Paul Watson’s posts tagged “Ursula K Le Guin”

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Ursula Le Guin’s SF novel The Dispossessed is still by far the best account of an anarchist society, warts and all. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards but, more importantly, it secured a place in the heart of many anarchists and even if its author denied she was anarchist, she expressed the ideal well. So well, in fact, its publication should be discussed and a few claims made about it refuted.

Nobody would dare to boil down Ursula Le Guin’s marvelous writing—all that fantasy, all that science fiction, poetry, essays, translations—into one idea. But in a pinch I’d pick two sentences from her 2014 National Book Award speech: “Capitalism[’s] power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”