In this refusal of futurity, Ursula K. Le Guin takes a non-linear journey – full of side trips and reversals – through a counter-imaginary of place. A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be demonstrates that how we write is inseparable from how we imagine worlds. In anti-heroic literary style, alternative social imaginaries can be rehearsed so that utopia is realised as a practice of staying with and inhabiting the present.