I have recently read Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which is a wonderful look into a Solarpunk world. However, an important critique that the book emphasizes is that this new Solarpunk society (or, well, an Anarchist society really) has produced a ‘tyranny of bureaucracy’ and a number of social pressures that stifle individual ambition and that punish those that are different from the norm.

Would you agree that Le Guin’s critique can be useful for the solarpunk movement?

I have attached an analysis of the novel as well.

In the novel, the two most prominent slices of reality that require complementary interpretations are Shevek’s General Temporal Theory and his vision of anarchism on Anarres. Just as he sees Sequency and Simultaneity as complementary, so he sees individual freedom and social responsibility as the complementary manifestations of anarchy. Moreover, Shevek is able to comprehend anarchy in a complementary way only because his view is based on the theory of time that he has developed.

  • Mysteriarch ☀️@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    Ha, I just realized that The Dispossessed is a literal example of lunarpunk, since Anarres is the moon of Urras!

    Well, Le Guin herself gave it the subtitle ‘an ambiguous utopia’. I think it just makes the whole novel (and the ideas) that much stronger, since it’s not just some masturbatory fantasy about anarchism. She really imagines another type of society, problems and all.

    • Steve@slrpnk.netM
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      1 year ago

      She’s such an important person both for Solarpunk / Lunarpunk and speculative fiction in general as well as Anarchism and related movements