Where to beginning!? Ursula (first name basis, cause what girl doesn’t remember the charismatic villain-ness in ‘The Little Mermaid’?), is a genius. We can talk about the social/political aspect of the book all day; two sister planets: one living in capitalistic sin with government spy power which gives rise to protests (sound familiar?), and a commune-planet, where everything is shared, from food and clothing, to child-rearing responsibilities and cistern cleaning jobs. There is even mention of the Terran aliens (us…), and their fall from grace due to over-consuming, over-mining, which left them with a broken system and an arid and sterile landscape (much like the commune-planet Anarres, but its without the brotherhood.) Terrans: we have been warned.
While all that is remarkably interesting, I was fascinated with the physics. Anything that mentions Zeno’s paradox will have me hook line and sinker. Dr. Shevek’s goal is to unify circular and linear time. The rise and setting of the sun, the motion of the clock, a plant’s orbit, the making and unmaking of a universe – these are all cyclical, in that there is no beginning, and no end. The notion of linear time only comes into existence due to our mortality. We are born, we live, we end. Therefore, is it not our ego that is in the way of unifying these two ideas of time? The same can be said about the two philosophical systems: it is only the ego that gets in the way of a common.
The way the story unravels is with purpose – again to unify this idea of time. It begins with a journey to another planet, then the book alternates between future and history, until it catches up to one another in the last two chapters. As great Odo philosophizes, “journey is return.” And like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” Shevek learns this lesson by doing just that.
“You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of the transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place that you have never been.”
“It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreading, grows better for being stepped on.”
“Well, we think that time ‘passes,’ flows past us; but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.”
JohannaAirth 