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Utopian fiction imagines a society organized far better than the author's own, usually seen through the eyes of a visitor who is shown how it works. The genre takes its name from Thomas More's *Utopia* (1516), whose title puns on the Greek for "no place" and "good place." Later examples include Edward Bellamy's *Looking Backward: 2000-1887* (1888), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's *Herland* (1915) and Ursula K. Le Guin's *The Dispossessed* (1974). A utopia is always also a criticism of the present, because each ideal arrangement points to a problem the author sees at home.
Read the passage in Book 1 of *Utopia* where sheep are said to "devour men," then read a description of Utopian work or property from Book 2, and pair each Utopian practice with the English problem it answers. Then read the opening of *Herland* and track what the male visitors expect and how they are proved wrong. Ask of any utopia: who benefits, what is lost, and what the visitor fails to see.
In 1516 the English lawyer and statesman Thomas More published a short book in Latin called *Utopia*. Its first part is a conversation about the troubles of England, where landowners were enclosing fields for sheep and driving farmers off the land. A traveler named Raphael Hythloday says that in England sheep now "devour men." The second part is Hythloday's account of an island he claims to have visited, called Utopia, where property is held in common, everyone works, and the working day is six hours.
The title is a pun. In Greek, ou-topos means "no place" and eu-topos means "good place." The best society may exist nowhere. More adds other hints of doubt. Hythloday's name suggests "speaker of nonsense," and the character named More is not fully convinced. The book set the pattern for a genre: a visitor reaches an ideal society, learns how it works, and returns to report.
The pattern lasted. Edward Bellamy's *Looking Backward: 2000-1887* (1888) sends a Bostonian into a long sleep. He wakes in the year 2000 to find industry run cooperatively and poverty gone. The novel sold widely and inspired political clubs. William Morris answered it with *News from Nowhere* (1890), which pictures a society of craft and simple pleasure instead of efficient machines. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's *Herland* (1915) sends three American men into a country of women who have lived without men for two thousand years. The men's expectations about women are proved wrong at almost every turn, which makes the book both utopia and satire.
In the twentieth century, writers grew more cautious about perfect plans. Dystopian novels showed ideal systems turning into tyrannies. Ursula K. Le Guin's *The Dispossessed* (1974), subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia," follows a physicist from an anarchist moon whose society has no government or property. Le Guin shows its freedoms and its hidden pressures to conform.
When you read a utopia, ask three questions. What problem in the author's world does each arrangement answer? What does the visitor learn, and what does he miss? Does the text want you to believe in its ideal, or to think harder about why it is out of reach?
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