Utopian and dystopian fiction

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The Utopian genre and its offshoot, the Dystopia, are genres of literature that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world, or utopia, as the setting for a novel. Dystopian fiction is the opposite: creation of a nightmare world, where utopian ideals have been subverted. Many novels combine both, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take in its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction writing.

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The word utopia was first used in this context by Thomas More in his 1516 work Utopia. The word utopia means "no place" in Greek, and resembles the Greek term for "good place," eutopia. In his book, More sets out a vision of an ideal society. An earlier example of a Utopian work from classical times is Plato's The Republic, in which he outlines what he sees as the ideal society and its political system.

Other examples include Aldous Huxley's Island, B.F. Skinner's Walden Two, and Samuel Butler's Erewhon ("Erewhon" is "nowhere" spelled backwards — almost).

Examples:

Dystopias usually include elements of contemporary society and function as a warning against some modern trend. Often, the warning is against the threat of oppressive regimes in one form or another.

Examples of dystopias:

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is sometimes linked with Utopian (and Dystopian) literature, because it shares the general preoccupation with ideas of the good (and bad) society. Of the countries Lemuel Gulliver visits, only the Country of the Houyhnhnms approaches a Utopia; most of the others have significant Dystopian aspects.

Many works combine elements of both utopias and dystopias. Typically, an observer from our world will journey to another place or time and see one society the author considers ideal, and another representing the worst possible outcome. The point is usually that the choices we make now may lead to a better or worse potential future world. Ursula K. Leguin's Always Coming Home fulfils this model, as does Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. In Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing there is no time-travelling observer, but her ideal society is invaded by a neighbouring power embodying evil repression. In Aldous Huxley's Island, in many ways a counterpoint to his better-known Brave New World, the fusion of the best parts of Buddhist philosophy and Western technology is threatened by the "invasion" of oil companies.

In another literary model, the imagined society journeys between elements of utopia and dystopia over the course of the novel or film. At the beginning of The Giver by Lois Lowry, the world is described as a utopia, but as the book progresses, dystopia takes over.

Anthony Burgess wrote in Part One of his novel 1985, about Nineteen Eighty-Four, stating that "I prefer to call Orwell’s imaginary society a cacotopia – on the lines of cacophony or cacodaemon. It sounds worse than dystopia."

A subgenre of this is ecotopian fiction, where the author posits either a utopian or dystopian world revolving around environmental conservation or destruction. Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia was the first example of this, followed by Kim Stanley Robinson in his California trilogy. Robinson has also edited an anthology of short ecotopian fiction, called Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias.

Another important subgenre is feminist utopias, for example Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time. See also the overlapping category of feminist science fiction. Writer Sally Gearhart calls feminist utopian fiction political: it contrasts the present world with an idealized society, criticizes contemporary values and conditions, sees men or masculine systems as the major cause of social and political problems (e.g. war), and presents women as equal to or superior to men, having ownership over their reproductive functions. A common solution to gender oppression or social ills in feminist utopian fiction is to remove men, either showing isolated female societies as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, or societies where men have died out or been replaced, as in Joanna Russ's A Few Things I Know About Whileaway, where "the poisonous binary gender" has died off. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is an example of a feminist utopian novel that does not remove men, but posits a non-human biology in which each individual is usually neuter, and sometimes male, sometimes female.

Étienne Cabet's work Voyages en Icarie caused a group of Cabet's followers, known as Icarians, to leave France in 1848 and come to the United States to found a series of utopian settlements in Texas, Illinois, Iowa, California, and elsewhere. These groups lived in communal settings and lasted until 1898.

Though few would claim "utopian" status, the ongoing movement of Intentional Communities (www.ic.org) are groups of people who strive for a more ideal life in some way, and are inspired by a similar urge found in utopian novels. IC's are cultural and social experiments in better living. Some of the better known modern experiments include Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage (www.dancingrabbit.org), Twin Oaks (which was actually directly inspired by Wladen II, one of the Utopia Novels on this list) and The Farm in the US, ZEGG in Germany, Camphill Communities (all over, but originating in Europe) and Auroville in India. Geoph Kozeny's video, Visions of Utopia (available at the www.ic.org website) highlights some of the best (and most challenging) aspects of trying to make utopia real.

  • Applebaum, Robert. Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  • Bartkowski, Frances. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
  • Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature. Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1994.
  • Booker, M. Keith. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1994.
  • Ferns, Chris. Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1999.
  • Gerber, Richard. Utopian Fantasy. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955.
  • Gottlieb, Erika. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial. Montreal, McGill-Queen's Press, 2001.
  • Haschak, Paul G. Utopian/Dystopian Literature. Metuchen, NJ, Scarecrow Press, 1994.
  • Kessler, Carol Farley. Dare to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women Before 1950. Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1995.
  • Tod, Ian, and Michael Wheeler. Utopia. London, Orbis, 1978.
  • Sargent, Lyman Tower. "Themes in Utopian Fiction in English before Wells." Science Fiction Studies Vol. 10, No. 3, pt. 3 (November 1976).
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_and_dystopian_fiction"
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