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Title: Excellent Novel of Ideas
Review: This is an excellent novel of ideas. Leguin portrays a nearly stateless society based on small groups of communes inhabiting a arid planet. The residents are exiles from a capitalistic planet, and Leguin uses the capitalist planet as a foil for her utopia. The novel was written in the early 70s when there were still hundreds, maybe thousands of active communes across America and the book is a speculation about how these social ideas might play out if used on a large scale society. The subtitle is 'an ambiguous utopia', Leguin tries to be realistic about the problems that human nature presents to such a society. My only criticism of this novel is that the pace is a bit slow at times, following the life history of the main protagonist sometimes in too much detail.
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