Les Dépossédés Add a review

The Dispossessed (subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia) is a 1974 anarchist utopian science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, one of her seven Hainish Cycle novels. It is one of a small number of books to win all three awards—Hugo, Locus, and Nebula—for best science fiction or fantasy novel. It achieved a degree of literary recognition unusual for science fiction because of its exploration of themes such as anarchism and revolutionary societies, capitalism, utopia, individualism, and collectivism.

The novel features the development of the mathematical theory underlying a fictional ansible, a device capable of faster-than-light communication, which can send messages without delay, even between star systems. This device plays a critical role in the Hainish Cycle. The invention of the ansible places the novel first in the internal chronology of the Hainish Cycle, although it was the fifth to be published.