For Winston Churchill, victory in the Second World War meant that ‘the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world… will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science’.

Were Churchill transported to the troubled first quarter of the 21st century, with its trade wars and shooting conflicts, its ongoing plagues and miseries, he would still have been dazzled by our ‘sunlit uplands’. Why then has our era’s cultural imagination grown so stale that we wallow only in dystopian narratives?

The 19th century had been filled with technological optimism and a sense of wonder and possibility. Novelists of the time, such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, cast their minds into the future to imagine technological wonders – universal plenty, space voyages, a world knitted together by lightning-fast communication and travel.

In the imaginations of these authors, not just technology but society itself could be transformed beyond recognition. Edward Bellamy’s time-travel novel, Looking Backward (1888), imagined America curing itself of the ills of the Gilded Age and peacefully evolving into an egalitarian utopia. His book spawned ‘Bellamy Societies’ around the country to advocate for progressive reforms, as well as a boomlet of utopian books, some 200 in the period 1887-95 alone. More ominously, in tsarist Russia, Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863) inspired anarchists, socialists, and democrats alike with its vision of autonomous communes.

But the 20th century brought ruin on a colossal scale. The machine gun, artillery, mustard gas, the atom bomb, and other horrors of industrialised warfare loomed too large. Social engineering led not into the light but to the dead end of totalitarianism. Technology would not empower the individual but fuel tyranny. Utopia smacked of naïveté at best, Machiavellian ambition at worst. Dystopia seemed not pessimistic but realistic.

The 30-year stretch from the 1920s to the 1950s gave us masterworks of the dystopian genre – Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. They showed the regimentation of human cogs into inhuman machines, worlds of censorship and surveillance, with dictatorships colonising outer space and the inner reaches of the mind. A later generation of ‘cyberpunk’ fiction shifted its fears from a domineering state to ruthless corporations, conjuring up neon-lit high-tech hellscapes with the masses too anaesthetised by robotic brothels and virtual-reality headsets to rebel.

Despite the shadow of nuclear war (a scenario that looms large in dystopias then and now), the Cold War produced some notable utopian exceptions. The cartoon series The Jetsons imagined a futuristic middle-class American society replete with friendly robots and cheap rocket ships, while Star Trek transplanted the 1960s’ hopes for shared prosperity and tolerance into the cosmos – the spirit of the United Nations on a galactic scale.

On the whole, however, the 20^th century was perhaps too embittered for utopia not to ring hollow. In her justly celebrated short story, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, Ursula K. Le Guin posed the thought experiment of a perfect society of peace, wealth, creativity, and freedom – only to reveal that all this perfection and sophistication was inextricably founded upon the suffering of one child. Perfection, it seemed, always had its price.

By the dawn of the 21st century, the pendulum had swung decisively, permanently it seemed, towards dystopia. The era of digital alienation, global terrorism, and environmental degradation brought us The Matrix, The Hunger Games, Silo – tyrannies and doomsdays beyond count. Literary fiction, too: from Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic The Road to Kazuo Ishiguro’s haunting Never Let Me Go, to the corporate dystopias of George Saunders’ presciently titled Liberation Day. It is hard to find a pinprick of light amid the depictions of new dark ages.

This cultural reality has been mirrored in the realm of politics and policy. For many on the left, the real-world future looks awfully dystopian, from looming climate disaster to AI takeover to automation-induced unemployment. The result has been an unfortunate Luddite turn. Seeing only threats, not possibilities, in the coming of AI is one symptom of this trend. Another is the climate-anxiety contingent (small, but disproportionately vocal), who proudly assert they would never bring children into the world only to face a burning world, societal collapse, and inevitable wars over scarce water and food. So, too, is the rising tide of ‘de-growth’ economics that promises stagnation for the rich world, and permanent poverty for the unfortunate majority who live in the Global South.

Into this hellscape comes Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s provocatively optimistic book Abundance. The authors take their fellow liberals to task for crippling government, leaving large-scale change  – even for worthy and needed projects that liberals profess to support – impossibly mired in red tape. By privileging the status quo, and making the perfect the enemy of the good, a future of green energy, affordable housing, and medical breakthroughs recedes into impossibility. This means less technology, less growth, fewer resources, and a zero-sum fight over a stagnant or shrinking pie. Klein and Thompson lament that, for liberals, optimistic visions of a high-tech future of abundance and autonomy for all have faded. Is the best the left can hope for merely to avert oligarchy and climate catastrophe?

The right, of course, is no stranger to dystopia – any number of feverish books and tweets imagine theocratic Eurabia, Roman-style imperial collapse, or more run-of-the-mill ‘woke’ tyranny. Yet many, at least in Silicon Valley, hold fast to a certain belligerent optimism. A critical faction of tech billionaires flipped to support Trump in 2024, convinced that American society is stuck in stagnation, and that only dramatic, even violent change can shake the rust off. We see this tendency in the so-called ‘effective-accelerationist’ movement: artificial intelligence boosters, who, far from fearing a robotic uprising or misused AI, are intent on ensuring that American AI is freed from Biden-era safety regulations so it can zoom forward to dominate its Chinese rivals and supercharge a future of technical marvels (for our side).

If the right has its vision of a ‘new American golden age’, what’s the optimistic tale for the left? Where are the sunlit uplands? Abundance offers one answer. It champions technology, growth, and the dynamic spirit of change rather than degrowth or doomerism.

It is no coincidence, then, that the Abundance authors are being lauded by professor Ada Palmer at the Chicago Humanities Festival. When she’s not doing her day job at the University of Chicago as a Renaissance historian of censorship and heterodoxy, Palmer is the author of perhaps the most elaborate and philosophically complex utopia of the century, Terra Ignota. This masterful science-fiction series imagines a world where distance and want have been defeated. In her vision of the 2400s, war is a relic of the past, a form of Universal Basic Income has been achieved, only career obsessives work more than 20 hours a week, and a system of flying cars (think: Uber but free and 12,000 miles per hour) means you can live in Lagos and commute to Tokyo. A thick network of Tocquevillian associations means this world is not only democratic, but ideal for personal growth, autonomy, and voluntary community-building.

Palmer’s world is particularly refreshing in an era when even visions of abundance are often dystopian – consider the bland consumerism and stagnation of Pixar’s Wall-E, with its obese citizens confined to floating pods that serve them endless food and television. Terra Ignota is a vison of abundance par excellence, and a celebration of the possibilities of the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment wedded to high technology. Bellamy, envisioning 2000 from the vantage point of 1887 Boston, was confident that capitalism would wither away – yet, while poverty is gone from Palmer’s 2454, markets are not.

Palmer’s world is emphatically not a perfect one. Elections go the way we wish they would not, or are even rigged; markets crash; marriages fail. But the freedom for the individual to chart their own course, to choose their own values, and to be genuinely assured of every chance to flourish, is empowered by good governance and flexible institutions as much as by technological marvels. Her 2454 is an even more imaginative vision of the sunlit uplands, far outstripping our own era just as 2025 would be nigh-unrecognisable to Churchill’s 1940.

Orwell told us ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’ To be sure, techno-totalitarianism and a ‘new Dark Age’ powered by ‘the lights of a perverted science’ are eminently possible futures. A new politics of scarcity – zero-sum thinking informs both leftist degrowth and rightist beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies – point towards a diminished sense of the possible, and make such futures more likely.

The 21st century deserves its sunlit uplands. More optimistic paths are possible, where technology and societal reform serves to reduce suffering and want, and expand the sphere of human creativity and endeavour. We do a disservice to future generations if we do not dream of genuinely utopian world of abundance, and how to make it real. For the depressed and dispirited dreamers of the 2020s, Thompson and Klein’s manifesto, and Palmer’s novels, would not be a bad place to start.