I just recently got a new copy of The Dispossessed.

[conuly]

Which just happens to be one of my favorite Le Guin books ever. (Never could get into Earthsea, but this one is just after Catwings in my esteem, and you KNOW Catwings rocks.)

So I re-read it, naturally, and enjoyed it and all that... but I have to wonder: How different would this book have been if it had been written after email?

Comments

[legendary-zelda.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a really good book! I haven't read it in a good long while. I should put it on my re-read list.

I can't answer the question about email though, since it's been so long since I read it that I can't remember many plot details.

[conuly]

Much of the plot focuses around the logistics of mail delivery and organizing phone calls at a specific time (so as to save on paper and labor - they're still using manual switchboards!), and one of the ways they're constantly kept from sharing any information with the other world is with the reasonable sounding justification that they simply don't have the resources to send mail off-world unless it's for a really good reason.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

I never thought of that but I assume it would still be about cost. It takes energy to run the servers the same as anything else.

[conuly]

We're told that what with wind power and another source of power (geothermal?) they actually run a small surplus.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Woot, that's one of my favorite LeGuin books too, and one of the few alien societies in which I could picture living reasonably happily. (I don't count the future human society in Always Coming Home as 'alien'.)

Couple days ago, I re-read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (http://www.amazon.com/Moon-Harsh-Mistress-Robert-Heinlein/dp/0312863551/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top) by Robert Heinlein - set in 2075, but written in 1966, five years before the invention of the microprocessor. It's still an utterly awesome book, but now it reads like some sort of steampunk AU: they're still using microfilm, electric typewriters, paper computer print-outs.

The science gap stands out especially clearly because the leader of the Revolution to Free Luna is in fact a computer - THE Computer, so amazingly advanced that he's 'woken up' to sentient self-awareness - so Heinlein threw in a lot of gee-whiz cybernetics, finest of its kind in his day, guaranteed to impress his adult scientist readers. Which was great, only now most of it is so obsolete that those electronics components are sold as collector's items.