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This chapter traces how the where of work and workers appears as a problem and a value in utopian writing, arguing that we misunderstand the justice utopia strives for if we think of it as a right allocation only of benefits resulting from (or emerging apart from) labor rather than, also, of benefits that can inhere in labor. It remarks a key change in utopian imagining in the years since the middle of the twentieth century: the abandoning, as a major constituent of utopian aspiration, of the dream of people working where and how they like. One can posit many reasons for this shift, including a general drift away from vocabularies of social amelioration that center on the worker, but the chapter concentrates on two significant developments. The first is an increasing concern with freedom to live as one chooses — that is, with liberty of lifestyle — that in the ambit of utopian writing seems increasingly to subsume specifically work-related prerogatives under a larger figure of mobility and whose arrival front and center in utopian thinking is registered by Robert Nozick's metautopia, or what Frederic Jameson has dubbed “the utopian archipelago.” The second is the ever increasing visibility of labor-driven migration as a fraught feature of life in the contemporary world.

This chapter examines an aspect of utopia that has provided especially ample fodder for counterindignation. Analysts of utopian writing have long noted that some utopias promise to realize their goals by means of rules and institutions that work with people as they inevitably are, while other utopias propose to arrange conditions that will reshape human character. The chapter distinguishes between managerial utopias, which operate mainly through wittily engineered incentives and disincentives, and transformative utopias, which arrange conditions in ways that help determine what utopian people will be like. Both kinds of utopias have inspired vehement counterindignation because they can be seen as assaulting, if in somewhat different ways, human freedom. But the transformative utopia has proven especially inflammatory because it seems to imply a forcing of the soul by the powers that be — and because it seems at its furthest to threaten the replacement of humanity as we know it with something else. After tracing the history of these two utopian modes, the chapter turns to the acme of the transformative mode as it emerges, in the middle of the twentieth century, in antiutopian alarms about behavioral conditioning as well as a radical defense of conditioning mounted by B. F. Skinner.

This introductory chapter briefly sets out the book's claims on utopian writing. The first claim is that the texts examined in this book create perfect worlds. The overarching claim is related: the texts being examine create perfect worlds by refusing or failing to present models of perfect worlds. Here, the chapter argues that efficacy and divisiveness go hand in hand. For the writers discussed in the following chapters, the dissolution of community is the first step toward establishing an alternative to community. A writer responds to the failure of utopia—America in the aftermath of Reconstruction, the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the world under neoliberalism—by devising their own utopian project. The project is precarious. It risks solipsism at one extreme and mere critique at the other. Ultimately, its effects are asymmetrical and highly improbable: a perfect world that cannot be replicated or shared.

Both Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer and E. M. Forster’s Maurice explore success achieved in the face of society’s hostility to homosexuality. This chapter addresses both novels in terms of allegory and utopian possibility. Whilst Galgut’s adoption of biofiction in Arctic Summer aims to utilize the political and creative possibilities found in early modernist writing, the text’s tight control of narrative form and use of allegory leads to problems – that apparent newness is in fact highly scripted and controlled. Spurred by this consideration of Arctic Summer, a new approach is taken to Maurice that emphasises its openness as a text. The reader is encouraged to engage with issues of interpretation, with Maurice’s own development showing him becoming adept at reading complex, pressured situations. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is seen as an important intertext both for Maurice and the South African Anglophone tradition to which Galgut belongs. Using Walter Benjamin on natural history and allegory the chapter contends that Maurice, whilst maintaining its stress on how long-term same-sex relationships and cross-class love secure meaning in the world, also depicts a world that is always subject to change, loss and ruination.