The Once and Future Left: Reflections on China Miéville's 'October' and Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Dispossessed'
By Harry Hantel
Recently, I read two books as part of a leftism-focused reading group with a friend. We read October by China Miéville and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin before my friend’s law school responsibilities put our two-person reading group on hiatus.
In reflecting on these two books, I noticed their authors share a comity despite a wealth of baseline differences. October is nonfiction, a dramatization of the major players and events of Red October—the Russian Revolution of 1917—while The Dispossessed is Le Guin’s science fiction (a term she disdained) tale of a distant future society where the haves live on a prosperous planet and the have-nots on a desolate orbiting moon. Miéville and Le Guin are a fitting pair, however, as the former is better known for his own science fiction writing.
Miéville wrings every drop of drama from those famed Communist meetings deciding on hierarchies and the declarations made before taking action. Yes, Lenin wears a wig and disguise and smuggles himself across borders in and out of Russia, Rasputin poisons the opinions of Nicholas II’s court before being literally poisoned (and shot, and dropped into a freezing river). There is fighting between royalists and revolutionaries in the street, but for the most part, the book is tracking the movement of revolutionary feeling itself. That is to say, the moments those brave men and women decided to step off the ledge and upend their society. It happened in fits and starts at many contentious meetings.
Le Guin seems to pull a similar trick, grafting a philosophical discussion of the virtues of an anarchic society based on mutual aid and personal responsibility onto the tale of the brilliant scientist in exile, Shevek. The book alternates between Shevek’s present where he is wined and dined by the capitalists of A-Io on the planet Urras who seek his General Temporal Theory and chapters in which he pines for his lost home on the barren moon Annares. In an interview with The Paris Review, Le Guin said she was purposefully rendering a utopian society, specifically an anarchist one, as a response to the popularity of dystopia. “And at some point it occurred to me that nobody had written an anarchist utopia. We’d had socialist utopias and dystopias and all the rest, but anarchism—hey, that would be fun.”
I found myself invested in both of these approaches. I believe Le Guin and Miéville to be fair-minded even while acknowledging that it seems quite obvious where their sympathies lie. Miéville brings that little slice of history to life, reminding us that besides being liberating in a political or moral sense, revolution is, of course, exciting. You feel the fervor in the streets, the optimism of the proletariat as they seek to topple an empire, and the moments where that fervor waxes and wanes. Knowing how it all eventually goes wrong doesn’t diminish the power of the nascent movement. In Le Guin, we see a future that seems to have leapt forward in so many ways, yet Shevek still finds himself embroiled in a proletariat revolution hardly so different from the real one that took place in 20th century Russia. Even a society that can travel through space finds itself divided over the same old concerns: Food, money, shelter, and self-determination.
There’s a reason these books feel so urgent. Out of control oligarchy, a starving populace, war without reason or end: our present is not so far from either our past or this imagined possibility of our future. When Miéville says, “The regime is frantic. It experiments with combinations of concession and repression. And the revolution provokes not only bloody official crackdowns, but the traditional ultra-right sadism quasi-sanctioned by the state,” I felt the echoes of the Proud Boys standing down and standing by. When Le Guin describes the ebullient feeling of protest: “It was good to be outside, after the rooms with locked doors, the hiding places. It was good to be walking, swinging his arms, breathing the clear air of a spring morning. To be among so many people, so immense a crowd, thousands marching together, filling all the side streets as well as the broad thoroughfare down which they marched, was frightening but it was exhilarating too,” I thought of the ecstatic release after months of lockdown of hitting the streets of LA in June to protest police brutality and the feeling of oneness lost in isolation. These moments from both books vibrate with similarity to the events of our current historical moment.
Harry Hantel is a writer living in Los Angeles and a current student in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction or Non-Fiction.
