(2) For the purposes of this essay, I am most interested in the critical dystopia designation, which Sargent defines as 'a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as worse than the contemporary society but that normally includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopia can be overcome and replaced with a eutopia' (2003, p. In their introduction to Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, titled 'Dystopia and Histories', Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan utilise Lyman Sargent's definitions of utopia, eutopia, anti-utopia, dystopia, and critical dystopia. In this paper, I shall investigate the poetics of these two sites and shall argue that utopian impulses exist in the characters of the child, the artist, and the hybrid custodian, all of whom act as figures of resistance and hope in a dystopian world ruled by rigid and repetitive empirical discourses. It is a world of fluidity and delight and difference and play. Here cages perched in tea-cups sprout wings, dirigibles gesture with dangling limbs, a peeled banana with a light bulb head chases a miniature space ship. There is but one space of relief and difference, which is named UtqIA.

Rounded edges exist as pipes and dials and the tops of umbrellas the overwhelming ethos of this place is a world of boxes and machinery. Melbourne flattens into a sepia-toned city comprising buildings and people that echo each other in their rectangular uniformity. In his picture book The Lost Thing (2000), Shaun Tan visually depicts a futuristic Melbourne, Australia as a dystopic industrialised modernist cityscape.

Shaun Tan Notebooks no 1 by Shaun Tan