Five hundred years ago Thomas More wrote his Utopia, a text about an ideal society (see Figure 5.1). One of the first things King Utopos undertakes in the construction of Utopia is the building of a trench that insulates Utopia from the surrounding world to make it an island. Reasons for this insular containment are provided within the narrative, and more still become apparent from the analysis of its operations, which we can see repeated across utopian fiction and its numerous posterities within speculative imaginaries. For as Fredric Jameson observes, Utopia is one of those rare texts that ‘inaugurates a whole new genre’ (1977, 4).

One of the truisms of utopian fiction is its inevitable invocation of its dystopian opposite. Readers or viewers of fictions of ideal islands know that the patina of perfection only disguises the lurking menace that lies waiting for the hapless visitors, castaways and planetary explorers dazzled by its allure. The artificiality of this carapace is especially apparent in outmoded science fiction films and television series, where the time lag accentuates the cultural specificity of the nominated priorities of greatest human need and value presented as essential in an ideal world. However, if truth be told, elements of utopian artificiality were always apparent in these texts. Even at the time of their release, film and televisual depictions of these perfect worlds seemed unconvincing, but this half-recognition was easily displaced onto the medium of representation. Somehow, it was the televisual deficiency that compromised the reality of perfection. The screen itself was the patina that complicated assessment regarding what was always in plain view – the necessarily imperfect condition of all utopias.

Louis Marin's theorization of utopian texts, followed by Jameson's detailed explications of Marin and his own work on the genre over decades, accounts for this relationship between utopian and dystopian elements and the hypervisibility of their internal and mutual contradictions. These formulations and reading practices have far-reaching implications for reading island fiction including but also beyond those texts explicitly engaged with projections of ideality. Central to all the textual operations and reading practices put forward by both Utopian theorists is Marin's argument that utopian discourse is inherently figural rather than conceptual: He writes: