A Funny Man's Dream

Science fiction was often an arena for the utopian blueprint of future society, and this carried on through the soviets to today. Eg: Chernyshevky's infamous “what is to be done” (which Lenin drew his communist ideas). Socialism was perceived as the sociological equivalent of Darwinism - and as Isiah Berlin argues, the logical endpoint of an application of enlightenment thinking. The Soviet view of human nature is that humans are wholly shaped by their environment - the idea of something so nebulous and ineffable as a “soul” is preposterous (I can go into this a whole lot more - soviet architecture was the reflection of Stalin's attempt to create a new type of human.)
Dostoevsky's science fiction tale, where the vision of salvation through scientific and material progress advanced by Chernyshevskt is dispelled in a dream of tulips on a perfect twin of earth: the cosmic paradise breaks down into a society of masters and slaves (ominously prophetic). The narrator wakes from his dream to see the only salvation lies through the Christian love of neighbours (how very Dostoevsky).