Comment by vidarh

They used to be more common maybe, but even the titular "Utopia" by Thomas More had slavery. Sometimes the "perfect" settings were imperfect due to the times they were written, often they were intentionally imperfect, and that was the point.

E.g. consider HG Wells The Time Machine, where the future start out seeming quite like an utopia but then we meet the Morlocks.

But lots of books were downright dystopian much earlier. Heck, several of the "standards bearers" for dystopias pre-date cyberpunk by a lot, like Brave New World, This Perfect Day, 1984.

Particularly stories like The Time Machine where the setting as a whole very much was revealed not to be an utopia were among the most common "utopian" settings pre-cyberpunk.

Pure utopias were very rare for a reason: They're really hard to set compelling in stories in, and so most of the ones that do exist tend to set stories on their edges and fault lines.

What changed with cyberpunk wasn't that (surface) utopias went away, or even that we get to see the imperfect underside, but that the script is flipped so that the protagonist isn't a tourist on the underside, but belongs there, and is often alienated from any seemingly perfect parts of the world they inhabit.

Compare settings that do show both sides, like The Time Machine, and a cyberpunk version of The Time Machine would probably have a protagonist that was a Morlock. The world itself wouldn't change, but we'd get to see it from the opposite POV.