hich are paid for by mining Anarres's ores.
Though Odonian anarchy is founded on an idealistic principle of brotherly love and equality, the reality of their daily lives is the drudgery of mining and other grunt work, subsistence sharing of food, the aforementioned propaganda, and the teaching that everyone is mentally equal.
Nevertheless, Shevek manages to stand out as a prodigy. So he is sent to the University of Abbenay, where he has to work with a priggish, petty, intellectually jealous and credit- hogging physicist bureaucrat named Sabul if he wants any of his work published. In the nine years it takes Shevek to finally grasp the elusive fundamentals of his theory, he finds a female partner in a woman named Takver by whom he has children, is thwarted in his efforts to publish uncensored any theorem contra- dicting Sabul's, and becomes the intellectual lighting rod in an uprising of dissident Urrastis against CWG censorship of ideas.
Escaping the Abbenay Institute apartment that has become his prison, Shevek flees to the Terran Embassy. There he meets a female ambassador named Keng, who is sympathetic to his goal of giving his theory to all of Urras. He then flees to Urras aboard the ship Mindful to accept his prize, spending several years in nearly vain pursuit of finishing his theory. In the end, intend- ing to spread his theory around, he returns to Anarres to resume his life with Tvarek and their children.
Any discussion of Le Guin's assumptions must acknowledge that the story is intended both as serious political metaphor and as political satire. After all, the mother planet's name can be pronounced Urr-as, the ship taking Shevek there is called Mindful, and the secret meeting place of Anarrasti neo-revolutionaries is Joking Lane. Using as her metaphoric political models American capitalism and Russian communism, Le Guin rightly assumes that communist revolutionary leaders always become more oppressive than the tyr...