Recommendations
Books Like The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
For readers of Le Guin's anarchist utopia
If you loved The Dispossessed's sustained comparison between anarchist Anarres and capitalist Urras, Shevek's physics of time, and Le Guin's refusal of a simple utopian resolution, these books explore the same political SF tradition.
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Buy on AmazonThe Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
The companion Hugo-winner in the Hainish Cycle — Genly Ai on Gethen is the formal predecessor to Shevek on Urras, both novels about outsiders confronting radically different societies and what that reveals about their own assumptions.
- 2
Buy on AmazonThe Word for World is Forest
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin's anti-imperialist novella in the Hainish Cycle — more directly political than The Dispossessed, making the anti-imperialist argument that The Dispossessed presents through sustained comparison.
- 3
Buy on AmazonParable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler
Butler's near-future dystopia — the companion in speculative fiction about the construction of alternative communities; Earthseed is Butler's answer to the question of what comes after collapse, where Le Guin asks what an alternative looks like in place.
- 4Buy on Amazon
The Fifth Season
by N.K. Jemisin
The most important recent successor in the humanist SF tradition Le Guin established — the Broken Earth trilogy's examination of oppression and survival is Jemisin's continuation of Le Guin's political SF project.
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Buy on AmazonRed Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson's Mars trilogy opener — the companion in political SF that takes seriously the social and economic organization of a new society; the Mars colonists' debates about terraforming and ownership are the 1990s version of Anarres vs. Urras.
- 6
Buy on AmazonWoman on the Edge of Time
by Marge Piercy
Piercy's 1976 feminist utopia — the companion in 1970s feminist SF that presents an alternative community in contrast to a dystopian present; Mattapoisett is the feminist version of Anarres, Le Guin's most important contemporary comparison.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's feminist dystopia — the companion in speculative fiction about social orders that oppress women; where Le Guin imagines what freedom could look like, Atwood imagines what the worst alternative looks like.
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Buy on AmazonNews from Nowhere
by William Morris
Morris's 1890 utopian novel — the anarchist predecessor; the Victorian vision of a post-capitalist England based on craft and community is the political ancestor of Anarres, the oldest entry point into the tradition Le Guin is extending.
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