The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin is the best political novel I've read and it's a science fiction novel about an anarchist physicist on a resource-scarce moon. The novel's structure — alternating chapters between the anarchist moon Anarres and the capitalist planet Urras — is itself an argument. Neither society is utopian. Both are dystopian in specific, illuminating ways.

What Le Guin is doing is using the doubled setting to make visible the assumptions that single-setting fiction takes for granted. Property, scarcity, authority, obligation — these are contingent arrangements rather than natural facts, and the alternating structure forces you to hold two incompatible arrangements in mind simultaneously.

Shevek, the physicist at the center, is trying to do with physics what Le Guin is doing with the novel: build a theory of time that allows causality and freedom to coexist. The parallel between the formal ambition of the book and the intellectual ambition of its protagonist is deliberate and pays off.