Why dance? To celebrate and to revere; to let go and to hold on; to be with others and to withdraw into yourself; to unite the individual and the collective, the immediate and the ultimate; to quiver, to flow, to make real the impossible, and, within the moment of movement, to transform. Even to make literature: writers from Leo Tolstoy to Christopher Isherwood have used the dance floor to bridge social and political worlds, to turn private life into public spectacle, and to work out all manner of worries, sorrows, and disappointments. In the past half decade, a run of novels, memoirs, and even poetry collections have embraced the literary potential of underground electronic music. Two recent books, McKenzie Wark’s “Raving,” from 2023, and Emily Witt’s “Health and Safety,” from 2024, explore different but overlapping facets of New York’s underground rave scene, and Liam Cagney’s “Berghain Nights,” from 2025, provides a personal history of the legendary Berlin club and the pounding techno played nightly within.

The story here is of the dance floor as a provisional utopia. For these writers, techno and house clubs are integrated spaces where all participants can immerse themselves in the beat. Wark, who, at fifty-six, came out as transgender, posits these often improvised raves as a zone where trans people can be in their own bodies. She writes that, while dancing, she feels herself becoming “just happy flesh,” “a trans body homing in on its own estrangement.” With this movement comes the possibility of freedom. “There was a sense—a hope—that what we were discovering at the club was a truth we should hold on to,” the poet Aria Aber writes, in a recent Yale Review essay.

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In Aber’s novel “Good Girl,” from 2025, a young Afghan German woman named Nila, in the early twenty-tens, throws herself into Germany’s club scene amid a series of crises both public and private: conservative parents, neo-Nazi terrorist bombings, a relationship with a controlling older American man. Nila cannot solve these problems, but on the nights and weekends that she and her friends spend on the dance floor, “drained of a sense of self,” the world around her no longer seems so unbearable.

Nila’s sense of dance as a means of escape is shared by the ravers in Mónica Ojeda’s new novel, “Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun,” translated by Sarah Booker. In Ecuador in the near future, catastrophe runs rampant: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and daily violence committed both by cartels and by the government. Seeking relief, a pair of teen girls named Noa and Nicole hitch their way up to Solar Noise, a weeklong festival “of experimental shamanic noise, of underground post-Andean music, of ancestral thrash retrofuturism,” held in the Andean páramo, surrounded by volcanic peaks.

Upon arrival, the girls find a community of ravers and psychedelic rockers, romantics and orgiastics, shamans who serve as doctors, and poets who believe themselves to be prophets. Solar Noise, it seems, is a kind of spiritual magnet, drawing hedonists and seekers and musicians envisioning new hybrid genres: electropasillos, capishcafunk, mambojazz. The festival, it’s said, has the capacity to spur strange dreams and wild dancing, to whip people into trances, to separate the body from the soul and reunite them in a new form. Noa dances viciously, slamming her body raw in front of the stage. She begins sleepwalking backward, following a chorus of primal voices, an “ancient dream drumming” that she hears in her head. Noa has “a passion for annihilation for the sake of annihilation,” as one character puts it, “the desire to reach the limit of the tolerable,” and to transcend it. If dance can serve to strengthen social ties, here it seems to break them apart. Whether the outcome will be terrible or beautiful is unclear.

Humans have been dancing for tens of thousands of years, but they have only been dancing to techno since the nineteen-eighties. Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson—a trio of d.j.s now known as the Belleville Three—grew up together in the suburbs of Detroit. As teens, they began combining boundary-breaking funk with the kinds of synthesized beats of early electro-pop groups like Kraftwerk, folding those influences into the standard four-on-the-floor house rhythm and jacking up the tempo to create a sound that was entirely their own.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, these sounds would be remixed, reimagined, and redeployed in dance clubs around the world. As captured by the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, these clubs—in London and Berlin—appear as houses of secular worship, with a sea of blissed-out faces turned up toward the speakers, one congregation devoted to the beat. “That’s how living together could be: being peaceful together and enjoying the senses,” Tillmans would later reflect. “Suddenly everybody felt that there was this utopia that was very real, and you could actually live this utopian dream.”

The club left its imprint on the movies, pop music, and fashion of the era. It was also captured in literary fiction. In the Scottish novels “Trainspotting,” by Irvine Welsh, and “Morvern Callar,” by Alan Warner, night life was a routine activity, taken up every weekend and put aside for the workweek. Drug-taking, beat-making, and dancing yourself to sleep were no longer fringe activities; they were just normal life.

The experimental German writer Rainald Goetz’s 1998 novel, “Rave,” translated by Adrian Nathan West, is set largely in the night clubs of Berlin and Munich. The book flows in and out of rooms, conversations, memories, and sensations, riding up and down on intoxicant waves, with the music pulsing always beneath it. Goetz is trying to capture the essence of the dance age, guided by a question posed by his narrator: “How would a text about our lives have to sound?”

The French writer Ann Scott tried to answer this question in her 2000 novel, “Superstars,” recently translated by Jonathan Woollen. Scott’s narrator, Louise, is a musician of sorts, a frequent drug user, and a desperate diehard romantic, forever dogged by her ex-girlfriend Alex. Louise receives a huge advance to produce an electronic record, but proceeds to make barely any music at all. She cycles in and out of Paris’s queer techno scene, going to clubs, helping her friends d.j., and dropping a lot of E.

“Rave” is told in restless fragments, “Superstars” in an almost perversely detached style that privileges visual observation over physical experience. Yet there are moments in “Superstars,” as in an early scene set at an underground rave, when Scott lets the music take over. She knows how a dance track can arise from a set of vinyl records—flexing and flowing from sample to sample, transition to transition—and how those tiny musical choices take hold of the body and make it move. “Loops overlapped, unfolded, weaved all kinds of structures, infinite trails,” Louise narrates, “and my brain wanted to follow them all, one after the other.”

From time to time, these novels partake of Tillmans’s sensual utopia, but more often they reveal its limits. In the recent book “Hyperpolitics,” the political historian Anton Jäger uses Tillmans’s photographs to illustrate the uniquely apolitical character of post-Cold War life, its retreat from the ideological churches of an earlier era. In Jäger’s view, the spread of club culture in the eighties and nineties reflected the retreat of mass public institutions like political parties, churches, and unions. In this new culture, freedom was attained not through engagement in political struggle but through individual consumer choices. Having been freed of political commitments by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of great-power conflict, the increasingly well-to-do dancers of the nineties and early two-thousands sought fulfillment in the marketplace of self-gratification.

The period’s dance-floor novels are similarly myopic. Their narrators worry about the corruption of their music scenes by news presenters, magazine writers, major-label scouts, and (for Goetz especially) academics. They watch foreign TV and obsess over brand names. Scott seems to find some special profundity in the science of advertising, devoting part of a chapter to describing a stream of TV commercials, and stopping her novel short to point out pieces of clothing worn by people at a rave, along with the designer.

There does not seem to be much of substance beyond the dance floor, and even there the rush of movement often gives way to a spiritual desolation. Louise’s drug use quickly becomes a heroin addiction, shrouding the later part of “Superstars” in an opiate haze. The characters in “Rave” can act out only in their fantasies, saying things like “No danger, no party; no fear, no fun; no beat, no logic, no nothing.” In Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 adaptation of “Morvern Callar,” the protagonist enters a Spanish night club and then disappears into herself, still listening to her own music on a Walkman. The result is a collection of novels that, while intermittently electrifying, expend an incredible quantity of words on the semiotics of TV marketing and the ethics of selling out. The authors write to us from the seemingly endless present of the nineties, when d.j.s soundtracked Hollywood movies and trips to Ibiza were dirt cheap—and then the lights came up, and the utopia vanished.

The nineties club kids and their literary representatives might have eschewed historical memory and organized politics, but the newer dance-floor books possess considerably more perspective. Less depressive, more earnest, and more explicitly political, they place the club in a larger context, rather than adopting the moment-to-moment focus on the immediate present employed by Scott, Welsh, and Goetz. In “Berghain Nights,” Cagney relates the history of techno, from its emergence in deindustrializing Detroit to its explosion in a reunified Berlin, where it was performed in air-raid bunkers, abandoned depots, and the former East German power plant that today houses Berghain. Witt and Wark both write about the liberatory potential of the rave scene among those pushed out of more mainstream spaces. And, in her Yale Review essay, Aber writes that her time on the dance floor taught her “a way of thinking with other people, not alone.”

A dance party can be a communal experience, a collective of bodies and nervous systems swaying and vibrating in response to music made and mixed on the fly. Aber shares a youthful memory of dancing at a festival in a field outside Berlin, when she stepped outside of her own body and perceived the crowd around her as “a large, multitudinous organism” that had arisen all at once. What had once been separate had become, briefly, something whole. And only with “work and surrender, attention and intent” could they hope to keep something that was never guaranteed in the first place.

Jäger compares the sounds of techno to the noise of Detroit’s industrial machinery—the music that drove the ersatz utopias of the late twentieth century is, in other words, merely a synthetic echo of a far more vital past. This is meant to be a poignant quip, but it exposes the limitations of his conception of history. Jäger can only conceive of mass culture as a product of a given historical moment, rather than as a response to that moment. But the temporary collective forged on the dance floor is not just a distraction from the crises of contemporary culture—it’s also capable of reshaping how we see ourselves and others.

After all, what begins inside the body will always ripple out into the wider world. The seekers of Ojeda’s “Electric Shamans” want to be lifted from the violence of their society and the conundrums of their lives. Most of all, they want to encounter a living music so powerful that it has the capacity to transform, to liberate, to destroy. Where so many of her predecessors came alive only on the dance floor, Ojeda allows her subject matter to reverberate through the novel, inflecting every sentence with its shivery rhythms. Mountains are transformed into “giant bells,” and human minds into caves that dream and bloom. Dance becomes an exorcism, a resurrection, an “interior cataclysm” that breaks open the body and transforms the soul. This is a novel where, as one character remarks, “the power of sound is greater than that of meaning.”

Late in the novel, Noa, Nicole, and their newfound compatriots get into a van with a group of musical hermits who have fled to the mountains to escape the violence of Ecuadorian society. Together, they retreat to a volcanic lake and take part in a psychedelic ceremony, dancing to the beat of that ancient dream drumming. One levitates, a second hears the voices of the dead, a third experiences the entire geologic history of the Andean mountain range inside his own body. “I was a leaf, a chunk of asteroid, a guy named Pedro from the future,” he says. All this might or might not be pure hallucination, another admits. But, “what does it matter if that’s what the music made me see.”

Ojeda does not view the dance floor as a utopia, or a model, or a solution. The Solar Noise festival ends, and the killing goes on. But, for at least some of her characters, their moment of transcendence retains its power. “Electric Shamans,” like the best of the new dance-floor books, tries to represent the emergence of a world that seems perennially out of reach. As on the dance floor, you must give yourself over to the movement, the music, the beat. You surrender, and then you see. ♦