Imagining the future is a difficult business, in no small part because whenever we do so the resulting product—be it fiction, political theory, prophecy, or technology— invariably reveals more about the socio-political culture and aesthetic impulses of the person doing the imagining than it does about the purported future. Our images of the future are indexed to the specific moment that constitutes the context, though not necessarily the limit, of imagination. To further complicate the task, the world in which we do our imagining is one scarred by the legacy of catastrophes (from Nazi Germany to Maoist China and beyond) that were themselves the utopian projects of a future boldly imagined.