The Dispossessed
Following World War I, novels describing utopias gradually decreased in number, until the genre almost went extinct in mid-century, being replaced by dystopias like the famous Nineteen-Eighty-Four written by George Orwell. Later on, in the mid-seventies, fuelled by the upsurge of social reform that began in the late sixties and continued into the new decade, new utopias graced the scene, the most memorable ones being Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, Samuel R. Delany's Triton, and Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. The reason for which these particular utopias succeeded where others had failed was their obtainability. Where traditional utopias like Bellamy’s Looking Backward were static, dull and unfeasible, representing their societies…show more content… Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is, however, more than just a study of her so called ‘ambiguous’ utopia. Even at the time it was written it was labelled as feminist science fiction, due to the fact that it uses the setting of anarchist Anarres to focus also on the dynamics of gender equality. Within that communal society, gender is not seen as a factor leading to social otherness, as the institutions and social rules which create that in our own reality are lacking there: there is no marriage institution, relationships come with no strings attached, women’s sexuality is in no way oppressed, and so…show more content… This is done from both the Gethenian perspective and Ai’s own. About the Gethenian one, the author has explained that it was one of her thought experiments – what would a society look like if the population was largely asexual? One of her conclusions, albeit one that stands on shaky ground, is that there would be no wars, with another being that the lack of sexual manipulation would lead to such a concept as shifgrethor, with its moral