Thomas M. Disch 6 min read

A skeptical visitor tours a perfect society whose guide keeps changing the subject.

On the planet of New Katanga, pardon, Utopia, a doubting visitor and his relentlessly upbeat guide spar over whether any paradise can exist without an underlying injustice, while the guide steers each awkward question toward the local architecture. An early, sharply funny story from Thomas M. Disch, one of the New Wave's most acid intelligences, skewering the utopian pitch through pure needling dialogue. Read it for satire with real teeth from a writer who'd spend his career distrusting easy paradises.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

6 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).