The Dispossessed takes place on twin planets: Urras, a lush world that supports a number of diverse nations, and Anarres, Urras' arid moon. Two centuries before the story begins, the followers of the anarchist philosopher Odo, seeking an alternative to the oppression and corruption of Urras, established a utopian society on Anarres.

The Anarresti anarchists aren't the bomb-throwing, chaos-loving dissidents of popular imagination, but idealists who believe that most human ills grow from living under governments, and that the only just society is one based upon communal sharing, mutual tolerance, and voluntary cooperation.

On Anarres there are no laws, no property, no governors, no nations, no money, no marriage, no police, and no prisons. Even the language, deliberately created by the colony's first settlers, reflects anti-propertarian ideals: there are no possessive pronouns.

The book follows the journey of Shevek is a physicist who possesses the kind of genius that comes only once in many generations. His life's work is to unite the principles of Sequency (time moves forward in a linear fashion, like an arrow) and Simultaneity (all times are present at once; it is we who move) into a General Temporal Theory. But in the environment of Anarres, he can't complete this work that diverges radically from conventional Anarresti physics, are not welcome.

He to travels to Urras, to the wealthy and decadent nation of A-Io. In A-Io, Shevek is confronted by the differences between the two societies. As he struggles to assimilate them, he begins to see that the haven he thought he had found is in fact a jail. He faces an impossible dilemma: how, imprisoned by his own choice, can he behave like a free man? How, on Urras, can he remain a true Anarresti?

It's a book of opposites: a utopian novel that doesn't flinch from exposing the flaws of its model society, a social commentary that presents communal cooperation as the truest human ideal, yet focuses on the inevitable separateness of the creative individual within such a structure.

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