Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Review

by Alex Heard, New York: W.W. Norton, 360 pages, $24.95

Autopia is, by definition, a fantasy: The word literally means "no place," and the classical utopias existed only in the imagination. Sometimes, they were enchanting literature. Political scientists may sneer at the French socialist Charles Fourier, in whose utopia the planets copulate and the oceans turn to lemonade, but the surrealists loved him.

Their enthusiasm certainly makes more sense than that of those 19th-century Americans who actually tried to found Fourierist "phalanxes." There's a reason why most utopias remain placeless, as Fourier's fans and the other utopian colonists of the era quickly discovered: It's pretty hard to design any community from scratch, let alone one that overturns dozens of social conventions. Even the colonies that succeeded for a sustained period of time - the towns founded by the American anarchist Josiah Warren, for instance - were soon either absorbed into the society around them or destroyed by the sort of outside forces that could erase any community, whether or not it was baptized by idealists.

America still has hundreds of intentional communities, some more successful than others, along with elaborate plans for even larger colonies - the "new country" fantasies that periodically flicker in the libertarian press, for example. But most new settlements today are commercial developments, not utopian communes; they're governed by condo boards and CC&Rs, not socialist or religious visionaries. The dream of a world without exploitation has persisted, but the smart money is invested in worlds without pets.

Literary utopias, on the other hand, have flourished, especially if you include the sort of writing that is concerned less with designing a new order than with simply imagining how - to borrow historian Russell Jacoby's definition of utopia - "the future could fundamentally surpass the present." Modern utopianism includes virtually every tract about the alleged New Age, every Luddite proposal to erase the last two centuries, every call for a religious reawakening, every manifesto on the transformative powers of cyberspace. It includes Web sites, science fiction novels, and essays in xeroxed zines.

Even conspiracy theories can be utopian, since a dystopia is also a kind of utopia. I'm not talking about allegations of crimes in high places (many of which, we've learned, turn out to be true); I mean the wild stuff, the tales of alien implants and Masonic mind control, of cabals always just poised on completing their long march toward global rule. From Swift to Orwell, dystopian writers have exaggerated social trends they dislike, forging those artful distortions into...