Maybe you want a dystopia of a different sort, a dystopia that gets less play, less attention, a world less visited. A world less seen but no less dark than the usual dystopic alternate histories.
Jumpnauts, in the end, is a very ambitious and interesting novel.
The Siege of Burning Grass is a book that rewards patient and slow reading rather than skipping merrily through it. The author is engaging with weighty subjects here and you want to take this patiently and think about the central themes again and what is going on.
I myself have been a fan and enthusiast, one might even say a connoisseur of multiversal fiction, since I got into a car with Prince Corwin and Prince Random and drove from Westchester all the way to Amber.
So you see, Return from the Stars is a most ambiguous Utopia, indeed, and anyone who reads The Dispossessed (and if you haven’t yet, you should go fix that, too) should also read Return from the Stars and ponder its questions.
I want to come to recent events in another way. All of this reminds me of a story that I want do a deep dive on: “The World Science Fiction Convention of 2080” by Ian Watson (published in 1980). This is a short, very inside baseball story of Worldcon, Worldcon fandom and science fiction, and it is quite revealing.
