My friend Rebecca Smith finally got me to read this, after we both confessed to never having read it. Is this book even more relevant now than in 1974, now that many of the cautionary elements of this allegory have become our reality? It’s a book stuffed full of big ideas, and I loved that a lot of the suspense is driven by unsensational things: will Shevek get drunk and sloppy? Will petty syndicate politics keep him from publishing? The formal structure of the book imbued the Anarres scenes with a poetic, philosophical air that I really enjoyed despite initially wanting to race through them to get to the present-day narrative thread.