(Note: This may seem innocuous, as the rest, which is insane couldn’t be included due to the damn character limit. The rest will go in the comments, so go to those for the meat of it)

UTOPIAN AND INDEED DYSTOPIAN fictional societies are often an impressive way of putting political and social ideas in a sort of fictional shop window, the more easily to be seen and admired, or the opposite. It is much easier, of course, to demonstrate ideas and ideologies working on paper than in practice. But also such demonstration may, if done well, have far more impact upon the reader than any number of dry ideological/philosophical tomes. A talented author can bring his dream, or nightmare, far more vividly to his readership by offering them a picture of it happening, rather than a dry blueprint or plan for achieving it. Not surprisingly, therefore, utopian/dystopian fiction has a long and interesting history. From Sir Thomas More’s eponymous 16th Century work, through those Lemuel Gulliver found on his Travels, the late-19th-Century-Socialist future vision of England embodied in William Morris’s News From Nowhere, the 20th Century nightmare visions of consumerism in Brave New World and communism in 1984, to Ursula K. LeGuin’s anarchist world of Anarres in The Dispossessed. Now we have a Nietzschean vision realised – impressively in this reviewer’s view - in American writer S.M. Stirling’s Draka series.