All quotes from the novel:
Chapter 3:
This room was evidently for his sole use, as it opened off the bedroom, and contained only one of each kind of fixture, though each was of a sensuous luxury that far surpassed mere eroticism and partook, in Shevek’s view, of a kind of ultimate apotheosis of the excremental.
Since those days Shevek had worked with many people of talent, but because he had never been a full-time member of the Abbenay Institute, he had never been able to take them far enough; they remained bogged down in the old problems, the classical Sequency physics. He had had no equals. Here, in the realm of inequity, he met them at last.
Pae coughed. “Scientists. Oh, yes, certainly, they’re all men. There are some female teachers in the girls’ schools, of course. But they never get past Certificate level.”
Reminded me of how girls' schools were originally staffed by female teachers. They have lower qualifications because they couldn't access them.
Shevek returned to sit on the marble seat by the hearth, which he already felt as his seat, his territory. He wanted a territory. He felt the need for caution. But he felt more strongly the need that had brought him across the dry abyss from the other world, the need for communication, the wish to unbuild walls.
The wall. Shevek knew the wall, by now, when he came up against it. The wall was this young man’s charm, courtesy, indifference.
.
“I think you are afraid of me, Pae,” he said, abruptly and genially.
“Afraid of you, sir?” “Because I am, by my existence, disproof of the necessity of the state. But what is to fear? I will not hurt you, Saio Pae, you know. I am personally quite harmless…Listen, I am not a doctor. We do not use titles. I am called Shevek.”
“I know, I’m sorry, sir. In our terms, you see, it seems disrespectful. It just doesn’t seem right.” He apologized winningly, expecting forgiveness.
“Can you not recognize me as an equal?” Shevek asked, watching him without either forgiveness or anger.
Pae was for once nonplused. “But really, sir, you are, you know, a very important man—”
“There is no reason why you should change your habits for me,” Shevek said. “It does not matter. I thought you might be glad to be free of the unnecessary, that’s all.”
I love this exchange.
A-Io had led the world for centuries, they said, in ecological control and the husbanding of natural resources. The excesses of the Ninth Millennium were ancient history, their only lasting effect being the shortage of certain metals, which fortunately could be imported from the Moon.
Reading over this bit again, it strikes me as odd that Le Guin didn't include the fact that Anarres is essentially a 'free' mining colony of Urras in the discussion that Shevek has with the Keng (the Terran ambassador). It would've been a stronger hit in how Urras is hell and how it being hell continues to impact on Anarres's ability to communicate and interact with other planets and species.
Laia Asieo Odo 698—769 To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.
I still really like this epitaph.
“You have so much,” Shevek said to the engineer who had taken charge of him, a man named Oegeo. “You have so much to work with, and you work with it so well. This is magnificent—the coordination, the cooperation, the greatness of the enterprise.”
“Couldn’t swing anything on this scale where you come from, eh?” the engineer said, grinning.
“Spaceships? Our space fleet is the ships the Settlers came in from Urras—built here on Urras—nearly two centuries ago. To build just a ship to carry grain across the sea, a barge, it takes a year’s planning, a big effort of our economy.”
Oegeo nodded. “Well, we’ve got the goods, all right. But you know, you’re the man who can tell us when to scrap this whole job—throw it all away.”
“Throw it away? What do you mean?”
“Faster than light travel,” Oegeo said. “Transilience. The old physics says it isn’t possible. The Terrans say it isn’t possible. But the Hainish, who after all invented the drive we use now, say that it is possible, only they don’t know how to do it, because they’re just learning temporal physics from us. Evidently if it’s in anybody’s pocket, anybody in the known worlds, Dr. Shevek, it’s in yours.”
This interaction is really good, too.
When they were in the car and the chauffeur was closing the doors, Chifoilisk (another probable source of Pae’s ill humor) asked, “What did you want to see another castle for, Shevek? Should have thought you’d had enough old ruins to hold you for a while.”
“The Fort in Drio was where Odo spent nine years,” Shevek replied. His face was set, as it had been since he talked with Oegeo. “After the Insurrection of 747. She wrote the Prison Letters there, and the Analogy.”
“Afraid it’s been pulled down,” Pae said sympathetically. “Drio was a moribund sort of town, and the Foundation just wiped out and started fresh.”
I enjoy some of the parallels that Odo has with past radicals. Specifically, we get a call back to Gramsci's Prison Notebooks here.
I have been here for a long time, the room said to Shevek, and I am still here. What are you doing here?
He had no answer. He had no right to all the grace and bounty of this world, earned and maintained by the work, the devotion, the faithfulness of its people. Paradise is for those who make Paradise. He did not belong. He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their past, their history. The Settlers of Anarres had turned their backs on the Old World and its past, opted for the future only. But as surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forgo the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile.
Chapter 4:
They brought fossil oils and petroleum products, certain delicate machine parts and electronic components that Anarresti manufacturing was not geared to supply, and often a new strain of fruit tree or grain for testing. They took back to Urras a full load of mercury, copper, aluminum, uranium, tin, and gold. It was, for them, a very good bargain. The division of their cargoes eight times a year was the most prestigious function of the Urrasti Council of World Governments and the major event of the Urrasti world stock market. In fact, the Free World of Anarres was a mining colony of Urras.
The fact galled. Every generation, every year, in the PDC debates of Abbenay, fierce protests were made: “Why do we continue these profiteering business transactions with warmaking propertarians?” And cooler heads always gave the same answer: “It would cost the Urrasti more to dig the ores themselves; therefore they don’t invade us. But if we broke the trade agreement, they would use force.” It is hard, however, for people who have never paid money for anything to understand the psychology of cost, the argument of the marketplace. Seven generations of peace had not brought trust.
See, this bit right here should've been brought up again in the conversation with Keng because it would've worked well to highlight the idea of "This may be your paradise, but your paradise is built upon the backs of those it still harms and holds sway over."
Therefore the work-posting called Defense never had to call for volunteers. Most Defense work was so boring that it was not called work in Pravic, which used the same word for work and play, but kleggich, drudgery. Defense workers manned the twelve old interplanetary ships, keeping them repaired and in orbit as a guard network; maintained radar and radio-telescopic scans in lonesome places; did dull duty at the Port. And yet they always had a waiting list. However pragmatic the morality a young Anarresti absorbed, yet life overflowed in him, demanding altruism, self-sacrifice, scope for the absolute gesture. Loneliness, watchfulness, danger, spaceships: they offered the lure of romance.
For two hundred years after the first landing Anarres was explored, mapped, investigated, but not colonized. Why move to a howling desert when there was plenty of room in the gracious valleys of Urras?
But it was mined. The self-plundering eras of the Ninth and early Tenth Millennia had left the lodes of Urras empty; and as rocketry was perfected, it became cheaper to mine the Moon than to extract needed metals from low-grade ores or sea water. In the Urrasti year IX-738 a settlement was founded at the foot of the Ne Thera Mountains, where mercury was mined, in the old Ans Hos. They called the place Anarres Town. It was not a town, there were no women. Men signed on for two or three years’ duty as miners or technicians, then went home to the real world.
The Moon and its mines were under the jurisdiction of the Council of World Governments, but around in the Moon’s eastern hemisphere the nation of Thu had a little secret: a rocket base and a settlement of goldminers, with their wives and children. They really lived on the Moon, but nobody knew it except their government. It was the collapse of that government in the year 771 that led to the proposal, in the Council of World Governments, of giving the Moon to the International Society of Odonians—buying them off with a world, before they fatally undermined the authority of law and national sovereignty on Urras. Anarres Town was evacuated, and from the midst of the turmoil in Thu a couple of hasty final rockets were sent to pick up the goldminers. Not all of them chose to return. Some of them liked the howling desert.
For over twenty years the twelve ships granted to the Odonian Settlers by the Council of World Governments went back and forth between the worlds, until the million souls who chose the new life had all been brought across the dry abyss. Then the port was closed to immigration and left open only to the freight ships of the Trade Agreement. By then Anarres Town held a hundred thousand people, and had been renamed Abbenay, which meant, in the new language of the new society, Mind.
Ugh, I love this description. It's frustrating but also gorgeously written.
Decentralization had been an essential element in Odo’s plans for the society she did not live to see founded. She had no intention of trying to de-urbanize civilization. Though she suggested that the natural limit to the size of a community lay in its dependence on its own immediate region for essential food and power, she intended that all communities be connected by communication and transportation networks, so that goods and ideas would get where they were wanted, and the administration of things might work with speed and ease, and no community should be cut off from change and interchange. But the network was not to be run from the top down. There was to be no controlling center, no capital, no establishment for the self-perpetuating machinery of bureaucracy and the dominance drive of individuals seeking to become captains, bosses, chiefs of state.
Her plans, however, had been based on the generous ground of Urras.
When Shevek was nine his afternoon schoolwork for several months had been caring for the ornamental plants in Wide Plains community—delicate exotics, that had to be fed and sunned like babies. He had assisted an old man in the peaceful and exacting task, had liked him and liked the plants, and the dirt, and the work. When he saw the color of the Plain of Abbenay he remembered the old man, and the smell of fish-oil manure, and the color of the first leafbuds on small bare branches, that clear vigorous green.
The elements that made up Abbenay were the same as in any other Odonian community, repeated many times: workshops, factories, domiciles, dormitories, learning centers, meeting halls, distributories, depots, refectories. The bigger buildings were most often grouped around open squares, giving the city a basic cellular texture: it was one subcommunity or neighborhood after another. Heavy industry and food-processing plants tended to cluster on the city’s outskirts, and the cellular pattern was repeated in that related industries often stood side by side on a certain square or street.
Children were around, some involved in the work with the adults, some underfoot making mudpies, some busy with games in the street, one sitting perched up on the roof of the learning center with her nose deep in a book.
No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.
Shevek turned to go. Sabul raised his growl: “Keep those books with you! They’re not for general consumption.”
The young man paused, turned back, and said after a moment in his calm, rather diffident voice, “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t let anybody else read them!”
I kind of wish Sabul took a stronger presence to further highlight the irony of possession in a society without possessions.
Sabul got up again and came close to him. “Listen. You’re now a member of the Central Institute of Sciences, a Physics syndic, working with me, Sabul. You follow that? Privilege is responsibility. Correct?”
“I’m to acquire knowledge which I’m not to share,” Shevek said after a brief pause, stating the sentence as if it were a proposition in logic.
“If you found a pack of explosive caps in the street would you ‘share’ them with every kid that went by? Those books are explosives. Now do you follow me?”
“Yes.”
“All right” Sabul turned away, scowling with what appeared to be an endemic, not a specific rage. Shevek left, carrying the dynamite carefully, with revulsion and devouring curiosity.
He set to work to learn Iotic. He worked alone in Room 46, because of Sabul’s warning, and because it came only too naturally to him to work alone.
Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it. The reliable and affectionate presence of adults who are also, in their own way, different, is the only reassurance such a child can have; and Shevek had not had it. His father had indeed been utterly reliable and affectionate. Whatever Shevek was and whatever he did, Palat approved and was loyal. But Palat had not had this curse of difference. He was like the others, like all the others to whom community came so easy. He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person’s solitude which alone transcends it.
Thus Shevek discovered that not only petroleum and mercury went back and forth between the sundered worlds, and not only books, such as the books he had been reading, but also letters. Letters! Letters to propertarians, to subjects of governments founded on the inequity of power, to individuals who were inevitably exploited by and exploiters of others, because they had consented to be elements in the State-Machine. Did such people actually exchange ideas with free people in a nonaggressive, voluntary manner? Could they really admit equality and participate in intellectual solidarity, or were they merely trying to dominate, to assert their power, to possess? The idea of actually exchanging letters with a propertarian alarmed him, but it would be interesting to find out…
The first, and still the least acceptable, of these discoveries was that he was supposed to learn Iotic but keep his knowledge to himself: a situation so new to him and morally so confusing that he had not yet worked it out. Evidently he did not exactly harm anybody by not sharing his knowledge with them. On the other hand what conceivable harm could it do them to know that he knew Iotic, and that they could learn it too? Surely freedom lay rather in openness than in secrecy, and freedom is always worth the risk. He could not see what the risk was, anyway. It occurred to him once that Sabul wanted to keep the new Urrasti physics private—to own it, as a property, a source of power over his colleagues on Anarres. But this idea was so counter to Shevek’s habits of thinking that it had great difficulty getting itself clear in his mind, and when it did he suppressed it at once, with contempt, as a genuinely disgusting thought.
Then there was the private room, another moral thorn. As a child, if you slept alone in a single it meant you had bothered the others in the dormitory until they wouldn’t tolerate you; you had egoized. Solitude equated with disgrace. In adult terms, the principal referent for single rooms was a sexual one. Every domicile had a number of singles, and a couple that wanted to copulate used one of these free singles for a night, or a decad, or as long as they liked. A couple undertaking partnership took a double room; in a small town where no double was available, they often built one on to the end of a domicile, and long, low, straggling buildings might thus be created room by room, called “partners’ truck trains.” Aside from sexual pairing there was no reason for not sleeping in a dormitory. You could choose a small one or a large one, and if you didn’t like your roommates, you could move to another dormitory. Everybody had the workshop, laboratory, studio, barn, or office that he needed for his work; one could be as private or as public as one chose in the baths; sexual privacy was freely available and socially expected; and beyond that privacy was not functional. It was excess, waste. The economy of Anarres would not support the building, maintenance, heating, lighting of individual houses and apartments. A person whose nature was genuinely unsociable had to get away from society and look after himself. He was completely free to do so. He could build himself a house wherever he liked (though if it spoiled a good view or a fertile bit of land he might find himself under heavy pressure from his neighbors to move elsewhere). There were a good many solitaries and hermits on the fringes of the older Anarresti communities, pretending that they were not members of a social species. But for those who accepted the privilege and obligation of human solidarity, privacy was a value only where it served a function.
There was always a dessert at the Institute refectory at dinner. Shevek enjoyed it very much, and when there were extras he took them. And his conscience, his organic-societal conscience, got indigestion. Didn’t everybody at every refectory, from Abbenay to Uttermost, get the same, share and share alike? He had always been told so and had always found it so. Of course there were local variations: regional specialties, shortages, surpluses, makeshifts in situations such as Project Camps, poor cooks, good cooks, in fact an endless variety within the unchanging framework. But no cook was so talented that he could make a dessert without the makings. Most refectories served dessert once or twice a decad. Here it was served nightly. Why? Were the members of the Central Institute of the Sciences better than other people?
Shevek did not ask these questions of anyone else. The social conscience, the opinion of others, was the most powerful moral force motivating the behavior of most Anarresti, but it was a little less powerful in him than in most of them. So many of his problems were of a kind other people did not understand that he had got used to working them out for himself, in silence. So he did with these problems, which were much harder for him, in some ways, than those of temporal physics. He asked no one’s opinion. He stopped taking dessert at the refectory.
He did not, however, move to a dormitory. He weighed the moral discomfort against the practical advantage, and found the latter heavier. He worked better in the private room. The job was worth doing and he was doing it well. It was centrally functional to his society. The responsibility justified the privilege.
So he worked.
He looked at the book the older man held out: a thin book, bound in green, the Circle of Life on the cover. He took it and looked at the title page: “A Critique of Atro’s Infinite Sequency Hypothesis.” It was his essay, Atro’s acknowledgment and defense, and his reply. It had all been translated or retranslated into Pravic, and printed by the PDC presses in Abbenay. There were two authors’ names: Sabul, Shevek.
Sabul craned his neck over the copy Shevek held, and gloated. His growl became throaty and chuckling. “We’ve finished Atro. Finished him, the damned profiteer! Now let them try to talk about ‘puerile imprecision’!” Sabul had nursed ten years’ resentment against the Physics Review of Ieu Eun University, which had referred to his theoretical work as “crippled by provincialism and the puerile imprecision with which Odonian dogma infects every area of thought.” “They’ll see who’s provincial now!” he said, grinning. In nearly a year’s acquaintance Shevek could not recall having seen him smile.
Shevek sat down across the room, clearing a pile of papers off a bench to do so; the physics office was of course communal, but Sabul kept this back room of the two littered with materials he was using, so that there never seemed to be quite room for anyone else. Shevek looked down at the book he still held, then out the window. He felt, and looked, rather ill. He also looked tense; but with Sabul he had never been shy or awkward, as he often was with people whom he would have liked to know. “I didn’t know you were translating it,” he said.
“Translated it, edited it. Polished some of the rougher spots, filled in transitions you’d left out, and so forth. Couple of decads’ work. You should be proud of it, your ideas to a large extent form the groundwork of the finished book.”
It consisted entirely of Shevek’s and Atro’s ideas.
“Yes,” Shevek said. He looked down at his hands. Presently he said, “I’d like to publish the paper I wrote this quarter on Reversibility. It ought to go to Atro. It would interest him. He’s still hung up on causation.”
“Publish it? Where?”
“In Iotic, I meant—on Urras. Send it to Atro, like this last one, and he’ll put it in one of the journals there.”
“You can’t give them a work to publish that hasn’t been printed here.”
“But that’s what we did with this one. All this, except my rebuttal, came out in the Ieu Eun Review—before this came out here.”
“I couldn’t prevent that, but why do you think I hurried this into print? You don’t think everybody in PDC approves of our trading ideas with Urras like this, do you? Defense insists that every word that leaves here on those freighters be passed by a PDC-approved expert. And on top of that, do you think all the provincial physicists who don’t get in on this pipeline to Urras don’t begrudge our using it? Think they aren’t envious? There are people lying in wait, lying in wait for us to make a false step. If we’re ever caught doing it, we’ll lose that mail slot on the Urrasti freighters. You see the picture now?”
“How did the Institute get that mail slot in the first place?”
“Pegvur’s election to the PDC, ten years ago.” Pegvur had been a physicist of moderate distinction. “I’ve trod damned carefully to keep it, ever since. See?”
Shevek nodded.
“In any case, Atro doesn’t want to read that stuff of yours. I looked that paper over and gave it back to you decads ago. When are you going to stop wasting time on these reactionary theories Gvarab clings to? Can’t you see she’s wasted her whole life on ’em? If you keep at it, you’re going to make a fool of yourself. Which, of course, is your inalienable right. But you’re not going to make a fool of me.”
“What if I submit the paper for publication here, in Pravic, then?”
“Waste of time.”
Shevek absorbed this with a slight nod. He got up, lanky and angular, and stood a moment, remote among his thoughts. The winter light lay harsh on his hair, which he now wore pulled back in a queue, and his still face. He came to the desk and took a copy off the little stock of new books. “I’d like to send one of these to Mitis,” he said.
“Take all you want. Listen. If you think you know what you’re doing better than I do, then submit that paper to the Press. You don’t need permission! This isn’t some kind of hierarchy, you know! I can’t stop you. All I can do is give you my advice.”
“You’re the Press Syndicate’s consultant on manuscripts in physics,” Shevek said. “I thought I’d save time for everyone by asking you now.”
His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.
“Save time, what do you mean?” Sabul growled, but Sabul was also an Odonian: he writhed as if physically tormented by his own hypocrisy, turned away from Shevek, turned back to him, and said spitefully, his voice thick with anger. “Go ahead! Submit the damned thing! I’ll declare myself incompetent to give counsel on it. I’ll tell them to consult Gvarab. She’s the Simultaneity expert, not I. The mystical gagaist! The universe as a giant harp-string, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I suppose? The fact is that I am incompetent—in other words, unwilling—to counsel PDC or the Press on intellectual excrement!”
“The work I’ve done for you,” Shevek said, “is part of the work I’ve done following Gvarab’s ideas in Simultaneity. If you want one, you’ll have to stand the other. Grain grows best in shit, as we say in Northsetting.”
He stood a moment, and getting no verbal reply from Sabul, said goodbye and left.
He knew he had won a battle, and easily, without apparent violence. But violence had been done.
As Mitis had predicted, he was “Sabul’s man.” Sabul had ceased to be a functioning physicist years ago; his high reputation was built on expropriations from other minds. Shevek was to do the thinking, and Sabul would take the credit.
Obviously an ethically intolerable situation, which Shevek would denounce and relinquish. Only he would not. He needed Sabul. He wanted to publish what he wrote and to send it to the men, who could understand it, the Urrasti physicists; he needed their ideas, their criticism, their collaboration.
So they had bargained, he and Sabul, bargained like profiteers. It had not been a battle, but a sale. You give me this and I’ll give you that. Refuse me and I’ll refuse you. Sold? Sold! Shevek’s career, like the existence of his society, depended on the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract. Not a relationship of mutual aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship; not organic, but mechanical. Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?
At the clinic they diagnosed his insanity as a light pneumonia and told him to go to bed in Ward Two. He protested. The aide accused him of egoizing and explained that if he went home a physician would have to go to the trouble of calling on him there and arranging private care for him. He went to bed in Ward Two.
This is something I'd love to say to people engaged in private healthcare.
I know Abbenay is a forbidding place at first. One feels lost, isolated, lacking the simple solidarity the little towns have. I know interesting people, whom you might like to meet. And people who might be useful to you. I know Sabul; I have some notion of what you may have come up against, with him, and with the whole Institute. They play dominance games there. It takes some experience to know how to outplay them.
He gave way to the fear that had come with her, the sense of the breaking of promises, the incoherence of time. He broke. He began to cry, trying to hide his face in the shelter of his arms, for he could not find the strength to turn over. One of the old men, the sick old men, came and sat on the side of the cot and patted his shoulder. “It’s all right, brother. It’ll be all right, little brother,” he muttered. Shevek heard him and felt his touch, but took no comfort in it. Even from the brother there is no comfort in the bad hour, in the dark at the foot of the wall.