Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is often called an ambiguous utopia. The phrase is accurate, but too polite. The book is sharper than that. It is a novel about a revolution that has survived long enough to become ordinary, and therefore dangerous to itself. Its great subject is not whether Anarres is better than Urras. It is what happens when a society built to abolish domination begins to produce domination in forms it no longer knows how to name.

Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney is usually filed as post-apocalyptic science fiction, which is accurate in the dull way a label on a morgue drawer is accurate. There has been a nuclear catastrophe. Civilization is damaged. Bodies are damaged. Institutions have thinned into rumor, barter, local authority, and whatever machinery still happens to work. But the book is less interested in the spectacular end of the world than in the smaller and more stubborn question of what counts as common life after the end has already happened.