The Dispossessed (in later printings titled The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia) is a 1974 anarchist utopian science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, one of her seven Hainish Cycle novels. It is one of a small number of books to win all three Hugo, Locus and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. It achieved a degree of literary recognition unusual for science fiction due to its exploration of themes such as anarchism and revolutionary societies, capitalism, utopia, and individualism and collectivism. It features the development of the mathematical theory underlying a fictional ansible, a device capable of faster-than-light communication (it can send messages without delay, even between star systems) that plays a critical role in the Hainish Cycle. The invention of the ansible places the novel first in the internal chronology of the Hainish Cycle, although it was the fifth published. Background In her introduction to the Library of America reprint in 2017, reflecting back some 40 years from late in her life, the author wrote: Le Guin's parents, academic anthropologists Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, were friends with J. Robert Oppenheimer; Le Guin stated that Oppenheimer was the model for Shevek, the book's protagonist. Meaning of the title It has been suggested that Le Guin's title is a reference to Dostoyevsky's novel about anarchists, Demons (, Bésy), one popular English-language translation of which is titled The Possessed. Many of the philosophical underpinnings and ecological concepts came from Murray Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), according to a letter Le Guin sent to Bookchin. Anarres citizens are dispossessed not just by political choice, but by the very lack of actual resources to possess. Here, again, Le Guin draws a contrast with the natural wealth of Urras, and the competitive behaviors this fosters. Setting The Dispossessed is set on Anarres and Urras, the twin inhabited worlds of Tau Ceti. Urras is divided into several states, but is dominated by two rival superpowers, A-Io and Thu. While on Urras, the main character spends most of his time in A-Io, a state with a capitalist economy and a patriarchal system. The state of Thu is never actually visited, but is said to have an authoritarian system that claims to rule in the name of the proletariat. A-Io has dissent in its borders, including a few different oppositional left-wing parties, one of which is closely linked to the rival society of Thu. When a revolution