On the island utopia of Prospera, a ferryman who gently shepherds people through the retirement process--and, when necessary, enforces it--Proctor Bennet, of the Department of Social Contracts, receives a disturbing and cryptic message from his father, while The Support Staff, who keep Prospera running, organize a revolution that causes Proctor to question everything he once believed.

"The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end. Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location. The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world's stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So...

In a future of near-instantaneous global travel and abundance where leaders conduct mathematically planned, secret murders to maintain a peaceful balance, a convict sentenced to wander the world in service to all teams up with a guilt-stricken counselor when both become privy to the existence of a supernatural child.

Visionaries of all ages and places have pursued Utopias, dreaming impossible dreams of starting over in new communities fashioned more closely to their ideals. In Visions of Utopia, John Egerton traces the fascinating history of the experimental communities founded by such groups in Tennessee. He focuses in particular on three extraordinary colonies of the 19th century, each of them widely known in its time: Nashoba, and interracial settlement near...

"It's the late 1960s, and two lovers converge on an arid patch of earth in South India. John Walker is the handsome scion of a powerful East Coast American family. Diane Maes is a beautiful hippie from Belgium. They have come to build a new world -- Auroville, an international utopian community for thousands of people. Their faith is strong, the future bright. So how do John and Diane end up dying two decades later, on the same day, on a cracked concrete...