“Mosley presents a short tract with a lengthy title: Folding the Red into the Black; or, Developing a Viable Untopia for Human Survival in the 21st Century. Mosley’s coinage “untopia” indicates a practical departure from attempts to engineer a “perfect state of social harmony.” He never claims a perfect solution. The strategy throughout this plainspoken essay is to release the project of human survival from partisan baggage. Utopias contrived since the rise of industry have been socialist alternatives to capitalist reality, even as capitalist modernization has been sold globally with the same kind of starry-eyed ideals and force-fed militarism. The abstract ideas and “virtual” structures humans are violently subjected to are “derived from false notions of history and the subsequent confusion about who, and what, we are.” Both socialist and capitalist ideals threaten to dehumanize the global population – Mosley prefers the universal term “denizens” – by treating humans uniformly like drones in the first instance, and running most of them like mules in the latter. Therefore, the early sections of the book delve into Mosley’s conception of people. As a streetwise author of crime fiction, he has a certain authority to call upon in this area. But the key human insight around which he constructs his society derives from his own introspective nature as an artist: a society has to allow for the creativity of its denizens, and will be all the more successful and humane if it does.”

Read the full review here.