H.G. Wells thought you couldn’t really have utopias without a dystopias. The visionary writer believed you needed to aspire to the former and parcel out space for the latter, separate pristine living spaces from the despoiled, industrialized areas that would be exploited to support them. (It’s an idea Larry Page endorses.) Even in a post-industrial landscape, progress will similarly be a mixed blessing. The future is bright–and dark.

A brief excerpt from Wells’ 1905 “A Modern Utopia”:

But in Utopia there will be wide stretches of cheerless or unhealthy or toilsome or dangerous land with never a household; there will be regions of mining and smelting, black with the smoke of furnaces and gashed and desolated by mines, with a sort of weird inhospitable grandeur of industrial desolation, and the men will come thither and work for a spell and return to civilisation again, washing and changing their attire in the swift gliding train. And by way of compensation there will be beautiful regions of the earth specially set apart and favoured for children; in them the presence of children will remit taxation, while in other less wholesome places the presence of children will be taxed.•