When I was seven(not)teen, it was a very good year...

Photo from Mathias Degen, Cologne, Germany
(Wikimedia Commons)

The Novel of the "sixties?"
In his study guide to Dispossessed, Paul Brians identifies Dispossessed as a product of the sixties: "All of these are values much promoted in the counterculture of the "Sixties" (which lasted from approximately 1967 to 1974); and the novel is clearly a product of its time. In many ways, Annares is an idealized hippie commune." (http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/dispossessed.html) I mention this quote here, because, curiously enough, the novel was published in 1974, (the end of this era,) and the concurrent theoretical reading was from Michel Foucault's speech given in 1964, (the beginning of this era.) That Dr. Sparks is a clever one to arrange such readings, yes?

There is so much material in the readings to cover, but let me touch on a few items regarding (ana)chronisms that were of interest to me.

Michel Foucault in 1967 - a couple of anachronisms and a flash of prescience:

**The pressing problem is, not time, but space?

"In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography. This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world -a problem that is certainly quite important.... In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time."

The sixties were replaced by the seventies and eighties with the "greed is good/time is money" age that saw the invention of the fax machine, the portable phone, and the ubiquitous proliferation of the DayTimer. Seems like the concern for time outweighed the concern for space, just as the concern for personal wealth outweighed the communal concern for the planet Earth.

**Before systematization of deconstructive/postmodern theory:

"These utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces. There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society..."

Note the use of the words "real" and "unreal." Ah, deconstructionist/postmodern theory in its infancy, before its theology had become systematized. No self-respecting quoter of Foucault would reify social constructs with such terminology today.

**Prescience? The exclusion of the "other?"

"Heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons, and ... retirement homes...."

Wow, Michel - the marginalization, exclusion, and expulsion of the different in favor of reifying the status quo of the dominant system. Hit that one right on the head!

Dispossessed, published in 1974, a recurring anachronism, and a flash of prescience:

**Why can;t we get away from Led Zeppelin and the Goodyear Blimp?
The "airship" or dirigible makes an appearance here, just as it does on so many SciFi works from H.G. Wells to C.S. Lewis to Jules Verne to late 20th-century "steampunk" SciFi. But, even with catastrophes like the recent New York stories, we can;t seem to get over "the humanity" of the Hindenburg.

**The ansible - an idea whose time has come!
Since the dawn of (Star Trek) time, we have yearned for teleportation - or what Le Guin's Shevek calls "transilliance." But, alas, what with the tragedy of Jeff Goldblum's failed experiment in The Fly... So, we have settled on a transference, not of physical bodies, but of ideas. The problem as explained in Dispossessed sounds like the pre-telephone era of Earth history - but it's different. Whereas the telephone can carry voice, and the telegraph words, and the fax a duplicate copy - or at least a reasonable facsimile - of a document - we are now using different means than that to communicate. Not quite the transilliance of the physical person from one place to another - but an increasingly media-rich connectivity that includes video, voice, presentation graphics, collaborative real-time tools, and other interactive features. This new connectivity approaches the "ansible" in ways that might have been hard for Le Guin to have imagined in 1974.