Two crucial insights are at the heart of this learned and wide-ranging book: “a driving force” in the invention of any utopia is “indignation at a world badly formed” (3), and the ultimate goal of utopia is the achievement of justice. Douglas Mao brings together these two aspects of the utopian project in the figure of Nemesis, associated in classical tradition with justice, who abandons humankind in righteous anger at its fallen state. Nemesis personifies the feeling of indignation provoked by the wrongness of things along with the conviction that setting them right can happen only once the claims of justice are honored.Neither indignation nor justice figures prominently in the large corpus of critical writing on utopia whose foundational work is Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia. For Mao, indignation names the sense of outrage at the bungled arrangements that lead to human suffering. Unlike satire, to which it is closely related, utopian indignation is directed not at the foibles of individuals but at the failures of “systems, institutions, customs, and practices” (28). A key feature of this concern with totalities is ire at the shoddy workmanship that deprives existing social arrangements of some imagined ideal of symmetry or proportion. A like outrage is discernible in utopian calls for justice. Any system that is fair, equitable, and just will by necessity also be aesthetically pleasing. Mao notes the obsession with design characteristic of “blueprint utopias,” in which every feature of the ideal society is laid out in minute detail. This fixation perplexes and embarrasses many critics, among them Fredric Jameson, who contends that it is impossible to reconcile the impassioned, trenchant analysis of social injustice in such works with the endless tinkering that goes into their “seating charts and plans and urban reconstructions” (quoted on 4). By contrast, Mao argues that the obsession with design is integral to the utopian project. It is a clear sign of the belief that a properly ordered society would not only provide for human needs but satisfy our desire for a world that is beautiful in its arrangements of things and people.The claim that utopia aims at justice—and not, as is usually argued, happiness or freedom or material well-being—is the most compelling of Mao’s reassessments of utopian discourse. He describes justice “as a kind of metagood . . . that might be said to lie concealed beneath the more particular desiderata through which it would be realized” (5). One consequence of this emphasis on justice is the recognition that the utopian project is in the final analysis concerned not with the good of society considered as an abstraction but with the good of the individuals who compose it. Since only persons can be recipients of justice, it is persons who give utopia its justification. The many and varied imaginings of utopia over the centuries thus ultimately spring from “a desire that people have what they ought to have, that they be treated as they should be treated, that they be able to live as they ought to be able to live” (13). The success of any particular utopia is measured not by the well-being of the order itself but by the degree to which it gives people “what’s due” (13). The most common critique of utopian projects is that they privilege systems over people—this is the premise that underlies the dystopian visions of We, Brave New World, Brazil, and The Matrix, among others—but Mao argues that this mistakes utopia’s character. Even the mania for design is motivated by the desire to imagine systems whose primary function is to do right by the individuals inhabiting them.Mao calls his book “essentially descriptive,” an “examination of some through lines in the literature of utopia” rather than a narrative history of the form or a critique of its governing ideologies (10). Inventions of Nemesis engages with an impressive (yet coherent) range of texts in literature, criticism, philosophy, political science, and economics. Thomas More’s Utopia is a touchstone on the literary side, while Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future is the critical work with which Mao is most frequently in conversation. But he has incisive things to say about scores of writers, from Plato to Octavia Butler and from Robert Owen and Charles Fourier to John Rawls and Wai Chee Dimock. Each of the book’s three long chapters takes up aspects of the utopian project that in Mao’s view have not been sufficiently treated. Chapter 1 makes the case for seeing indignation and justice as central to utopianism before turning to what Mao calls counterindignation, the outrage directed by antiutopians at castle-in-the-sky utopian dreaming, which in their view threatens, against all reason and common sense, to overturn a fundamentally just social order. Chapter 2 proposes a working distinction between managerial utopias, which seek to realize their goals by working with human nature as it is (whatever that is taken to mean), and transformative utopias, which proceed on the assumption that under the conditions of utopia human nature itself will be radically changed. In practice, most utopias mix the two styles in different proportions, but all utopias raise the question of “what can or can’t be done with ‘human nature’” (87). Counterindignation is most readily provoked by the fear that utopia will transform subjectivity so radically that human beings as we know them will cease to exist. While a few utopian writers openly embrace this possibility, most fend off the charge by insisting that their utopias do not change human nature but instead, for the first time, allow for its fullest and most perfect expression. But what does that mean? As Mao shows, utopia brings into sharp focus the criteria by which human life is judged and valued. A recurring argument in antiutopian writing is that utopia ultimately deprives human life of value by removing all hardship and struggle from it. Mao astutely observes that utopia has “an uneasy association with perfection,” because it “may sort ill with a certain open-endedness associated with the value of human lives” (140). Perfection implies stasis, an achieved order, which can be felt to be at odds with the ideals tied to human development, growth, change.Mao comes at questions of stasis and change from another angle in chapter 3, which to my mind contains the book’s most original and far-reaching speculations. The foregrounding of “arrangement” in utopian writing—blueprints, schemata, the distribution of roles—has obscured the fact that “utopian imagining has been profoundly animated by questions pertaining to the value of human mobility” (142). The founding text of the genre, More’s Utopia, was in large part motivated by the economic crises of the early sixteenth century, which uprooted unprecedented numbers of workers and set them on the road in search of employment. More’s utopian scheme was intended to obviate the need for such migrancy (which stirred fears of lawlessness and even insurrection) by providing work for all. By the nineteenth century the situation had reversed. The ideal of full employment remained central—indeed, the idea that people cannot be happy without useful work to engage them is a constant across the centuries—but now utopian imaginings were motivated by a desire to free people from the constraints of unrewarding toil by giving them the liberty to move at will from job to job and from one location to the next. “It can be no sort of Utopia worth desiring that does not give the utmost freedom of going to and fro,” writes the narrator of H. G. Wells’s Modern Utopia (quoted on 165). Mao traces this element in utopian writing from Fourier and Owen through Marx, William Morris, and Wells to the Soviet utopias of Aleksandr Bogdanov and finally to Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany. The administrative complexities occasioned by all this moving about in turn give rise to some elaborate systems—some ingenious, others not so much—for coordinating labor so as to meet the needs of society without compromising the rights of workers to choose what they do and where.For Le Guin and Delany, writing in the 1960s and 1970s, the dream of freedom through mobility was already shadowed by the socioeconomic realities of mass migration under global capitalism, in which workers move from one exploitative labor environment to another with little hope of acquiring the rights or privileges afforded to natives. The radical dislocations and dispossessions suffered by migrant communities are now much more likely to be the stuff of dystopian fiction. Meanwhile, the last half century has seen some astonishingly fertile efforts to reimagine the premises of the utopian project, most notably by abandoning the idea of a single utopia in favor of a loose confederation or “archipelago” of utopias organized in different ways so as to meet the needs and desires of different people, or of the same person at different times. Inventions of Nemesis concludes by returning to the place of justice in utopian thinking, this time in the context of globalization. How might we imagine “what’s due” on a planetary scale? What claims does global justice make on us, and how might they be met? It is not the least of this book’s many virtues that it ends by opening out into new lines of inquiry while demonstrating the urgency that continues to drive utopian thinking.