The Dispossessed (1974)

Anarres is an arid moon where scarcity writes the rules, and Le Guin is as unsentimental about it as Herbert is about water. Anarchists left the rich planet Urras for it about 170 years before the story begins. Nobody there owns anything, the language discourages possessives, and a drought can send a theoretical physicist to hard labour in the desert for four years. Shevek is that physicist, and he crosses to Urras with a theory its governments badly want. Chapters alternate between the two worlds, weighing what each costs the people who live in it, and the subtitle, An Ambiguous Utopia, is honest: neither society gets off lightly.