Shevek is an outcast in a communal culture. A brilliant physicist, he is despised by his neighbors for encouraging contact between the anarchist communities of Anarres and sympathizers on the hated capitalist home world, Urras. Shevek is troubled by isolationism and contempt in a society founded on universal brotherhood. Worse, a tough work ethic enforced by their harsh desert world has led to a creeping bureaucracy and even majority tyranny. Social laws and punishments are emerging unnoticed out of public opinion, eating away at the ideals of an egalitarian movement that had culminated in a mass emigration from Urras to Anarres two centuries before.

Blocked from getting his message across, Shevek takes the dangerous step of going to Urras, knowing he might not be able to return. There he's dazzled at first by the home world's luxury and lush beauty; but the Urrastis have "bought" him. They're enabling him to work unfettered in exchange for what they want most: his breakthrough comprehensive theory of time, which will make possible instantaneous travel and communication--and so domination--across space.

Shevek realizes his only chance of finding friends on Urras is among the dispossessed, those who, like himself (and all Anarreans), have nothing. He escapes into a world hid31den from him since his arrival, the slums inhabited by the despised poor. Welcomed as a symbol of those who once escaped persecution, Shevek joins a general strike and a mass demonstration; but the movement is ruthlessly suppressed and Shevek nearly joins the uncounted dead. Now a fugitive insurrectionist, Shevek's only hope is to risk being stoned as a traitor back home. He must find a way back to Anarres.

A search for utopia

Sometimes philosophy makes the best science fiction. There may be no better way of taking the measure of a society than to posit a second society, fundamentally different in morals, ethics, and customs but as richly textured as the first, and then spend a novel exploring one from the point of view of the other. Ursula Le Guin is a master at this art. She uses careful construction of key characters, thorough development of societal attitudes, and an unaffected, intimate narrative tone to create living worlds with complex cultures. In The Dispossessed, as with The Left Hand of Darkness, she immerses a single member of one society into the depths of the other.

Le Guin uses two parallel story lines in alternating chapters to tell Shevek's story, a reflection of Shevek's work on the simultaneity of time--all of time exists in unity even though it seems to proceed sequentially. One plot line follows the action on Urras. The other starts with Shevek's childhood and builds toward the crucial realization that his society is becoming enslaved by public opinion, and because they're convinced of their righteousness they can't even see it. This understanding parallels the unmasking of the Urrasti rich and his embrace of the dispossessed. The slow development of Shevek's disillusionment with Anarrean culture, but not with communal ideals, brings into focus at the critical moment the emotional complexity of Shevek's reaction to the crises on Urras.

The Dispossessed, which earned both a Hugo and a Nebula award, is an outstanding example of how to explore society as an organism that's fed by human interactions, reshaping and reshaped by the people and ideas that comprise it.