Utopia as Structure in Everything for Everyone

Utopia as Structure in Everything for Everyone

This article relates to Everything for Everyone

A large number of contemporary American works of speculative fiction, if not the majority, could reasonably be classified as dystopian in some sense—imagining a future world in which the era-defining problems of our time like climate change, white supremacy, fascism, and the obscenely wide income gaps of late-stage capitalism have gotten exponentially worse. This is likely not because the authors who write this kind of fiction are pessimists, though surely some are, but because dystopia seemingly lends itself more easily to a compelling plot. Storytelling, we have been told, requires conflict. The protagonist must be up against something—in the dystopian plot, it is usually a fascist government, societal collapse, climate disaster, or some combination of these—and ultimately prevail.

M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi's Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 flips this presumption on its head by placing the narrative on the other side of the protagonists' prevailing, and in so doing demonstrates that we are living now in the dystopia, and that it doesn't have to be this way. We learn of the most chilling details of the darkest days of this dystopia from a safe distance, through the stories of the people who fought back and saved the world from the aforementioned plagues of contemporary society. In virtually every way, Everything for Everyone subverts the traditional modes of Western storytelling, which most commonly features a central protagonist and three-act arc structure: the setup, the confrontation (rising action, usually ending with a climax), and resolution. Instead, we have capsule stories, presented in non-linear order, in which individual characters recall their part in overthrowing oppression, and talk about some aspect of how things have changed for the better in this utopian future world. Many of these stories feature the drama of conflict (such as Kawkab Hassan's story of liberating Palestine from Israeli occupation and Aniyah Reed's of liberating science from corporate greed) but with the remove of hindsight.

In other chapters, there is no conflict at all. A character called Latif Timbers discusses the new structures for raising children, usually involving multiple families living in the same home to share duties and resources. Another called Kayla Puan talks about how life and mutual support works in the commune. It does not feel like there is anything lacking in these chapters despite there being no story arc, because the central theme of utopia is a trellis that supports the individual vines of narrative as they unfurl in their various directions. Through this mechanism of support, the authors demonstrate all of the ways in which our world could be better, and in some ways the means through which we can get there. There is no singular hero, very little setup, no rising action or climax, and no resolution in this non-linear, capsule-based form of storytelling.

While the three-act structure involving a central conflict is most common in the Western world, this is far from the only way to tell a story, and other cultures do things differently. In Craft in the Real World, author Matthew Salesses explores some examples of this, including the work of theorist Ming Dong Gu in Chinese Theories of Fiction. According to Salesses, Gu lays out some common features of Chinese fiction: "Chinese fiction comes from street talk and gossip...the author and reader may show up within the story as themselves, […] episodic structure, [...] a mix of formal language with vernacular or even vulgar language." All of these are featured in Everything for Everyone as well. The book also bears similarities to African griot tradition and some Middle Eastern storytelling (i.e., One Thousand and One Nights), particularly in the framing device used in creating an overarching story (or frame) which contains multiple smaller narratives.

The unconventional choices made in the building of a narrative by the authors of Everything for Everyone mirrors the reversal of conventions that the interviewees describe in their stories, and this is how the book can serve as a map to the utopian (or at the very least better, more equitable) world described in its pages. If enough of us decide to do things differently, the dystopian narrative of our current day can be disrupted.

Grapes hanging from trellis
Photo from Unsplash on Freerange Stock

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This article relates to Everything for Everyone. It first ran in the November 5, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.