5 ideas
Săsărman published the collection in Ceaușescu's Romania in 1975, and censors cut several of the cities whose political allegory was too legible. Ursula K. Le Guin's 2013 English version was made from the Spanish translation with the author's collaboration, because she did not read Romanian.
Each imaginary city takes one organizing principle, such as a technology, a belief, a spatial layout or a ruling obsession, and treats it as the city's entire logic. Everything else, including laws, daily life and catastrophe, is derived from that principle within a few pages. Isolating a single premise and running it to its end makes visible how one assumption can structure a whole social order.
In these cities the ideal does not fail because enemies sabotage it. It fails because its founding principle is applied consistently without any competing value to limit it. The dystopia is the utopia fully realized, and perfection itself is the mechanism of the collapse.
Under censorship, a writer displaces critique of the present regime onto invented, timeless or mythic places. The text can then be defended as fantasy while readers who share the code recognize the target. This protection has a built-in limit: the clearer the allegory is to readers, the clearer it is to censors, so the most successful pieces are the ones most likely to be cut.
Read a city's physical form as a statement of who holds power and how. Walls, geometry, verticality and the placement of a center show the power structure more honestly than any stated ideology. The book's title image, squaring the circle, frames the attempt to force an organic human community into a rigid rational plan as a task that is impossible by definition.