W.D. Clarke

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Leguin
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
Player Piano (etc.), Kurt Vonnegut
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Another Now, YV
Utopia, Thomas More
News From Nowhere, William Morris
The New Atlantis, Francis Bacon
Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy (etc., etc.)

(which I would take a stab at defining, by beginning with:
—worth at least a re-read for the beguiling quiddity of its prose
—the subtlety and nuance and robustness its structure/architectonics
—ambiguities which linger long after its pages are left behind
—and which can proceed, seemingly organically, from its characters
—the uniqueness and cohesion of narrative "voice"
—and/or some undefinable quintessence, some nearly inarticulate "content" inseparable from "form" (if those words themselves so much as bear the weight of their utterance).
—its wholeness, harmony, and radiance, in other words (and to borrow a phrase from Aquinas).

Thomas had been listening intently. Costa inferred from his silence that he didn’t quite know whether to be impressed or dismissive. Sensing his vacillation, Costa chose a different approach.

‘Forget the politics and look at it aesthetically,’ he suggested. ‘The force assembled by Akwesi is more beautiful than the blunt and boring power of an ultra-rich man and his sycophantic henchmen. If you were to put the two forces to music, Bezos’s would sound like Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, [the Another Now's]like Beethoven’s Ninth.’

As Thomas and Costa continued their discussion, Eva reflected on her son’s character and the relationship that was taking shape before her. Costa’s musical references had been lost on the young man, and he had been forced to attempt a different analogy. But had Thomas been familiar with the two musical works, Eva was sure he would have chosen the Valkyries every time. Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ required an optimism of the spirit that her son lacked. She felt keenly that it was the absence of a father figure in his life that made him susceptible to absolutist patriarchal power. A Jeff Bezos, a Rupert Murdoch, a Darth Vader, especially a Mephistopheles, would find it easy to enlist Thomas in their enterprise, their boisterous validation of male power promising him what he had lacked all his life in a way that democratic power, however intellectually intriguing and aesthetically pleasing, could not.

Thirteen years after chance had brought them together, Iris and Eva were sounding alike for the first time. Impressed, Thomas asked them if encountering the Other Now together had been ‘their moment of truth’, opening the way to a rapprochement.

‘Moments of truth are a fiction,’ Iris said, adding, ‘Truth grows organically, Thomas. There was never a particular moment or event that pushed my thinking and your mother’s closer together. Epiphanies are an illusion that our minds conjure up to explain our failure to realize the obvious earlier.’

‘Our moment of truth came in 2008,’ he said. ‘Once we dropped the ball back then, by 2020 it was too late.’

Yet again, though, Iris had to have the last word before also retiring for the night.

‘Like epiphanies, the fork-in-the-road theory of history is a convenient lie,’ she said. ‘Yes, Costa, 2008 was a crisis whose wasting paved the way for the bigots and the financiers to prevail after 2020. But the truth is we face a fork in the road every day of our lives. Every single day we fail to take advantage of opportunities to change the course of history. And do you know how we console ourselves? We look into the past, pick out one “pivotal” moment and try to lessen our guilt by saying that was the moment we missed. No, mate. We miss pivotal moments every day, every hour, every freaking instant.’

During the years he had spent designing and building HALPEVAM in his self-made technological prison, to avert losing his mind he would spend four weeks every summer floating off the southern coast of Crete on a small wooden boat, offline, reading nothing but poetry.

‘Why poetry?’ asked Thomas.

‘Because it’s all we have to prevent our dreams turning into nightmares,’ Costa replied.
A futurist since he had read Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto at a tender age, Costa’s faith in the future started receding in 1976 – the year he heard his beloved Sex Pistols singing ‘there’s no future’. Since then he had walked a hopeful tightrope over an abyss filled with dreams of emancipation shattered by the alienating power of his technologies. HALPEVAM was to be his redemption, his special gift to humanity.

a good life requires that we find, like Odysseus, a strong mast to which to tie ourselves when it matters, lest we remain slaves to our every whim. This mast must be good and it must be self-chosen, but crucially it cannot simply be another, higher or more powerful desire. It must be something separate from and independent of our self. Lashing ourselves to it is the only way of ensuring the true freedom and autonomy that we crave.’

Costa suddenly understood what Iris was up to. This was her roundabout way of breaking to her friends the news that she was not planning to join them in the Other Now. And what better way to do this than via a rendition of her favourite theme: the sovereignty of good – her conviction that great art cannot be willed into existence by the calculus of an artist’s desires; that, similarly, exquisite music and brilliant mathematical proofs emerge for their own sake, not because of a musician’s or a mathematician’s self-interested scheming.