Abstract

The objective of the following essay is to describe and problematize the concept of socialist utopianism in the Chilean context of the twentieth and twenty-first century through the analysis of Jorge Baradit’s alternate history novel, Synco. Published in 2008 but chronologically situated in the 1980s, Baradit’s novel imagines socialist Chile as a dystopia disguised as a technologically advanced eutopia. This brings into the foreground many utopian contents of the past socialist experience in the country that are eventually dismantled by the anti-utopian, anti-ideological post-dictatorship perspective of the author, which constitutes both a critique and a testament of the weakened state of current political trust and militancy in the country.