Why Adam Roberts set out to write a sci-fi utopia, not a dystopia

Adam Roberts' Lake of Darkness opens as two space ships investigate a black hole The starting point for this novel was that I wanted to write utopian fiction. I hadn't done this before: all my previous novels have been straight science fiction. But utopia, the genre that imagines a better, or a perfect, world, is older than science fiction: the first utopian novel, the work that coined the term, was written by Thomas More all the way back in 1516. I was interested in what happened to the mode: More's Utopia generated lots of imitators. Through the 17th and 18th centuries, a great many utopian books, novels, tracts and treatises were written.