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. Annares is the ambiguous Utopia of the subtitle. 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. Though set in the future, the people of Urras and Annares are not future Earthlings, but, like us, descendant of the Hainish.
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.
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