book set on Urras are still more exciting than the portions set on Anarres. Nevertheless, LeGuin's admission of social tension into her utopian society allows her to create a more textured story, and therefore a fuller social criticism, than is found in more traditional utopian works. In the course of the book, her overal framing device also allows her to offer her perspective on international relations in its relationship to social order as a whole, and it is on this aspect of the book that the following discussion will primarily focus.
Three levels of what effectively are international relations are operative in The Dispossessed. In order to understand them, and the interactions among them, it is necessary to sketch out the overall setting of the novel. It is placed in an extremely distant future, long after a period of interstellar colonization established human settlements on planets orbiting several nearby stars. Interstellar travel appears to have then been lost, until it was rediscovered a couple of generations before the time of the novel.
The planets Anarres and Urras, on which the story is set, form a double planet--each a "moon" of the other--orbiting the star Tau Ceti. Both are Earthlike and habitable, but whereas Urras is an ecologically rich planet, able to support a large population, Anarres is largely a desert world. The original colonists evidently ignored Anarres, and settled only on more attractive Urras. In the remote past, the society there evidently collapsed into primitive conditions; their recorded history only goes back a few thousand years, and references in the book imply that much of that history was at roughly a medieval level of society and technology, achieving industrialism only in the last few centuries.
Some two hundred years before the time of the story, there was an anarchist revolt on Urras. It was partially quelled, but the rebels were allowed to settle on nearby Urras. C...