Tarnished Utopia (Annotated)

Tarnished Utopia is a compact work of speculative fiction that subjects the dream of the perfected society to a sharply ironic test. Rather than presenting futurity as simple progress, Jameson explores the moral abrasions hidden beneath order, efficiency, and rational planning. Its prose bears the brisk, lucid movement of mid-twentieth-century magazine science fiction, yet its governing impulse is...