Ninth and early Tenth Millennia

The Ninth and early Tenth Millennia are the historical period in which Urras’s resource depletion and the search for new supplies shaped the settlement and long-term isolation of Anarres. Their legacy reaches beyond the founding of the Anarresti society: it persists in the trade that sustains the colony, in assumptions about environmental management, and in the later test of solidarity during drought and food shortages.

Resource depletion and settlement

By the Ninth and early Tenth Millennia, Urras had undergone eras of self-plundering that left its metal lodes exhausted. As rocketry advanced, mining the Moon became cheaper than extracting metals from low-grade ores or seawater. These pressures helped turn Anarres, initially explored but not colonized, into a source of minerals for Urras.

In the Urrasti year IX-738, a settlement was established at the foot of the Ne Thera Mountains, in the old Ans Hos region, to mine mercury. Called Anarres Town, it was a work camp rather than a settled community: there were no women, and men signed on for two or three years as miners or technicians before returning to Urras. The colonial history thus began with extraction, not with the social experiment that would later give Anarres its distinct political identity.

A separate lunar settlement, maintained secretly by the nation of Thu, included gold miners and their families. When Thu’s government collapsed in 771, the Council of World Governments proposed giving the Moon to the International Society of Odonians, hoping to contain the movement’s challenge to law and national sovereignty on Urras. The miners’ settlement was evacuated, although some residents chose not to return. The transfer of the Moon therefore joined political containment to an existing history of mining and settlement.

Trade and continuing dependence

The founding of the Anarresti settlement did not end the economic relationship that had made the planet valuable. After the settlers’ transfer, the Port of Anarres was closed to immigration but remained open to freight under the Trade Agreement. In the later arrangement, Urras’s ships brought fossil oils, petroleum products, specialized machine parts and electronic components, as well as experimental fruit-tree and grain strains. They carried away mercury, copper, aluminum, uranium, tin and gold.

This exchange was profitable for Urras, and the novel identifies Anarres as, in practical terms, a mining colony. Anarresti objections to continued trade met a pragmatic answer: extraction on Anarres cost the Urrasti less than invasion would, while ending the agreement might invite force. The logic of marketplace cost, however, was difficult for people who had never paid money for anything to accept. Seven generations of peace had not produced trust. The old resource economy therefore survives not simply as ancient history but as a present political vulnerability.

Environmental inheritance and later scarcity

The period’s resource history also shapes the contrasting accounts of ecological management. On Urras, the depletion of metal lodes is remembered as the lasting consequence of earlier excess; in A-Io, regulation and taxation restrict luxuries thought likely to consume irreplaceable resources or pollute the environment. The society presents this management as a source of pride, while its dependence on imported metals reveals that control and conservation have not erased the costs of earlier extraction.

On Anarres, later scarcity has a different immediate form. During a cold, dry winter, water is rationed and directed toward keeping holum plants alive, which supply food, clothing and fiber for the planet’s twenty million people. Food reserves have never been extensive, and drought intensifies the consequences of that limited margin. The novel places this crisis against the older history of resource use without reducing it to a simple equation between population and shortage: transport, reserves, and decisions about sharing also determine who bears deprivation.

The test of solidarity

A transport failure during the shortage makes the social stakes concrete. A train carrying 450 people stops for twenty hours in a mill town of 160 residents that has no extra food and depends on transport for its own supply. Giving the travelers food could leave the local population without enough for days, so the town gives them nothing. The passengers fast for sixty hours before reaching a station with a stocked refectory.

For Shevek, this is his first experience of hunger. The stoppage forces him to consider whether a society built on mutual aid can retain its solidarity when there is not enough to share. He sees how scarcity can open the way to force, power and violence, while the town’s refusal and the passengers’ anger show that cooperative ideals do not settle the practical conflict over limited supplies. Yet after the train resumes and the passengers receive a modest meal, they laugh together, having endured the ordeal as a group. The episode gives the long history of extraction and ecological limits a human scale: the central question is not only what resources exist, but whether people continue to recognize obligations to one another when those resources fail.

Historical significance

The Ninth and early Tenth Millennia matter as the prehistory of a society that is never wholly separate from the world it rejected. Urras’s exhausted mineral reserves help explain why Anarres was mined and why the later settlement arose; the freight agreement carries that dependence into the present. The novel then sets this history beside Anarres’s drought emergency, asking whether scarcity must reproduce domination or can be met through shared responsibility.

That question also informs Shevek’s understanding of scientific exchange. He refuses to let Urras treat his theory as a commodity or use it to gain power over other worlds, and instead argues that he wants to give it for the common good. In this contrast between profitable extraction and freely shared knowledge, the historical economy of the two planets becomes a continuing argument about what may be possessed, what must be shared, and whether solidarity can outlast the material conditions that first made it necessary.