The novel opens with Shevek at the port, preparing to board the ship for Urras, surrounded by an angry crowd. Alternating with his earliest childhood memories on Anarres: the children's houses, his first understanding of property and sharing, and his dawning gift for physics.

Shevek arrives on Urras and experiences overwhelming sensory shock: the abundance, the beauty, the ownership everywhere. On Anarres, his adolescent brilliance isolates him; he studies physics obsessively and begins to understand that his society's conformity is itself a kind of wall.

Shevek settles into the University of A-Io, begins to see the structures of control beneath Urras's generosity. On Anarres, his friendship with Bedap forces him to confront the ways his own society has calcified into a new kind of authoritarianism.

A famine strikes Anarres; Shevek is posted to a remote dust-processing station. The hardship is real and shared, but Shevek also discovers that the work-posting system has been quietly used to suppress his physics research. On Urras, Shevek begins to see what lives beneath the beauty.

Shevek meets and partners with Takver on Anarres — the deepest human relationship of his life. On Urras, he attends a lavish party that exposes the violence underneath the civilization he has been admiring.

Shevek joins an underground network on Anarres dedicated to genuine Odonian principles against the society's drift toward conformism. On Urras, the Temporal Theory nears completion — and Shevek realizes it will be stolen.

In the past, Shevek and Takver are reunited after years of separation; he finally returns to serious physics work. In the present, revolution erupts on Urras — workers rise, the government massacres them, and Shevek escapes into the underground.

Shevek broadcasts the completed Temporal Theory simultaneously to all worlds, ensuring it cannot be owned. He returns to Anarres with a young man from Urras — the first person from the home planet to set foot on the moon in 170 years.