The Dispossessed
Anarres and Urras are twin worlds in orbit around each other. Anarres is a dry, dust-swept moon colonized generations ago by a revolutionary movement that abolished property and the state; Urras is its rich, familiar sister, divided into rival capitalist and authoritarian powers. Shevek is a brilliant Anarresti physicist working toward a general theory of time, and he is the first of his people to travel to Urras in nearly two centuries, hoping to share his work and bridge two systems that have declared each other monstrous. What he finds on both worlds forces him to reckon with the compromises freedom actually requires. Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 Hainish novel is one of the landmarks of political science fiction and still one of the most searching fictional experiments in anarchism.
Where The Dispossessed keeps showing up
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What you might want to know about The Dispossessed
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Brilliant physicist Shevek leaves the anarchist moon of Anarres to visit the lush capitalist planet Urras, where his ancestors came from. The novel alternates his time on Urras with the hard life that produced him.
Yes. The Dispossessed won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards in 1975. It is widely cited as one of the great science fiction novels of the 20th century alongside Ursula K. Le Guin's earlier The Left Hand of Darkness.
No. The Dispossessed is a standalone, though both novels share Le Guin's Hainish universe. Each can be read on its own. New readers often start with whichever they encounter first.
The Dispossessed was written by Ursula K. Le Guin, published in 1974 by Harper Voyager.
The Dispossessed is 400 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Dispossessed takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
The Dispossessed is a standalone novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, not part of a series.
The Dispossessed is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
