The narrator repeatedly insults his readers of 2050 and wishes he were instead addressing readers of 2025, when somewhat fewer were boneheads. He looks back to early nineteenth-century Indiana where two utopian experiments were launched in the village of New Harmony. He then recounts the adventures of a another attempt to recreate utopian ideals during the turn of the twentieth century--a new "Boatload of Knowledge" on the banks of the Wabash. Though the novel chastens utopian ideals, its narrator doesn't give up on them altogether. The novel attempts to reach beyond now conventional dystopian narratives to some evidence for the durability of the human experiment.

N.B. The artist who has done all the artwork for "The Enigma Quartet"--cover designs and illustrative drawings--is New York-based artist Marcia Scanlon.