I think the book is in the direct tradition of American communitarianism, a series of [failed] utopian movements that go back to the first half of the 19th century (predating Marx). While this movement has a long literary history (Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance was based directly on the Brook Farm commune), you don’t have to know about the transcendentalists or the other egalitarian societies that have popped up on the fringes of capitalist society to appreciate Le Guin’s novel. Still, it’s hard to imagine that anyone who’s studied any history at all could confuse this native (and heavily Christian) movement for Marxism.
I know you didn’t reply to my last question, but I’ll try again. The Gorean subculture is so obscure that it makes fuzzy fetishists positively tabloid fodder. Can you point to any evidence that mainstream culture is even aware of the existence of Gor, much less that its influence is equal to that of other major sf books?
Well… in terms of ranking a book by it’s real world impact vs it’s literary merits EC does have something of a point, in that there are relatively few SF books (or books period for that matter) that have inspired people to craft entire lifestyles around the philosophical principals woven into the fictional worlds they create.
Even if the Gorean "lifestyle" has only a few thousand adherents, that’s a few thousand more than almost any other SF novel.
I cannot believe that Olaf Stapledon doesn’t make an appearance here. “The Last and First Men” should be in the top 5. And the following books don’t belong there:
Cryptonomicon (not sci/fi, not pariticularly good, IMHO)
Jurassic Park
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Edritch (not one of PKD’s better books, and they put it higher than that masterpiece VALIS?)
And all the Orson Scott Card should probably be 90 places lower than they were.
Gee, I hate to differ with you, but cite, cite, and cite. I got those by googling “The Dispossessed” Marxism and LeGuin. I got over 16,000 hits. Apparently, a LOT of people have made the same mistake I have. Or it could be you who is mistaken. At the very least, you must admit that mistaking LeGuin’s novels for a work involving Communism and Marxism might be something that’s pretty darned easy to do, even for people who HAVE studied “any history at all.”
I get 213,000 hits for Gorean and 13,000 hits for Kaotians, but I make no claims for widespread knowledge of Goreans from that, as many of the hits are from Gorean websites and blogs. The Kaotian leader said there are 25,000 Goreans worldwide, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for not taking that figure at face value. I still think I’ve made the point that the mainstream is at some level “aware” of the Goreans. Thing is, that wasn’t my point. My point was that Goreans were taking the principles of Norman’s books and using them to guide them in their daily lives – mostly, their sex lives, but there’s also the honor code thing. I don’t see anyone runnign their lives along the lines suggested by John Crowley’s “Little, Big” or Ian Banks’ “Use of Weapons.”
Betcha $1000 that you didn’t actually read any of those cites. (How do I know? If you had you wouldn’t have used them as proof of anything more than they used the word Marx and came up in a Google.)
You’d lose. I chose those three because they specifically referred to Marxist or Communist theory in “The Dispossessed” in a clear and unambiguous way at least once. Sometimes I had to read paragraph or page or two, but the references are there.
Yay, my favorite book, Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, made the list. Its such a classic but for some reason it never really hit the big “must read” lists, even after winning the first sci-fi award of some kind (can’t remember the name of it off hand, but it was a good enough book where they started the award because of it). They recently came out with a new printing of it after several years of it being tough to find.
It’s really good, and likely to be of GREAT interest to a person named “Asgardking.” It’s an alternate history in which the Vikings hold their own against the Christians during the 9th century AD.
For the last time, the main point isn’t whether it’s Marxism or Anarchism that Le Guin portrays in The Dispossessed (although it’s Anarchism), It’s that the book isn’t a pro-Anarchist/Marxist story as Evil Captor made out in his second mention - I believe “piece of Marxist crap” was the exact phrase. It’s in fact (amongst other explorations - of the Sappir-Whorff language theory amongst others) a study in how such revolutionary societies fail. That makes it very much a Science Fiction story, in the grand tradition of everyone from Wells to Huxley.