Storyline: 1/5 
 Characters: 3/5 
 Writing Style: 3/5 
 World: 3/5 
 There was a wall. Thus begins this John W. Campbell Memorial nominee, Prometheus Hall of Fame selectee, Hugo Award recipient, and Nebula winner. Those first four words are hardly evocative of grandeur; they fail to promise wonders to come. The opening scene, though, will be judged on more than its first words, and discussion of the wall would continue: It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on. Those opening paragraphs preview Le Guin's tale. Sentences, short and truncated prevail. Significance and meaning hang foreboding. The weight of the substance in those lines appear too heavy for the weak structural support offered by the austere grammatical construction. It would prove, however, to hold. Much less florid than her previous Hainish books, The Dispossessed would continue in this bare style: staccato, confrontational, and unreservedly contemplative. 
 The "There was a wall" moments would be frequent. Cursory, promising a significance not yet delivered, overconfident in stringency. Many of these moments would come in the form of ideas. Le Guin was writing at a time seemingly on the cusp of vast social change, and then-contemporary events regularly find their way into her story. Women's struggles for access to higher education provide readers with a sense of injustice. Questions over the corrupting nature of authority give us pause. Government overreaction to downtrodden strikers and protestors instill in us a fear of even democratic authority. One can see in these features an insistence on significance, a compelling to social relevance. Here, though, Le Guin was looking backward, even back in 1974. Women's education rights, admittedly still yet to become entrenched, had won recognition with the 1972 Title IX legislation banning discrimination based on sex. The Stanford Prison experiments of 1971 shocked researchers and readers - then as they do now - with their results on authority and harm. Similarly, the Kent State shootings of 1970 would be appropriated by Le Guin to generate sympathy and outrage. Le Guin would manage, however, to turn these into perfunctory, tiresome messages. This was a work that was supposed to open people's eyes to their surroundings and to possibilities. This was written in a style that suggested that Le Guin was attempting something new or at least explaining something abstruse to a new audience. Many of these devices and musings however, were not forward-looking but backward-facing. The educational discrimination of the sort Le Guin portrays was already outdated by the time she wrote this, and what she gave was a caricatured and easy digestible social wrong that overlooked the less sensational battle to secure rights already codified in law and partially practiced. The Stanford Prison Experiments, too, are full of implications that had yet to be fully appreciated. Le Guin's adaptation here was a superficial adoption, skipping over the surface to dip into the dark, psychological components but failing to delve deeply into ramifications and applications. This was an instance of sampling from pop-culture and pop-science for the sake of joining in the popular conversation. Similarly, Kent State has also long been a rallying cry to denounce martial and despotic activities against a democratic citizenry. The Kent State tragedy, however, was the outcome of a complicated context going far beyond those students and that university. What Le Guin does here is to use the imagery to vilify and engender outrage. This was not insightful in 1974. If anything, what the author does here is an early indicator of what society would do with the incident in the future - make it into a picture without context, a slogan without understanding. These moments: cursory, promising a significance not yet delivered, overconfident in stringency, are all the more simplistic in a 2017 reading. These were Le Guin's "There was a wall" moments. Even at the time of publication one could reasonably have asked for more. One could have expected more insight, more context, more contemplation. Of course, those demanding more needed only to read on; just as when one moves beyond the first sentence, one finds that Le Guin does have far more to offer. 
 Beyond those initial four words, Le Guin's opening pointed us to the wall as an idea, the wall as important. In something so simple as a low, crumbling wall, there was significance. Here was meaning. Here was complexity. And this was a book full of significance. The novel's original tagline: "The magnificent epic of an ambiguous utopia!" was only partially accurate. It was indeed an "ambiguous utopia," but it was definitely not a "magnificent epic." There is very little pretense to a plot here. There is very little attempt to make this more than a popularization and illustration of radical political ideas. This was Le Guin's Walden Two or her Animal Farm. Perhaps more accurately it was simultaneously her B. F. Skinner and George Orwell masterpiece. There is good reason for that original tagline, then, to have been abbreviated to "An Ambiguous Utopia." That ambiguity is the hallmark of the book; that is what makes it significant. To take and make real radical political visions is difficult enough. But to admit their problems, to see their flaws and make those just as real is an act of honesty I don't expect from social critics and activists. Similarly, to look for and find merit in one's enemy bespeaks fairness and some striving for objectivity. To generate this sympathy and work toward fairness requires Le Guin to include a lot of nuance and digression. This will make it, for some, a tedious book. It is additionally complicated because there are three points of reference from which we are to understand what goes on. Our perspective from Anarres is supposed to color our perceptions of Urras, and similarly ours of Urras to those of Anarres. The third point is the reader's own - or at least our fears of our own ecologically and politically dystopian future. The activities and descriptions of any scene, then, could be - and perhaps are supposed to be - perceived from three viewpoints. When on Urras we could try to accept the culture and understand and value events from within that system. Le Guin is surely asking us to do more, however. We are never to forsake the mindset of Anarres, never to wholly drop our critical and alien mentality. Finally, though, we are to look at those same events on Urras from the perspective of our present day and possible future. What that activity on Urras - or any scene in the book - means, then, changes wildly with each reference point. The appropriateness, the necessity, the justice and morality; all of these shift with with the vantage point. And I'm not sure that Le Guin completely manages this intricate picture. It gets even more obfuscated because she continues with her Taoist leanings and symbolism. At times she seems to care more about the finer injustices than the bigger picture and pattern. I questioned how faithful she was to anarcho-communism by the end; it seemed to have veered a long way into individualist anarchism. The questions of consistency and ideological accuracy will have to be taken up with others better versed in political ideologies. What the book is successful with is nuance and with a seemingly honest portrayal of political possibilities. 
 A book like this isn't supposed to be read for amusement. One is not supposed to ask, at the end, if they were entertained. You are supposed to ask what it means, what you took from it. The amount of commentary available on The Dispossessed is intimidating. Notable reviews must number in the hundreds or thousands, critical analyses proliferate through journals, and entire books have been devoted to analyzing Le Guin's ambiguous utopia(s). The sheer vastness of the material makes it difficult to approach, thus I'm not going to attempt any sort of grand analysis. This is an interpretation based on reading it once and without any idea of what the author intended: The primary message is that utopias are not going to solve all of humanity's problems. Or, perhaps said otherwise: no political system is going be a utopia. Imagine the most communally indoctrinated, humanist society possible, and there are still going to be people that are annoying, jealous, petty, vindictive, and bigoted. Still, we are supposed to take away from this that radically different political and social arrangements are possible and have their own benefits. Le Guin is endorsing anarcho-communism. It simply is an honest endorsement that admits that any realized system will disappoint many, fail others, and have its own severe structural flaws. What all three societies in Le Guin's novel want is freedom. This is her greater philosophical - rather than ideological - message. Freedom is not an outcome that can be achieved, not a state that can be captured. Freedom is choosing. Freedom is a verb, then, not a noun. To invoke individual freedom will imperil dictatorship, democracy, and even anarcho-communist utopia. This is also an admission that constraints on freedom will be necessary for the functioning of the political system, even if those constraints defy the very principles to which the political system is said to aspire. Thus the best we are left with are ambiguous utopias. 
 I strongly sympathize with this interpretation and message (and it is also possible that I've read my own sympathies into Le Guin's very complicated work). I'm still not sure if this was a didactic pseudo-novel or an overly embellished pseudo-philosophy. It surely is significant, and I also found it provocative.