This paper attempts to set “post-apartheid” South African fiction against current debates concerning the postcolonial and the post-national. South Africa, having recently come into its own in terms of the Utopian national vision that has driven and informed much of its history, is in danger of harbouring a deep and often hidden assumption that this is the end of its history, with only a better delivery of a static vision being in question. Arguing that such an attitude betrays the fundamental commitment to the future so central to the idea of the nation as presented in recent work by Benedict Anderson, amongst others, this paper will look at the general status of the future within “post”-thinking, before moving on to a specific consideration of some of the new genres that have come to the fore in post-apartheid fiction. In arguing that the nation is mainly useful to us as an idea if it is always beyond us, always calling us to question the present, this paper will attempt to redefine the Utopian in a strong sense and measure such a challenging embrace of the future against a number of key current South African texts.