The Dispossessed and Invisible Man :: Invisible Man Essays

The Dispossessed and Invisible Man Darko Suvin defines science apologue as a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and fundamental interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device (Suvin 7-8) is a fictional novum . . . a totalizing phenomenon or relationship (Suvin 64), locus and/or dramatis personae . . . radically or at least(prenominal) significantly alternative to the authors empirical environment simultaneously perceived as not impossible within the cognitive (cosmological and anthropological) norms of the authors epoch (Suvin viii). Unlike fantasy, science fiction is set in a realistic world, but one strange, alien. Only there are limits to how alien another world, another culture, can be, and it is the interface amidst those two realms that can give science fiction its power, by making us look back at ourselves from its skewed perspective. The Dispossessed takes as its novum a general theory of time, illustrated by the paradox of a rock thrown at a tree, a rock that can never reach its draw a bead on because theres always half of the way left to go (Le Guin 26). Shevek, Le Guins protagonist and formulator of the general temporal theory, sees himself as one who unbuilds argues (Le Guin 289), as the primal number, that is both adept and plurality (Le Guin 30) crossing interfaces. Walls abound in The Dispossessed the wall between Anarres and Urras (Le Guin 1-2), the wall that separates one individual from every other (Le Guin 6), the wall of social scruples (Le Guin 287), the wall between men and women (Le Guin 14-16), the wall of time--Zenos paradox--the limit that prevents the rock from striking the tree (Le Guin 26). But as Shevek knows, the rock does strike the tree that is the joke (Le Guin 27). The wall can be crossed. He crosses it when he leaves Anarres he crosses it in his love for Takver and Sadik he crosses it with the Syndic of Iniative, and he crosses it with the Terrans an d the Hainish. This need to unbuild walls is his cellular function, his moral choice, but it is process and not end, a journey and return and not merely a repetitive, atemporal cycle (Le Guin 290-291). The paradox of sequence and simultaneity is that nothing stays the same it is not the same river spillage past the bank, or the same wind blowing through the same tree as last spring.