My favorite depiction of utopia

A story about the day an all-powerful, kind Authority takes over the world and ends scarcity, pain and death, and the years after, when people still have to work out what to do with themselves. What makes it good is that it doesn’t pretend utopia is perfect: even with unlimited power some things stay hard, and some people would rather have the old world back.

It is the epilogue of Alexander Wales’s serial Worth the Candle, adapted by Caleb Biddulph so it reads without the 1.5 million words before it. Six chapters, about 35,000 words, roughly 2½ hours.

“The world ended about ten minutes ago, but that’s perfectly fine, because we have a new one.”

chapter 1

Contents

1. 1. The world ends · 9,418 words · 38 min

   The old world ends in ten minutes, and gently. Avatars of “Transition Services”, each a small thread of an all-powerful mind called the Authority, visit person after person to explain: no money, no scarcity, pain removed on request, a range of heavens from hard, risky low ones to fully transhuman high ones, and everything bounded by informed consent. A farmer, a grieving mother, a skeptical professor, a man denied revenge and a thief each take it differently. This chapter stands on its own.

   Rance Su, Garrett Voss, Perrina Wharf, Sutsu Su, Mercen Honth, Randall Vox, Pollanny FePonn, Mark Perperson, Clarabell Brown and Trish, Sonia, Lurida Vane

2. 2. Road trip · 7,203 words · 29 min

   A year in, six old friends switch off their enhancements and drive a minivan across South Dakota to Wall Drug, “for authenticity”, past clerks and waitresses played by ’spians. The banter is about bodies, clones and taste. Underneath, Jamie worries about Wren, who lives with a ’spian of Oliver, the man she loved, who chose to die rather than live in the Authority’s world. In the back seat she explains it as a slow, deliberate goodbye.

   Jamie, Marigold, Nia, Seraphina, Bram, Wren, the Heifer of Six Moons

3. 3. The witch on the hill · 4,216 words · 17 min

   Seraphina raises her children in a small, mostly unenhanced family heaven of seasons, gardens and play witchcraft. Marigold arrives by broomstick to say she is pregnant, and Jamie brings the children gifts, a cape that commands leaves and a sword for hunting monsters. The gifts start a gentle argument about how much pain and danger a child in heaven should be allowed.

   Seraphina, Ricardo, Goldie, Jamie the Younger, Marigold, Jamie

4. 4. Khazad Brunn · 4,170 words · 17 min

   Bram visits the dwarfhold he grew up in, resurrected exactly as it was, a low heaven whose young keep leaving. His father calls him the enemy of their way of life. At night, the dwarf he was once promised to comes to ask how long leaving hurts. Back home in the middle heavens, Bram lets his assistant find him company.

   Bram, his father, Nari, Kradoh, Lanik

5. 5. The Angel and the Devil · 4,989 words · 20 min

   Nia and her clone, the Angel and the Devil, live with Jamie C, a clone of Jamie who keeps losing at a world-building game the Jamies invented. A visit from Caelen, the grown son Nia has only recently reconnected with, leaves both Nias thinking about having children. Meanwhile everyone discovers that barrisball, a sport with ten thousand players, is absurdly complicated.

   Nia (the Angel and the Devil), Jamie C, Caelen

6. 6. Ten years in · 5,387 words · 22 min

   Ten years on, Wren feels everyone has moved on but her. She has spent years helping to resurrect the long dead, one at a time, by reading their lives closely enough to care, and the chapter follows one fae knight from 20,000 years ago back to life. Burned out, she finally lets her assistant set her up on a date, and it ends with a plan to spend the next few years together in a deep dive.

   Wren, Lil (her assistant), Shermarin of the Glasswood, Clarke Rinsome

“Before its ascension, the Authority had often thought that you could never have a utopia, because one person’s utopia would always be the dystopia of someone else.”

chapter 1

Story by Alexander Wales; adaptation by Caleb Biddulph, published with the author’s permission. The adaptation carries a content warning for sex, violence and profanity. The summaries above are mine; the story isn’t reproduced here.