> ULG's plot on the other hand has no distinctive scientifically interesting peculiarity that it seems to be built on. It might as well have occurred on Earth j

> ULG's plot on the other hand has no distinctive scientifically interesting peculiarity that it seems to be built on. It might as well have occurred on Earth just as it does in 'Anarres' or 'Urras'. How bizarre. My reading -- and I was a kid, it was so long ago -- is this: Communism is inherently flawed because if resources can be accumulated then some will rise in wealth and power. If that country lacks the resources, then there are other countries from which they can be taken. But in the Disposessed this cannot happen. It is a thought experiment: how could one set up a communist society that would be stable and work? If you have a whole planet that has few resources, but it's colonized by another which has many. But planets are far apart. So instead, it's a moon. Moons are relatively close. Earth humans got there in the 1960s, almost without computers, without microprocessors. But why? OK, we have a big rich parent planet with lots of resources, but a troublesome political minority who aren't happy with the distribution of resources. That's certainly plausible. So they ship them offworld to the marginally-habitable moon. It needs help to get going but it's so bleak nobody wants it. (So no territory need be taken from anyone.) There can be no acquisition of external resources; it's too far away. There can be no emigration back to a better life, unless they build spacecraft. They're stuck there, but they wanted to be, to show that their system could work. (Though the children have no choice.) So they do. It's a beautiful carefully and minutely calculated model of how communism could be made to work, and it couldn't hang together unless it were a habitable moon of a more-habitable planet. It's perfect. It's flawless. It has to be how it is. It couldn't happen here or anywhere else.