Discontent is brewing.Ĭhief among these rebels against the rebellion is a brilliant young physicist called Shevek, whom we first meet him as he is escorted to a transport ship that will take him from Annares to Uras. New ideas are frowned on and feared, while greedy, self-interested people (derided as "propertarians" in the language the inhabitants have invented for themselves) have started to hog power. The revolution is no longer moving forward. But at the time the book opens, things have calcified. Incredibly, the people on Annares don't even mind sleeping in dorms. Close to Urras (I know! It's the funniest planet name since Uranus) there's an almost inhabitable desert world called Annares where the idealists set up an anarchistic society based on principles of shared wealth, shared responsibility and shared bedrooms. 150-odd years before the story opens there was a huge revolution – but instead of taking the more usual step of hanging their oppressors from lampposts, a large number of the revolutionaries fled to set up their own ideal society. The inequality on Urras has naturally provoked a great deal of anger. I'm talking about Ursula K Le Guin's 1975 Hugo award winner, The Dispossessed, and her vivid descriptions of the dystopian world of Urras. I'm not even talking about the future as envisaged by the Tea Party. No, I'm not talking about the next few years of Cameron and Clegg's reign of terror.
Any protests are put down with brutal force. The health service has been destroyed and those who cannot afford private care are crammed into ancient filthy hospitals where they go simply to die. They loathe the poor and have ensured they cannot escape poverty and receive only the minimum of education and state support.
The government contains only the sneering rich and serves only the sneering rich.
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