Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Sure. There are two planets that are relevant. They’re kind of close to each other. One is home to an anarchist separatist cell that moved away from the original planet hundreds of years in the past. Then, the original planet is supposed to be more like a capitalist planet. It looks a lot more like Earth. Our main character is a physicist who travels between the two, trying to bridge the gap. I think that’s a broad summary. That makes sense to me. This was published, I think, in 1974. Reading it this time, it seemed to me to be the ultimate anti-utopian novel that, in fact, the collectivist society — you have to live together with other people who are strangers. You can’t rear your own children. There is very little freedom of expression. People only get to eat two meals a day. The way they talk about sex is not really very romantic, you might say, and it seems like a horror. I can’t imagine — the first time I read it, I thought, “Le Guin is really on the side of the communal society.” The other thing that struck me on my later reading of the book is just how anthropological it is as a mode of presentation. As you know, her father was a very famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber at Berkeley. Le Guin’s mother was a well-known psychologist. It’s almost not science fiction. It’s an anthropological investigation of two worlds that we call science fiction because we don’t know where else to put them. Yes, I think it’s referred to as an ambiguous utopia. I think Le Guin is pretty clear that she prefers the anarchist world but doesn’t shy away from the problems with it, which I think is usually the issue with utopian writing. Did you disagree? You don’t think that that’s clear?…

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