Re-Visiting Ursula Le Guin's the Dispossessed: Anarcho-Taoism and World Resource Management‪.‬

I called it "an ambiguous utopia". I think it's a perfectly natural step to go from Taoism to anarchism. That's what I found myself doing [in The Dispossessed]. They are definitely related, they appeal to the same type of person, the same bent of mind. (1) Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most influential science fiction and fantasy writers of the twentieth century and is easily the most prolific female author we have seen in relation to these, often male-dominated, genres. Born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, Le Guin has led a somewhat parochial lifestyle and has rarely ventured away from the "West Coast" since her return from Paris to live in Portland, Oregon, in 1958. (2) Her works received numerous awards and honours and they continue to be the subject of critical and analytical scrutiny across the academy. The series of novels that take place within her "Hainish Universe" (3) yield complexity and insight beyond the scope of most science fiction writers. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1975, was Le Guin's last Hainish universe novel to be published, but in the chronology of that world it is the first story to occur along the timeline. However, it is not this intricacy and combination of geographically plausible worlds and timelines that have made The Dispossessed a classic, but rather the unassailable philosophical contribution to Utopian discourse that it has made and continues to make.