Two young men, Raoul and Niko, who have little in common other than their isolation, escape across a wall of mist from a town about to become a crazed utopian experiment only to encounter a series of dreamlike dystopias, apparently in parallel. Perhaps unconsciously Utopia reflects the key themes of the generation coming of age: the environment, the impossibility of finding a job, the fragmentation of society, a troubled hedonism. The novel is also highly original and contains cubes, corridors, robots, biological columns (a metaphor for the constraints the system places on us), an ugly green and sensitive woman born out of a huge flower - and as in Botticelli's Birth of Venus the west wind blows gently into her hair - and many other powerful imaginings.