ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan retrieved the utopian figure of the "city on the hill" from colonial history to signify the society of harmony and enterprise that his new administration promised to establish. A decade later, in a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 1990, George Bush deployed the utopian figure of the millennium as he called for a new world order of peace and prosperity that would move beyond the era of the Cold War. Moving beyond the engaged utopianism of the 1970s and against the fashionable temptation to despair in the early 1980s, several sf writers turned to dystopian strategies as a way to come to terms with the changing, and enclosing, social reality. Although they reached back into its classical and science fictional roots, they did not simply revive dystopia but rather reworked it in the context of the economic, political, and cultural conditions of the decade.
