The Moons of Le Guin and Heinlein

Strong similarities and sharp contrasts exist between Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Both books experiment imaginatively with anarchist societies that develop from colonies of exile, on a moon in Heinlein's book and on a twin planet in Le Guin's. In both cases, selective immigration, harsh new environment. and enforced isolation from the decaying parent culture dictate new social patterns. Extrapolating these new directions in which society might grow allows each author to create a model based on chosen philosophical principles. For Heinlein, the principles might be described as "masculine," individualist, libertarian, laissez-faire capitalist, anarchist, and Christian. For Le Guin, the principles might be described as feminist, communal, centrally coordinated, anarchist, and Taoist. In spite Of plot similarities between the books, the governing principles chosen by the two writers are often nearly diametrical in their opposition. The one exception to this is anarchism, which both books seem to espouse. Fundamentally, though. even this is a difference: Le Guin's anarchism is based on faith in the cooperative nature of humans, while Heinlein's is based on belief in the ultimate inability of large groups of humans to cooperate rationally. Like the adversarial but inescapably linked societies represented by Le Guin and Heinlein, these two books orbit each other, exerting strong mutual gravitational forces. Neither can be understood alone. (DGW

Art · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction · Zygmunt Bauman's Sociology

• Food from Nowhere

  Open Access•Chris Maughan•Open Library of Humanities•2018

  Add to list