The Dispossessed

Extract: I love Ursula LeGuin's writing. She creates amazingly detailed societies. This book has two societies, and the process of the book makes you compare and contrast them. Each society believes it is utopian, but both are dysfunctional in one way or another. It is clear that she is mirroring the US and Soviet Union. Each thinks they are better than the other, full of tension and suspicion, yet both are being confronted with the idea of accepting each other through interactions of an individual. Clearly, both sides are flawed, but being brought up in one society makes you suspect of the other, no matter how open you may be to the other. This eventually inhibits the exchange of ideas, and eventually each society's people…