In Cities at the Edge of the World, David Lorenzo takes a Goldilocks approach to the topic of utopian and dystopian literature. Discussing Thomas More’s Utopia (ca. 1515), Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines (ca. 1688), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), Evgenie Zamyatin’s We (ca. 1921), and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), this work is neither an “encyclopedic overview of either genre,” nor an “in-depth” exploration of “utopian or dystopian temperament or philosophical stance” (p. 4). The approach rather is “to grapple with the message of each story,” thereby allowing “us room to investigate, compare, contrast, think about, and generally explore the questions these stories generate” (p. 4).

In quick succession, the introductory chapter offers a justification of the title of the book (“utopian and dystopian stories often describe endings” (p. 2)), defines and contrasts utopian and dystopian stories (“utopias emphasize the point that problems can be overcome by common sense, while dystopias argue for the application of an often ironic sensibility to undermine the complacent acceptance of dangerous trends” (p. 7)), plots More and company along a spectrum measuring the extent to which an author considers human nature “completely hardwired,” at one extreme, or “completely programmable,” at the other (p. 9), and gestures to some contemporary problems (“gross inequalities of wealth and income…de-industrialization, uneven development, boom and bust cycles” (p. 11)).

In each chapter, analysis of a single text proceeds rather ploddingly from a discussion of “Story” to a discussion of “Contexts and Problems” to a discussion of “Themes” to a discussion of “The Good Life/Life in Dystopia and Solutions” to (finally) a discussion of “Human Nature and Applications.” To be sure, interesting observations are made about the works under discussion (e.g. “For More, humans find, fulfill, and complete themselves most importantly in their leisure rather than in labor” (p. 35)), and plausible connections or contrasts are often drawn between texts (e.g. “Where Bellamy paints science and technology as crucial means by which to attain the good life for everyone, Zamyatin resembles Morris in viewing science and its accompanying language of mathematical reason as problematic with regard to a truly human existence” (p. 130)).

What is missing, however, is a theoretical framework that might provide fresh and unexpected insights into the meaning of the works selected and thereby reveal the tradition of utopian and dystopian literature in a new light. The two charts on offer, the aforementioned one plotting the authors along a nature/nurture spectrum (p. 9) and the other in the concluding chapter which reiterates and distills the analytical categories of the chapters, seem ad hoc, as do the paragraph-long lists of questions that occasionally interrupt the narrative (“What tasks should government perform? What do we fear the most? Now that we have the technical means to live well physically, what constitutes the good life and how is that life related to our political and economic systems? Is the quest for a perfect place dangerous? What, at bottom, is human nature?” and so on for another eleven questions on p. 3.). They are no substitute for a framing idea or question that might organize the book’s many, many observations in a way that adds significant theoretical value.

The materials for a theoretical framework are not lacking. One potentially productive idea that came to mind in reading this book was the status and significance of politics. If, for More, “life [in Utopia] is consciously organized on a day-to-day basis to reach the higher goals of universal material security, leisure for intellectual inquiry, and moral living” (27), it would suggest that More (adopting what many readers would consider a Platonic position) considers politics a means to reaching the good life but not a component of it. Is there a similar sensibility at work with Bellamy, whose vision of the achievement by the masses of “a life of choice and consumption” (85) through government-directed industrial planning seems also to reduce political questions to ones of resource allocation? While Morris’s vision of “free and easy wandering (103) in a craft economy where beauty is a preeminent value is posed as an alternative to Bellamy’s encomnium to industrial planning and mass consumption, in this utopian society, as well, the content of politics seems thin. The pattern (if there is one) suggests that utopian stories more generally might be driven by an impulse to transcend the plurality of what Hannah Arendt called “the political” in order to foster the peace needed to philosophize (or consume or commune with beauty). In this regard, Lorenzo’s identification of Neville’s civic republican commitment to “the exercise of virtue and self-restraint on the part of ordinary citizens” (50) and his reading of Neville’s dystopian travelogue of the shipwreck of an English bookkeeper with four women whose natural impulses are given free play as a critical response to Utopia is noteworthy. In the other dystopias discussed by Lorenzo, We and 1984, political matters (resistance, revolution, conspiracy) are front and center. Might it be that the dystopian tradition generally is driven by a different impulse than the utopian tradition, an impulse that Arendt would characterize as theoretical rather than philosophical? That is, might dystopian writers, in contrast with their Platonic utopian counterparts, be generally engaged in a project that appreciates, and aims to recover, the life-affirming dimensions of politics?

The dystopian works under consideration share another dynamic—the nesting of issues of male autonomy in narratives whose energy critically depends on men’s encounters with women. The main character of We, D-503, a loyal follower of the mathematically-ordered harmony of the One State, is “jolted out of his passivity by a strange woman, I-330…[who] exposes [him] both to a world of irrational emotions and to an underground resistance” (127). In 1984, Winston’s dingy life in the drab, war-mobilized, authoritarian society of Airstrip One changes when he “finds solace in a relationship with a girl whom he initially suspects is a member of the Thought Police” (155). This pattern, in which male desires for autonomy are stimulated by encounters with female Others (only to be snuffed out by agents of overbearing states), invites a gender-based analysis. So, for example, one might investigate how adult male concern with personal and political autonomy is shaped by preoedipal experiences in which female primary caretakers ambivalently constitute the critical socializing agent. (For a model in how to contextualize a theorist’s concern with autonomy in terms of preoedipal and other issues, see Hanna Pitkin’s Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli [1984].)

If Lorenzo’s book is lacking in theoretical heft, it may be that the purpose envisioned for the book was not primarily to intervene in theoretical debates. As it is, Cities at the End of the World resembles nothing so much as a compilation of materials—lectures, lists of discussion questions, annotated lists of secondary readings—for an introductory undergraduate course on selected examples of utopian and dystopian literature. (The post-colon component of the book’s title would make a fine heading for such a course.) In any case, this book would be worth a read for those planning to teach an introductory undergraduate course on utopian and dystopian texts. And it is worthy of consideration for inclusion on the syllabus of such a course as either a required or recommended reading. Political theorists and other scholars in this area of research should expect meager theoretical pay off, however.