News from nowhere: Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Sir Thomas More, currently on view at the Frick Collection, was commissioned in 1527. (The Frick Collection) Utopia and dystopia are twins, ...

In 2015, HBO canned the David Fincher-planned remake of the 2013 Channel 4 TV drama Utopia, a remarkable pharma-thriller with a graphic novel holding a very nasty genetic secret as the MacGuffin. A ...

The starting point for this novel was that I wanted to write utopian fiction. I hadn’t done this before: all my previous novels have been straight science fiction. But utopia, the genre that imagines ...

For a while, it seemed as if the only stories anyone wanted to tell were dystopian, but as our own world has grown increasingly grim, people seem a bit tired of dreadful worlds full of misery. “Where ...

I’d like to warn our dear readers: This piece is likely to be a somewhat dark one. Here I am about to end another academic year and maybe for the first time in my life, in the past few weeks I have ...

From the neon-drenched noir of Altered Carbon to the technophobic Black Mirror, dystopia is all over mainstream entertainment these days—and considering the current political climate, it’s easy to see ...

Visions of utopia are ubiquitous throughout Western history. They’ve inspired great works of art and literature, motivated countless believers to obey God’s commandments and driven some of the ...

The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this excerpt. Alexander Heffner: Where do we draw the line ...