Another excellent example of speculative fiction by LeGuin. The first three Hainish novels are more traditional scifi, but like Left Hand of Darkness, this one is pure speculative fiction. On one of the world settled by humans long ago, a small group of people revolted from the capitalist society on Urras and moved to Anarres, a poor desert world in the same system. There they formed a perfectly socialist or communist society with no government, no leaders and a non-cash economy. Everyone works and everyone works where it is needed, no matter what the job. Enter into the world of Anarres Shevek, a brilliant physicist. When he struggles to complete his great theory, he goes to Urras to meet with other physicists. This disrupts both worlds and himself and his family.
This is a comparison of a egalitarian society vs. a capitalist society, without being idealistic. Really excellent and still relevant today. ( )

This is a transition novel, where Le Guin is beginning to move from straight SF and fantasy, to a mix of literary, philosophical, and sociological concerns. Though set in the future, the people of Urras and Annares are not future Earthlings, but, like us, descendant of the Hainish. Urras is a western capitalist culture. Annares is a large desert moon of Urras, settled by a self-titled anarchist group called the Odonians, after the revolutionary Odo, seen in the short story The Day before the Revolution. Annares is the ambiguous Utopia of the subtitle. The main character is a brilliant physicist Shevet, so wrapped up in theory, that most of the novel is his slow learning of how Annares has drifted from Odo's teachings, but also how Urras for all its comforts was worse and why it would breed revolutionaries. While there are long passages debating the issues, as befits a book in the Utopian mode, this is also a book with a strong emotional core and character development. One place felt very dated to me: the overt sexism of Urras seemed drawn straight from1950 pulp fiction and advertising and lacked the subtlety of the arguments about economics and social structure that occupy the rest of the novel.

Recommended. ( )

My friend had me read this, as it was her favorite book. It didn't really click with me at first, but I've been thinking of it ever since, and I think it has actually become one of my favorites.

In the afternoon, when he cautiously looked outside, he saw an armored car stationed across the street and two others slewed across the street at the crossing. That explained the shouts he had been hearing: it would be soldiers giving orders to each other.

Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. “You call that organization?” he had inquired. “You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency — a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?” This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. “But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own — you know, their homes, or some notion or other,” the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the Army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.

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