand narratives of humanity follow one of two major themes. In one, we fell from an Edenic origin, Rousseau's noble savage or Christian myth to our current greedy corruption. In the other, we were violent brutes saved from Hobbes' war of all against all by gods, kings, and bureaucracy. Either way, the yoke of civilization is no more than what we deserve. Rousseau and Hobbes can be forgiven, because they were writing thought experiments at the dawn of modern political philosophy and had little actual evidence of our origins. The authors who cannot be so easily forgiven are their modern descendants, Jared Diamond (ecological geography), Yuval Harari (medieval history), and Steven Pinker (cognitive science), who present a grand narrative of humanity that is blinkered, boring, and wrong.
The essence of Graeber and Wengrow's work is to argue that a synthesis of research from anthropology and archeology shows that the modern world, defined by agriculture, industry, debt, domination, and war is not inevitable. Against the argument that cities and complex societies require hierarchies of control, Graeber and Wengrow show that simple chronology indicates that cities and agriculture arrived thousands of years before the chains of civilization, and that kings and debt slavery are late arrivals to people who made fundamental advances in domestication, pottery, metallurgy, and textiles.
The people of the Americas provide a second strand to this story. Graeber and Wengrow take period accounts of contact between the French and indigenous people of the northeast to show that the French regarded average the Huron or Iroquois as equal to one of their leading scholars in rhetoric and erudition, and by comparison Native Americans saw the French as little more than slaves. The peoples of the Americas had complex long-distance trade networks. Their political systems could be remade if they did not match their values. And in every aspect of quality of life, their lives seem better than their European contemporaries.
In a moment of discontent, possibly even one of breach, Graeber and Wengrow make a specific argument that rather than talking abstractly of equality and freedom, we need to think instead of the protection of three fundamental liberties: The freedom to move away from one's surroundings, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to shape entirely new social realities. The apparatus of social science, laid down by conservative men in the 19th century, has been one of limits. Instead, we need to think in terms of potential, and know that in the past and in other places, people had freedoms we can only dream of.
This book is a dazzling display of evidence that better worlds are possible, and a fascinating refutation of the standard lies we learned in school, which we trimmed to fit the colonialist ideologies of the past. I've complained about Graeber's sourcing in the past, but it looks fine to me, and my wife, who is an actual professor of archeology instead of some guy with an unrelated doctorate, will double check. For all its brilliance, there are some flaws. I think that the two Davids could have benefited from a more explicitly feminist approach to their topic, or at least another chapter with a feminist standpoint. The argument that the democratic and constitutional philosophies of the Enlightenment owe their origins to contact with Native Americans are plausible, but I would love a period scholar to really nail down the links, aside from the statements that everybody was reading period accounts of contact, and that Native ambassadors and Enlightenment philosophers were in the same city at the same time. Even so, these weaknesses point out fruitful areas for future work, and not major errors.
Read this book. You'll enjoy it, you'll learn something, and from a narrowly tactical sense, it takes the prior grand histories I mentioned above and stomps them in the dust....more
Illich makes a radical critique of education, capitalism, statism, and almost everything that is both extremely focused and also directs slashes at neIllich makes a radical critique of education, capitalism, statism, and almost everything that is both extremely focused and also directs slashes at nearly every underpinning assumption of society. Illich's most direct criticism is at the idea that formal education solves problems. Rather than being about skill acquisition or personal development, Illich identifies schools as the ideological wing of the consumption-production engine that is capitalism. The role of schools is to produce ignorance rather than insight, to create credentials and envy of credentials rather than mastery, to suck up surplus labor and intellect in the Promethean furnace of a culture consuming itself. The criticism starts with Dewey's ideas about education, and moves through Johnson's Great Society, international development, drawing heavily on Illich's personal experiences in Mexico, the Vietnam War, and the industrial design of the transistor radio. Don't mistake this for Marxism though; Illich calls out the Soviet system as another gear in the world-spanning educational system.
Against traditional classrooms and curriculum, Illich imagines 'learning webs', where computers would connect people who wanted to learn something to people who already knew it, forming tutoring pairings and affinity groups that meet in cafes and converted shopfronts. Mass production of tapes and audiobooks, along with appropriate technology in the developing world, will liberate minds. Most of Illich's criticisms are directed at the liberal consensus, and he's not afraid of citing Milton Friedman's voucherization of school systems as a positive example, but mostly it's the idea of any sort of formal, obligatory, schooling that is the enemy. There's a direct line between military discipline and educational discipline, and for Illich both are wasteful, anti-human, and evil. The institutional attempt to achieve a goal will always fulfill it's opposite.
As a historical artifact, this work was published in 1971, when for a brief glorious moment it seemed like the Counterculture would triumph, and that all the corrupt and evil institutions of a rotten society would crumble to be replaced by a new dawn met people where they were. Now, more than 40 years on, we know that this moment would last only a little longer. But Illich, even in his strident utopianism, wasn't wrong. Speaking as someone in the 23rd grade, too much education is useless credentialism that serves to indebt the ambitious working classes. Those with power and money have their own networks of private tutors to pursue actually effective education for their children, while basic skills like knowing how to do something, or how to think in a straight line for 500 words, are increasingly the privilege of the elite. ...more
The Left Hand of Darkness is along with The Man in the High Tower and Dune, one of the very few science fiction books that rises to true greatness. UrThe Left Hand of Darkness is along with The Man in the High Tower and Dune, one of the very few science fiction books that rises to true greatness. Ursula K. Le Guin imagines a meeting of two very different and alien cultures, as revealed in a masterfully and deliberately paced novel.
Genly Ai is the Envoy, a representative of the interplanetary Ekumen. Definitely not a government, and not quite a church, the Ekumen is a loose coordinating and idea sharing group using the instantaneous communication device of the ansible to link the 84 human planets separated by the tyranny of distance at light-speed (by the way, Terra is just one of many human worlds, and not the world of origin). Envoys are sent alone and unarmed, a single representative of greater humanity, with no power and no threats, simply an offer to join communication.
His mission is to Gethen, a harsh world locked in an ice age, and home to the strangest human type yet. Gethenians are perfect hermaphrodites. 26 days of the month they are sexless neuters, but for 4 days they enter an estrus called 'kemmer', and become functionally male or female at random. Anybody can potentially give birth. The sexual unity defines Gethenian culture as totally as sexual dimorphism defines ours, and Le Guin works through the implications beautifully in description of myth, social organization, and patterns of everyday life that make up culture.
The plot, as such, concerns Genly Ai's very lonely mission to the leading nations of Gethen: Karhide, ruled by a mad king; Orgoreyn, ruled by a bureaucratic commission with Stalinist tendencies towards internal exile. The life of an Envoy is fraught with peril. They have no true friends on an alien planet, may be disbelieved and killed, or used by political factions. Genly finds himself exiled to a forced labor camp, and then with the help of another exile and his one true friend, makes a heroic escape over 1000 miles of ice. The escape across the ice is one journey, made with the aid of technology as perfectly adapted as the stillsuits of Dune, if less ostentatious, but the true journey is learning to see the Gethenians as not imperfectly male or female, but truly as themselves.
My copy begins with a great introduction by Le Guin on prediction, description, truth, lies, and the story as metaphor, which is an essay worth reading in and of itself. As a prose stylist, a true fan (she submitted her first SF story at 11) and philosopher inspired by Taoist ideas, Le Guin is a clear cut above. ...more
I hate to say it, but We is important more for it's context than its content. Written by a disappointed revolutionary in the early days of the Soviet I hate to say it, but We is important more for it's context than its content. Written by a disappointed revolutionary in the early days of the Soviet state, suppressed in Russia yet influential on 1984 and Brave New World, We is a prototypical anti-utopian and anti-totalitarian novel, but not a very enjoyable one.
In the deep future, the One State has conquered the world, and is on th doorstep of conquering the planets and the inner space of the soul. Yet, this triumph of the many over the individual is threatened by the First Designer of the pioneering rocketship Integral, and his encounter with the seductress and emotional revolutionary I-330. Our narrator journals his descent into the disease of having a soul, the revolutionary underground, and the battle with the Guardians of the One State.
The problems with this novel are twofold. The first is a very Dostoevskian orientation towards individuals, emotions, turmoil, and general psychology, which works at cross purposes of the critique of utilitarian/rational leadership. The second problem is a lack of schematic coherence. By that, compare 1984, which was about Terror and History, or Brave New World, which makes eloquent statements about the antithesis of Pleasure and Freedom. In We, there is the stultifying Order of the One State contrasted against a human desire for authenticity and imagination. It's decent, but it lacks the penetrating insight of the other classic anti-utopian novels. Perhaps I do not have enough of a background in Soviet history, but I think that there is something more than can be said about the New Soviet Man, or the betrayal of ideals in the aftermath of the Revolution. ...more
Okay, that's not a review. Let me explain why this is my favorite book. Distraction paints a picture of a world gone down the tubes in an all too familiar way, but unlike the usual dystopian moanings, Sterling has the guts to imagine a way out; a characteristically optimistic American faith in the endless frontier of science, technology, and freedom from any kind of notion of responsibility.
But there are three things that I really, truly love about Distraction. First is the setting, which after 15 years smells more like the future than when it was written. An American political system that has descended into an insane farce. An economy that no longer has jobs for half the people; most of whom have dropped out to join a perpetual nomad carnival run off of weird reputation servers. Ecological Cold War with the Dutch and a coalition of low-lying Third World nations. A lost economic war with the Chinese over intellectual property. And information warfare as the basic fact of life--a world where bugs can be bought in bulk at flea markets, spam email servers orchestrate assassinations, and the US Air Force has to hold a bake sale to keep the lights on. It's a rich tapestry, and all of it hangs together beautifully.
Second, the aphorisms. Bruce Sterling knows how to turn a phrase, and he has some great ones around science and politics in this book. I'm a science policy professional by a living, and personally, I think Sterling has a better understanding of how this all works than 90% of the boring scholarly types involved. You want a mind-expanding quote about science and society, this is your book. Sterling doesn't bash you over the head with abstruse STS theory, but you can feel it deep underneath the writing.
And third, I really enjoy the plot and the characters: the genetically altered political strategist, the Nobel prize winning scientist, the mad governor of Louisiana, and the intricate scheme of neural engineering and power machinations that draw them into collision. Sure, some of the more important plot points proceed by random happenstance, but history doesn't have good reasons. In the real world, strange stuff that nobody could've seen comes in and upsets the board all the time. Just sit back, relax, and let the ride take you.
Jaron Lanier is very angry about computers. While this book is a necessary antidote to the usual silicon valley cyber-utopianism, Lanier is not nearlyJaron Lanier is very angry about computers. While this book is a necessary antidote to the usual silicon valley cyber-utopianism, Lanier is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and this manifesto is plagued by conceptual and organizational difficulties.
The first target of Lanier's wrath is the Singularity, the idea that increasingly powerful computers will lead to an intelligence explosion and the rapture of the nerds. Singulatarians are easy targets for mockery, and Lanier's attack is based around the Hard Problem of Consciousness: explaining the phenomenon of experience. This leads us into some interesting philosophical and mathematical thickets: all computers that we know of are Turing Machines, which are classed as machines which can solve a certain set of formalized mathematical questions (actually, the ones we know how to build are less than Turing Machines because they run in finite time and space). Either brains are Turing Machines, in which case experience is just math, or brains are not Turing Machines, in which case our understanding of math is due for some big changes. Lanier, however, doesn't talk about this (I know about it because I've read Godel Escher Bach several times), preferring to bash Kurzweil et al as robot cultists.
Second are online communities, which he characterizes as Digital Maoism, or blind mobs, primarily interested in trolling. Now, there is a lot of trolling online, and mobs are fickle and sometimes dangerous, and Clay Skirkey is probably a buffoon, but actual scholars doing actual scholarship (cite forthcoming, mostly my friends) have done a lot of interesting work on the social interactions that make up the web. Ethnographic studies are a lot more work than generalized bemoaning about cyber-vigilantes and the ADHD spikiness of internet interests. Of course the internet looks like a mob from on high-from a sufficient distance, nearly everything can be treated as a problem in statistical mechanics. Real social scientists, as opposed to self-proclaimed polymaths, have stopped taking "cyberspace" as an intellectually productive conversation.
Third, and most interesting, is Lanier's attack against Open Source culture. According to his argument, the computer has killed authorship, creative expression, and the middle class, leaving nothing but Cloud Lords and Microserfs. He has some interesting points about hip hop as the last novel/pre-digital artistic movement, the retro sensibilities of modern pop culture, and the triumphs of Open Source software being a clone of UNIX and an encyclopedia rather than something new.
That said, there are some big questions that Lanier doesn't engage with. First, as awful as MIDI and other standards are, (and a friend of mine did an undergrad STS thesis on MIDI), working technologies are by definition 'closed', in the social construction of technology sense of closure. You want tools that can be used; you have to assume those tools' political values as well. A little reading in the philosophy of technology, particular Bowker and Star's Sorting Things Out, would've been immensely helpful here.
Second, Lanier has a rather confused notion of what a computer is, as a box that shows me images which are made out of math. Copyright, authorship, the whole shebang of culture that Lanier cares so much about and takes as reaching its optimum right at 1970 or so, is historically and legally contingent on a bunch of technological and political factors around the reproduction of physical objects. Well, computers make math infinitely reproducible. Stewart Brand's slogan "Information wants to be free" doesn't quite get at how free information wants to be. Given a computer and some math, information is free in the same way that air can't be locked up. It's basically the problem of the 'digital original,' and the question of the value of the original versus copies. Lanier is making some kind of worthwhile point here, but its buried under so much vitriol and romanticism that it's hard to see (much like this review).
In the end, I think Lanier ironically does the exact same thing he criticizes others for doing, in that he blames all the contradictions of Late Stage Capitalism on computers. It's a technologically deterministic argument with a few new twists, but not nearly as novel or rigorous as it could be. ...more
This is the Real Deal. Pure uncut Bruce Sterling without any of those messy complications of plot or character or setting. The Chairman just sits downThis is the Real Deal. Pure uncut Bruce Sterling without any of those messy complications of plot or character or setting. The Chairman just sits down and tells you what he thinks The Future is going to look like. If you don't have the right constitution for it, you might OD and throw the book across the room with a cry of "What pretentious shit!" But if your mind is open and flexible (and you've already drunk the kool-aid), this book will rock your socks.
Sterling structures this book around the soliloquy of the Melancholy Jacques from As You Like It, the one that begins "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." And goes on to discuss the seven stages of life. He covers topics from basic human biology, to education, to gadgets, war, government, business, and finally the fate of the planet, all with the Sterling-esque eyeballs kicks. This is a great book for polemical passages, curt sentences, looping elliptical paragraphs which describe our Present Reality so well that you know instantly that there is no other way to see it.
Now, as a genre futurism tends not to age well. Tomorrow Now is the exception. The book was published in 2002, and while the "predictions" are for 50 years out, we're far enough along to do some preliminary analysis, and despite the hyperactive paranoia of the early millenium Sterling gets it right. The War on Terror was a bust, because fanatical cultists/drug dealing mobs are lousy at governing. Speaking of governing, the contemporary political conflict is between people who want to keep the networks open and flowing and people who want to grandstand, which is a more apt description of the 2012 Presidential Election than anything else I've seen. Technology is not about solving your problems, but about locking you into a relationship with a company, frequently an abusive relationship (hello Facebook!). Sterling's insights are based around a depiction of human nature as messy, complicated, uncertain, torn between transcendence and banality. Everything shiny inevitably is covered in smudges and dust.
This isn't a description of The Future As a Place to Go To, or a blueprint for how to build A Future to Live In. This book is a raft for sailing the vast and chaotic sea of the present. I'm proud to call Bruce Sterling my captain, even if he would deny any such role....more
Well, this is certainly a book. I can't say much more, due to the elliptical multi-narrators stream of consciousness style, but it's about Black faithWell, this is certainly a book. I can't say much more, due to the elliptical multi-narrators stream of consciousness style, but it's about Black faith healers somewhere in the South, and um, something happens, I don't know what. Guess my Patriarchy Pants are just on too tight....more
Davis does an admirable job demonstrating that prisons are racist, unjust, and a central component of a system of exploitation that damages American dDavis does an admirable job demonstrating that prisons are racist, unjust, and a central component of a system of exploitation that damages American democracy and economic opportunity. But the fact that prisons are terrible, both in their effects on society and at achieving their stated mission of reducing crime and reforming criminals, does not mean that they are obsolete. The strengths of this book, in linking prisons to endemic American racism and a toxic nexus of political-corporate-senesationalist media power, are undermined by its failure to grapple critically with ideas of security, the failures of the court system, and how prisons both reify and 'correct' various forms of social and psychological deviance. At least its short....more
With all thew uproar these days about how "NObama is a Socialist-Kenyan-Marxist-Nazi-Muslim", reading what an actual socialist believes is a vital antWith all thew uproar these days about how "NObama is a Socialist-Kenyan-Marxist-Nazi-Muslim", reading what an actual socialist believes is a vital antidote. Wright simply wants radical socialist democracy; the People empowered to make collective decisions over their own lives, with Capital and the State reduced until they can provide necessary services, but they no longer threaten the common welfare. While this is an admirable goal, this book is not quite up to the task. It feels musty, and set up bold claims and analytic frameworks while flinching away from the ultimate conclusions of what it would mean to live in a world of radical egalitarianism.
The Marxist analysis of the structural flaws of capitalism, and the way in which economic competition select for bad behavior is remains deadly accurate, but in many other respects, even this modernized Marxism fails to explain how capitalism will develop, and how it will develop given the admitted failure of the homogenization of the working class and the labor theory of productivity over the 20th century (two traditional Marxist keystone theories).
Society remains the most important actor in the book, and the least-well defined. Mutual solidarity and discussion is all well and good, but Wright doesn't quite develop the differences in society between the scales of say, a small worker-owned collective, a town, a nation, and the entire world. Ambitious plans for universal living wages and social ownership leave aside the massive inequalities between the 1st and 3rd world, and the 99% and the 1%. Finally, Wright has the typical Marxist valorization of the Worker, without considering how essentially non-economic activities fit into his utopian framework. This relentless materialism is both the strength of Marxism, and also its weakness, as it leaves a hollow "sociality" to battle against the Right's ideology of "liberty"...more
I wanted to like this book, but rather than develop characters, a plot, or setting, Delany appears to throw a bunch of interesting ideas into a blendeI wanted to like this book, but rather than develop characters, a plot, or setting, Delany appears to throw a bunch of interesting ideas into a blender and set to frappe. Delany can do military sci-fi well, witness the ferocious creativity of Babel-17. He is a master of unconventional bodies and sexes, as in "Aye, and Gomorrah...". But in Triton, a fundamentally unlikeable main character wanders through an interplanetary war without witnessing any of the machinations of power. Triton society places an emphasis on the diversity of sex and gender, yet total gender and sexual reassignment is a state provided out-patient surgery that is apparently easier than deciding what to wear to dinner. While some of the fragments are interesting, the book itself is a uncomfortable lump of uncooked ideas, without the redeeming literary qualities of Delany's other works....more
Ugh, just... ugh. Academic feminism is full of ridiculous crap. Kitch takes aim at the worst of it under the rubric of utopianism, but while her critiUgh, just... ugh. Academic feminism is full of ridiculous crap. Kitch takes aim at the worst of it under the rubric of utopianism, but while her critiques of The Movement are generally spot on, as best as I can tell utopianism and realism are interchangeable. Can't we just tell people not to be intellectually lazy fanatics?...more
Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed is a very hard book to write about. It's clearly great literature, but exactly why is hard to pin down.
The DispossUrsula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed is a very hard book to write about. It's clearly great literature, but exactly why is hard to pin down.
The Dispossessed centers on the story of Shevek, a physicist and idealist, but the true characters of this book are the twinned planets of Urras and Anarres. Urras is a world much like own our, of nations and government and money, a garden planet riven by dominance and war. Anarres is a dry and dusty moon, home to an exile civilization of revolutionary anarchists. The story takes place in alternating chapters, an Urras track beginning with Shevek's escape from Anarres to Urras, and an Anarres track following his life and growing dissatisfaction with his homeworld.
This is a book about revolutionary anarchism, about the radical potential for humans to be truly free. But what separates it from most utopian literature is Le Guin's reflexive critique of Anarres. Most utopian literature is about a plan; "if you designed a society like, this is how it'd be perfect." Le Guin shows us a society that is freer and more egalitarian than any that exists on Earth, backed up by a rational language that makes even thoughts of ownership and dominance difficult to express, but she is also wise enough to show how the revolution has become conservative and fearful, how social norms replace law, how the dominance games of politicians and academics still play out in the absence of formal power, and how true freedom must begin and end in the spirit.
The Urras plot concerns Shevek's final work on a Theory of Simultaneity and Sequency (the caps are deserved), a unified theory of physics which would make faster-than-light travel possible, along with the ansible communicator from the rest of Le Guin's Hainish cycle. Fictional physics on this level aren't really my cup of tea, but the book takes a solid run at how cosmology, and how we perceive time, matters as a fundamental basis for society and ideas like property and profit. Shevek's idealism won't let him give his invention to either the grubbing 'invisible parliament' of his own world, which opposes new ideas, or the profiteering and warmongering Urrasian academics who host his stay. There's a war and a great strike, but somehow the action on Urras seems unreal and irrelevant, compared to the dust and hard work of Anarres.
Stepping back to look at the big picture, The Dispossessed covers a lot of the same territory as Left Hand of Darkness, with a lone ambassador coming to another world, but I think The Dispossessed does a better job by giving us some context for Shevek, and his principled opposition to walls and barriers of all kind, especially walls that exist in the head and heart. Le Guin's talk of Simultaneity and Sequency is also about the question "can two people really meet?" and "how do we know when become ourselves?"
This was also a solid year for the Hugos as a whole. The Mote in God's Eye could've easily won in any of the past five years or so. Flow My Tears The Policeman Said is one of my favorite Philip K Dick stories. I haven't heard of Fire Time or Inverted World, but both sound fascinating. ...more
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