The Dispossessed and Invisible Man :: Invisible Man Essays

The dispossessed and Invisible Man Darko Suvin defines intuition fiction as a literary genre whose necessary and fitting conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal whatchamacallit (Suvin 7-8) is a fictional novum . . . a totalizing phenomenon or relationship (Suvin 64), locus and/or dramatis personae . . . radically or at least significantly alternative to the authors experimental environment simultaneously perceived as not impossible in spite of appearance 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 an some other world, another culture, can be, and it is the interface between those ii 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 stimulate throw at a tree, a rock that can never range of a function its target 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 beleaguers (Le Guin 289), as the underlying number, that is both unity 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 conscience (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 and the Hainish. This adopt to unbuild walls is his cellular function, his moral choice, but it is process and not end, a journey and fork over and not merely a repetitive, atemporal cycle (Le Guin 290-291). The paradox of sequence and simultaneousness is that nothing stays the same it is not the same river going by the bank, or the same wind blowing through the same tree as last spring.