The main misunderstanding about utopia is that it should be predictive – and therefore, that as a literary genre it should fall under the sprawling category of "science-fiction."

Utopia is not science-fiction. It is a much older exercise. Sci-fi can build some of its most interesting speculative worlds as utopias (Le Guin, The Culture, Star Trek) but Utopia it is not.

People are intensely interested in the future. Tocqueville once noted that in democratic societies, governed by the "passion for equality," the future is really all that's left to imagination and poetry.

Utopia is something else. It is an ancient tradition, born in a time when you could lose your head for printing words of lèse-majesté. And what is more of an affront to monarchs than speculating about a world without them?

But monarchs, and the societies that nurture them, do fall eventually. And one day this too shall pass.

Fredric Jameson once famously quipped that it is harder to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (in an NLR article about Rem Koolhaas, of all things). He had a point.

The reason is simple: we can't imagine a world beyond capitalism in the language and forms of capitalism, in its systems of cultural exchange, in its aesthetic style.

Conditions of production determine narratives. Pulp or TV or high-minded literary fiction must all move products. They are part of a chain of value where every intermediary takes her cut.

In order to move products and to accrue economic value to all those who live derive their living from the "cultural industry," there must be story "arcs" and "character development" and "voice" and "payoffs."

In that chain of value some writers are entertainers while others are thinkers or influencers or whatever bucket you may want to assign them. But the fact remains that all live in an economic system that requires them to find an audience through the mediation of the market.

You can't really write Utopia under these conditions. But you can write science-fiction, because in capitalist societies people are mostly and obsessively interested in the future.

(of course I botched the Jameson quote: it is *easier* to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism - thx @provisionalidea)

So how am I supposed to write a utopia, given that it is impossible? For one Jameson notes that it may not be easy, but he doesn't claim that it's impossible.

I have a taste for doomed thought experiments, so there's that. Also I don't care for readers. I am not writing for people to purchase my books nor to create IP from which conglomerates can extract a rent. I have forsworn all desires of rewards, monetary or otherwise ("success.")

I have been told repeatedly by well-intentioned folks that this is the wrong attitude and the wrong approach to sell books and to have a career. Good.

I am on a pilgrimage. Whether people join me on this journey is immaterial to my purpose or to its ultimate destination. As Maurice Blanchot says literary space is the space of death.

I am not here to make friends, and I have not come to play.