{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1329",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1329,
    "subject": "To Dan'l: Ambiguous utopias",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2001-04-09T22:03:37+00:00",
    "last": "2001-04-09T22:03:37+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0012-0557@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Nicholas Gevers",
        "address": "vermoulian at yahoo.com"
      },
      "date": "2001-04-09T22:03:37+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) To Dan'l: Ambiguous utopias",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "In response to the comments of Dan'l Blattid O'Roach\nbelow:\n\nPoints well taken. I should add that if THE\nDISPOSSESSED has influenced TBSS, it may well have\ndone so via its major utopian successor, again\nRobinson's MARS Trilogy--the Trilogy is very much\nabout sister planets, Mars and Earth, and their\ncomplex utopian/dystopian/counterutopian relationship,\nin close and deliberate echo of Le Guin.\n\nAmbiguity in Le Guin: well, absolutely, and Wolfe is\nfar more ambiguous than Le Guin, and more ambivalent,\nas I've indicated, about utopia; in THE DISPOSSESSED,\nLe Guin certainly strives for a balance of systems and\ntheir limitations, but she is inherently a highly\npartisan and didactic writer, and achieves less\nobjectivity than she believes. TBSS could profitably\nbe seen as Wolfe putting authentic \"ambiguity\" into\nthe utopia or heterotopia (Delany) for the first time,\nas only he can manage--thus his bewildering variety of\nsystems of governance, which come much closer to the\nworld's actual degree of variety than any ordinary\nutopian scenario ever could...\n\nIn short, TBSS poses the question: in the volatile,\nmultiplex cauldron of events that is socio-political\nreality, what degree of utopian consensus can ever\nemerge? Wolfe proposes some of the necessary\nlineaments of such a consensus (social justice,\ninclusivity, as I've mentioned in earlier posts), but\nleaves us in fully appropriate uncertainty as to\nwhether the consensus will ever really emerge and be\napplied. Sounds to me like the best thought-out\nutopian novel ever.\n\n--Nick Gevers."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "H'mmm.  I think this underestimates the \"ambiguous\"\nof Le Guin's\nsubtitle: THE DISPOSSESSED is about two worlds each\nof which \n_claims_ to be \"utopian\" vis-a-vis the other, but\nneither quite\nmanages to be a utopia. I think the key to\nunderstanding THE \nDISPOSSESSED is an idea expressed (of all places) in\nTHE BOOK OF \nTHE NEW SUN v.1 -- the passage of the lake of the\ndead in Hildegrin's\nboat, where Dorcas delivers herself of a little\nspeech on how the\ngood and the evil in the world remain in a kind of\nbalance between\ninternal and external. \n\nOf course, Le Guin isn't a Catholic, but move the\nidea in to her\nbelief-system and you have the key to THE\nDISPOSSESSED: each world \n_ought_ to be a Utopia, Urras because it has the\nresources, Anarres \nbecause it has the anarcho-Taoist philosophy: but\nneither quite makes \nit because it lacks what the other possesses. Each\nis dispossessed, \neach incomplete without the other. \n\nOf course, any simple mapping to THE DISPOSSESSED is\ngoing to be \nradically flawed because SHORT SUN contrasts four\nworlds, not two,\nand (counting roughly off the top of my head) at\nleast ten systems \nof governance -- Viron's, New Viron's, Gaon's,\nSoldo's, Blanko's, \nthe village on Green, the inhumi city, Dorp, uh, the\nplace at the\nend of the Whorl where Pig gets his eye, and the\nCommonwealth: all \ntheir governances are shown at least in miniature;\nall are offered\nto us in contrast with the others."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}