Consider Phlebas

"Iain Banks is the writer you probably think of as being furthest from utopia in all sorts of ways. But the underlying conceit is that this is a post-scarcity society where people are free from any kind of material concerns. If they want to tear down their existing planet and build a whole new one, they can just go ahead and do it. It’s quite a successful imagining of what things might be like, and how people might react to an end to scarcity. It is. It’s set indefinitely in the future – there’s space travel technology there to make the action work – but you have a situation where there are a vast number of species of various kinds out there in the universe and the heroes or central figures are a post-human culture called the Culture. They are pursuing this project of trying to make the galaxy safe for civilisation. So there are conflicts that go with that. In one of the novels, the Culture has interfered in this other society, they’re trying to bring them forward into this positive culture, and they produce this hideous civil war. The action, set some time in the future, flows from that ancient disaster. But the background to all of it is Banks’s ability to describe this society – how people would live without scarcity, what they would choose to do. It certainly is an exceptional achievement in terms of fiction, to produce a utopia that actually sounds appealing. Yes, that’s quite right. If you have all you need, if there’s no scarcity, you don’t need money. The Queen, supposedly, never carries money. In the Culture, everything is done with gift exchange – which is by no means utopian in the sense of being free from things like the bad and good motives that people have, but that’s one aspect of it. I don’t know – that’s a good question! The books capture, to my mind, the notion that we’re not looking at a static state of achieved perfection. Although Marx wasn’t in any way a utopian – and didn’t think incredibly carefully through this – in his early writings he talks about somebody who herds cattle by day and criticises literature by night, and switches from one to the other as they feel the need. That kind of freedom from alienation, and capacity to achieve your own projects, is what’s very evident in those novels. What we need is a utopian concept that recaptures the language of freedom, both from the authoritarian left of the past and from the market liberal notion that freedom is the freedom to work as hard as you want in order to have as large a bunch of consumer goods to choose from as you might desire. That’s because it can mean freedom for you to do what I want you to. But if you look at the question, when have people been most free to pursue their own projects? That freedom has been much greater in social democratic societies than it has been under either communism or market liberalism. To be free to do things, you also have to be free from want and poverty."