If surveillance involves the monitoring of people, it necessarily requires monitoring the spaces and places that people inhabit. Utopian texts have inherent spatial concerns, the root word ‘topos’ designating a ‘place’ to which might be attached prefixes with positive or negative connotations. This variety can extend across the many texts understood as utopian, but variations also can occur within individual works. For several centuries, utopian texts tended to depict relatively defined places, sometimes islands or hidden worlds. Especially over the last century, particularly in the shadow of works of H. G. Wells, such places are more likely to be global or planetary in extent. Within these capacious boundaries exist nations or superstates or enclaves, and at times, the explicit, hidden or developing tensions and divisions between these places require specific surveillance protocols and technologies. Boundaries are monitoring pinchpoints where designated groups and individuals can be included and excluded, although clearly surveillance can and does take place within those boundaries. At a more abstract level, comparisons between the world depicted within utopian texts and the worlds lived in by respective readers or viewers are built into the dynamic of any utopian work. Both the projected place of the text and the place occupied by readers and viewers are themselves open to multiple interpretations, reminding us that while some characters can find a space dystopic, others (sometimes the majority) within the same text will treat it as eutopian, or as something less like hell.