The Dispossessed

Content Ratings

Mild Romance

Shevek's marriage to Takver is a central and deeply loving partnership; physical and emotional intimacy is present but treated with Le Guin's characteristically understated warmth rather than explicit description.

Intense Themes

The novel mounts a sustained comparison of anarchist and capitalist societies, exploring how each fails its people, alongside themes of intellectual freedom, the ethics of national loyalty, and individual cost in collective systems.

Mild Violence

A protest on Urras is met with violent suppression by state forces; the scene is brutal but brief; the novel's conflict is primarily philosophical and social rather than physical.

Synopsis

Physicist Shevek leaves his anarchist homeworld of Anarresâ€”a society of austere collective equalityâ€”to visit its twin capitalist planet Urras, and the novel alternates between his life on both worlds as he seeks to complete a unified theory of time that neither world can produce alone. A rigorous and searching novel that takes both anarchism and capitalism seriously as systems with genuine costs and benefits. One of science fiction's most politically and philosophically substantial works.