Benjamin Goold's acknowledgement of Nineteen Eighty-Four's immense historical importance to public and academic imagination of surveillance, noted in the Introduction, comes with a sting in the tail. Accepting that Orwell and Michel Foucault ‘have been instrumental in shaping the way many criminologists and social theorists now think about questions of surveillance and its role in contemporary society’, Goold, a self-confessed empiricist, advises those criminologists and social theorists to concentrate their research on the actual rather than on the imagined world. He warns the alternative might be that the ‘theoretical literature of social control will become increasingly divorced from reality’ (Goold 2004: 212). Goold's point is entirely valid methodologically, but does not seem to have been honoured by some of his fellow social scientists. As well as numerous references to Orwell, a brief survey of works published after Goold's advice quickly discloses an array of works where utopias are referenced: seven chapters in The New Politics of Surveillance (2006); five chapters in Theorising Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond (2006); the chapter ‘Surveillance, Visibility and Popular Culture’ in Lyon's Surveillance Studies: An Overview (2007); four chapters in Surveillance: Power, Problems and Politics (2009); John McGrath's and Dietmar Kammerer's respective contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (2012), and the more recent examples mentioned in the introduction from Lyon and Bauman in Liquid Surveillance, among others. Goold himself is not averse to others examining surveillance through cultural lenses. In New Directions in Surveillance and Privacy (2009), he and co-editor Daniel Neyland introduce Mike Nellis's ‘Since Nineteen Eighty-Four: Representations of Surveillance in Literary Fiction’ (Nellis 2009: 178–204) with a brace of questions: ‘we have the opportunity to ask whether writing about futures of surveillance can be seen as one of the sets of resources through which readers of texts orient their contemplation of surveillance activities? Through fiction can we see the ways in which surveillance concepts are becoming part of the world?’ (Neyland and Goold 2009: xxiv).