It is one of the more unhelpful truisms of our times that these times are dystopian. Typically taken as a self-evident premise, such a claim may marshal the popularity of dystopian fictions to buttress its truth. The fictions would then sit alongside climate catastrophe, the radicalization of the far right, and the everyday pervasiveness of inequality, as part of the political furniture of “dystopian times.” Saving Utopia might, at first glance, appear to swim in the waters of this truism. But through a careful historicization of the concepts of both utopia and dystopia, Joe Davidson puts into question this equation of the twenty-first century with dystopia. In the first section of his introductory essay, “Utopia against the Grain,” Davidson tells his reader that the disappearance of “utopia” is “strange,” and further that his own task in Saving Utopia will be to respond to something which is precisely “a puzzle”—namely, the replacement of utopia by dystopia in contemporary culture. By asking where all the utopias have gone, Davidson opens up for exploration and understanding both the popularity of dystopian fictions and the relationship between that popularity and the political forces organizing life in the twenty-first century.

The puzzle so persuasively laid out in Davidson’s “Introduction” stands at the heart of his work. Namely, Saving Utopia provides an ambitious and conceptually nuanced exploration of the faltering of utopianism in the twenty-first century. Davidson asks why contemporary cultural formations seem so singularly indifferent to utopian thinking when there seems everywhere a yawning political need for such work. Clearly, Davidson writes, the lack of utopian dreaming in our present “is not because there is a broad sense of contentment with current society” (p. 2). That the invisibility of utopia reflects a political hostility to this kind of speculative thinking has been an accepted motif in Utopian Studies since at least the end of the Cold War. Davidson builds on the work of key utopian studies scholars (Tom Moylan, Caroline Edwards, Raffaella Baccolini, and Gregory Claeys) to extend and deepen the meanings of utopia, anti-utopianism, and dystopia in the twenty-first century. In particular, he offers scholars two important new ways to approach the faltering place of utopian thinking in our times: first, through the apparent collapse of anti-utopianism, and second, through the consolidation of a type of fiction he terms the “postdystopia.”

Davidson outlines how “the decline in anti-utopianism” is itself symptomatic of the much-weakened status of utopianism. The claim here is that utopian fictions were once engaged in a rich dialectical relationship with traditions of anti-utopianism. For fiction, this resulted in an antagonism capable of generating new fictions out of critiques of older ones. A utopian novel would be published, one related to the social and political dreams of its own historical moment, and would then be subjected to the critiques of those who feared or scorned such utopian dreaming. That response would itself generate adjustments to subsequent utopian fictions, fictions made all the stronger or more persuasive by being subjected to radically negative forms of critique. This dialectic, Davidson argues, has stalled: utopia has lost its antagonist in anti-utopianism.

Davidson’s work is informed by arguments that were themselves formulated to critique the claim that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “end of history” was nigh. The value of Saving Utopia lies partly in how closely Davidson threads these Marxist and other materialist critiques of late twentieth-century liberalism into and through the history of both utopian and dystopian fictions. The overall conclusion is a convincing one: the forces of anti-utopianism “won” and, in so doing, did themselves out of a job.

One of the gifts of Saving Utopia is Davidson’s careful definition of his concept of “postdystopia.” The term is used by Davidson as a way to conceptualize a sub-genre of contemporary fiction, one tied to many of the narrative conventions of dystopian fiction but which departs from those conventions to imagine heterogeneous futures, futures open both to the possibility of better times ahead and also open to the past, to the traumas and the solidarities of bad times gone by. In the three chapters that make up the second part of Saving Utopia, Davidson dramatizes the generative nature of his concept through close readings of fiction from the traditions of Black utopianism (Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber [2000], Cebo Campbell’s Sky Full of Elephants [2024], and Rivers Solomon’s The Deep [2019]), feminist utopianism (Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army [2007], Sandra Newman’s The Men [2022], Gabrielle Korn’s Yours for the Taking [2023], and Isabel Herguera’s animated text, El sueño de la Sultana [2023]), and green utopianism (Clare North’s Notes from the Burning Age [2021] and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future [2020]). Davidson is a sure-footed and convincing close reader, generating rich interpretations of his chosen fictions and, in the process, securing the usefulness of the concept of the postdystopia as a way to understand the predicament of utopia in our present.

Davidson also opens up an ambitious argument about contingency in the relationship between utopian dreaming and concepts of time across modernity. This is an argument that is ambitious in both historical and political scope:

For Louis-Sébastien Mercier, French author of L’An 2440 (1771), Paris in the twenty-fifth century was the place where the drama of a better world played out, but the dynamic concept in his utopian fiction is not a place but time itself. For Mercier, utopia was a temporal entity, part of a new understanding of historical time that incorporated difference, change, even rupture: with the “coming together of rupture and futurity, a hole is punctured in the older conceptions of history” (p. 40). Unlike Thomas More’s exploration in Utopia (1516), which positioned the better world as a human-made island existing already in the sixteenth century, European writers from the eighteenth century on were able to relate past, present, and future in terms of the concept of progress.

The history of the entanglement of the concept of progress with the classic period of European imperialism is well known. Davidson traces these entanglements and brings them into the twentieth century, where the successive catastrophes of two World Wars, the Holocaust, the threat of nuclear annihilation and the defeat of Communism collectively erode the ideological purchase that the concept of “progress” once had in the cultures of modernity. The twenty-first century becomes home to a “dramatic change in the status of the future,” one that has substantively altered the repertoire of cultural visions of radical change available to writers and readers alike (p. 39). Utopian fictions are not being written anymore not because there is no need for them, nor because there is no interest in them, but rather because the conceptual materials with which they were once built have ceased to be recognizable or persuasive in terms of our collective imagination.

Davidson’s argument here is well-made and draws on a great deal of research from contemporary philosophers and intellectual historians of time. There is a lacuna created in part by the relatively abstract nature of the argument, which involves a homogenization of the history of “modern time consciousness.” That linear and progressive “time consciousness” was not and could not be fully totalized: slave rebellions, the nascent women’s movement, peasants’ and workers’ movements, all complicate the conceptualization of modernity’s time as moving ever onwards and upwards. Outside of the imperial centers of Europe, and later the United States (and within the labor movements of Europe and North America), celebrations of modernity as “progress” were never fully dominant—as the history of anti-colonial and trade union militancy attests. Nevertheless, Davidson has opened up a new field of exploration for scholars of utopianism and of dystopian fiction. For this alone, he should be thanked.