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How about STTNG?
SDG — (archived)

I agree, not all of Asimov's robot stories fit into a deinition of Utopia. Positronic Man pretty much does, because its a history of the first robot, Andrew Martin, to cross the threshold and want some basic rights for itself. I was kind of expecting this to be a pretty dramatic civil rights battle in the book, but really turns out to not be. Its a story in the history of robots that some of the later books refer to. In particular in the book Robots of Dawn a female and her robot reminisce back to the days of 'Andrew Martin and Little Miss' and use those petnames for each other. Theres no real conflict in the book, except that the corporation US Robotics would prefer to have Andrew go away, instead of causing them so much trouble as the only free robot. There is a strong undercurrent of slave labor and civil rights throughout, but certainly no MLK Jr "I have a dream speeches" at which the end the speaker gets shot for his views. (assuming I didn't just guess the dramatic climax I haven't read yet).

Is Star Trek The Next Generation Utopic? Certainly federated earth seems like a pretty nice place to live and work. No money required. Working probably isn't required either if its more to your nature to hang out in your own personal holodeck instead. Though I'm not sure how anything gets done in the world. Boredome is probably the biggest recruiter in the federation. Join the federation, see the universe. Even then we have hints of boredome in the military. Your starship captain job getting a tad boring? Escape into the holodeck and be Sherlock Holmes for a while.

Like you mentioned, the Utopic/dystopic coin flip depends on point of view. Farenheit 451's majority population must have considered their existence utopic. Well, at least until the cities got nuked. Similar to the Matrix and 1984, the utopia turned into dystopia after an awakening of the protagonist.

Has the STTNG utopia ever turned dystopic on the show simply from a POV flip or awakening? I can't think of any instances, though I didn't watch it religiously. Sure there were mechanisms which created the dystopic feel (Picard=Locutus of borg or the Q continuum), but those relied on the mechanism and weren't truly dystopic because the underlying society was still utopic. I think we can count STTNG as strongly utopic, and somehow it still worked. Now I'm curious why.

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