Anticapitalist Utopias and Neotopias

This chapter studies the radical alternatives that can be found in the traditions of utopian thinking that have offered fully formed alternatives to a flawed present, from Thomas More to Ursula LeGuin, and from William Morris to Ivan Efremov. Utopias are one of the ways societies imagine alternative futures, and many utopians put their ideas into practice too, creating islands of the future. Then as now they were healthy antidotes to the lazy pessimism which claims that all attempts at progress are futile. If utopias are worlds where predators have been eliminated, dystopias are ones where they rule. But utopias both promise too much and deliver too little, their greatest weakness now as in the past being that they lack an account of how change will happen.