Peter S.
While the book may be labelled "Sci-Fi", Le Guin herself resisted such labelling (although the science fiction community did not: like her *Left Hand of Darkness* a few years earlier, it won both the Hugo and the Nebula Prizes; the Library of America, eschewing labelling, has published it and other Le Guin works). She subtitled some editions 'An Ambiguous Utopia', which I find a helpful hint. More clear in the print edition than in the reading is that the chapters alternate between those set on Shevek's (the protagonist's) ambiguous anarchist utopia planet of Anarres and display his development until his trip to Urras, and those chapters set on Urras, which at first seems utopian in its riches and natural profusion, whose lead country A-Io seems a lot like the US with economic inequalities enhanced (as they have been since the book was first published in 1973 or 74), and where Shevek has the resources to research his 'temporal physics'. The final chapter has Shevek returning to Anarres to an uncertain future. (As mentioned by another reviewer, longer pauses between chapters might help the listener here.)