Sonny's Utopia is about Sonny, a child astronaut from 20th-century America who is sent into space as an experiment testing the effects of long-term space travel on cognitive and physical development. Like Sir Thomas More's Utopia, Sonny's Utopia is divided into two parts-one that shows the utopia, and one that explains what it was designed to fix. The first part of the book, A History of the Doomed Society, explains what happened to Earth while Sonny was gone. The second part of the book, Sonny's Utopia, details Sonny's arrival and life back on (a much happier) Earth.