very vague "what book is this" question

pwd

For some reason this has been niggling at me.
I was in a library and I started reading a science fiction book. I didn't read very far into it. It had an introduction by ursula e guin which raved about it and suggested it was quite a significant/well known book. [I've never read ursula e guin.]
All I remember was that the protagonist was a scholar and he was getting ready to move to a different planet which was a very different culture. I think the introduction suggested it was quite a political book, and not new - decades old probably...
No idea why this is niggling at me - this was about a year ago I picked it up, put it down, forgot about it.
Any ideas?

fitz

Sure it was a different planet?
Could be The Saga of the Exiles by Julian May...
First book was The Many Coloured Land.

Takes a couple of hundred pages to get going, but develops into quite a good series after that...

pwd

Wasn't that. It was definitely a different planet.

boru05

Dune by Frank Herbert?

pwd

Not Dune. Protagonist was a researcher or something like that...

pwd

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed

It's this. No wonder the introduction was by Le Guinn - she wrote the rest of the book too