"The Dowry of Angyar" is the first work set in Le Guin's fictional Hainish universe. In this alternate history, human beings did not evolve on earth, but on Hain. The people of Hain colonized many neighboring planetary systems, including Terra (Earth) and Athshe, possibly a million years before the setting of the novels. The planets subsequently lost contact with each other, for reasons that Le Guin does not explain. Le Guin does not narrate the entire history of the Hainish universe at once, instead letting readers piece it together from various works. The novels and other fictional works set in the Hainish universe recount the efforts to re-establish a galactic civilization. Explorers take years to travel between planetary systems, although the journey is shortened for the travelers due to relativistic time dilation, as well as through instantaneous interstellar communication using the ansible, introduced in The Dispossessed. This galactic civilization is known as the "League of All Worlds".
