The story of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is told in alternating time periods: present, past, present, then mostly past leading to the present. In a section of the Milky Way Galaxy several light years from Earth, a genius 38-year-old physicist named Shevek is transported from his native home, the anarchist society moon of Anarres, to the mother capitalist and sexist planet of Urras. (Women must shave their heads and are forbidden male jobs.) There he will be awarded the Seo Oen prize in physics nine years late for his book "Principles of Simultaneity". He will also live among other scientists at Ieu Eun University while polishing his theory, the idea of which has two basic applica- tions: instantaneous communication through light years of space and instantaneous travel through same.
Shevek sees his theory as a means to international communi- cation and, therefore, brotherly communion. The warmongering Council of World Governments (CWG), however, sees it as a means to further profiteering by sending war ships to enslave their Hainish competitors and the people of other planets.
Shevek himself is the product of Odonian society and culture, whose ancestors 170 years earlier exiled themselves from Urras, guided by the communistic plans and principles of the late female anti-government revolutionary, Laia Asieo Odo (698-769 in Urrasti years). Odo's plans, which were based on the rich natural resources of Urras, can barely be maintained on the dry, cold, windy and bleak desert moon of Anarres.
For 200 years before and during Odo's time, Anarres was a mining colony of the Urrastian nation of Thu, a member of the CWG. When the Odonian revolution caused the Thuvian government to collapse in 771, the CWG bought off the one million revolution- aries by giving them the moon of Anarres. Thereafter, the Odonians and Urrastians demonized each other with propaganda while remaining linked by the Odonians' need for Urras's resources, w...