India, June 11 -- Super, a 2010 Kannada film, imagines a strange but apt utopia. In its make-believe world, India has become a superpower in 2030. Indians are prosperous and have "white servants" with the latter doing all the menial jobs and begging on the streets. The film's imagination is so limited that it cannot even imagine a utopia without poverty and discrimination. Today, as blundering billionaires seek to establish utopias on Mars, one can only wonder what dystopia that would entail for the rest of us.

Rivers Solomon imagines one such world in An Unkindness of Ghosts. In the novel, humanity - or what is left of it - has been hurtling through space in a ship called Matilda for over 300 years. They had to leave their former home, ...