Lucas Cranach's "Golden Age"—total unemployment, abundant food... bit boring?

In a perfect society, where do babies come from? The dangers of a licentious paradise are no joke: in Henry Neville’s 1668 “pornotopia” The Isle of Pines, a fiesta of lust and begetting by a shipwrecked Englishman and four female companions results, several generations later, in the island’s collapse into “whoredoms, incest and adultery.” On the other hand, rigid controls are tantamount to eugenics—for example, the Brave New World caste system, where babies’ brains are asphyxiated to order, to fill appropriate social stations—or they are, in fact, eugenics, like the straight-up “elimination” of the “lumpish, unteachable and unimaginative people” that HG Wells proposes in A Modern Utopia.

Dr Merlin Coverley’s pithy new book Utopia begs questions like this on every page, but it also presents lots of different models—most of which lean towards either anarchy or fascism—providing most of