As I got more and more interested in writing about positive futures, I started reading (or often re-reading) a lot of speculative fiction: utopian, feminist utopian, science-fiction, post-industrial, de-industrial, solar punk, hope punk, afrofuturist, graphic novels and manga, and basically almost any post-apocalyptic fiction or different future novel that wasn’t completely dystopian. I was interested in what other people thought a better world would look like and how it could happen.
At some point I did a deep dive into the history of utopian works. A book that was helpful in looking at a lot of historic utopian writing was The Utopia Reader, edited by Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent.
Most of the earliest written utopian works weren’t actually written about the future–they put the ideal world in the past, what the Greeks called the Golden Age and the Judeo-Christian tradition talked about as the Garden of Eden. (Probably the biggest exception to this was the Book of Revelation/Apocalypse where a new and wonderful earth happens during the future millennium described there.)
The ones written in the late Middle Ages/early Renaissance (the age of exploration) often put the utopian society in some far away, newly discovered place (often an island somewhere). It was only in the eighteenth century with Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s novel, The Year 2440 (also published as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred) that utopias really began to be about the future.
I also started noticing that a lot of the relatively recent (nineteenth century and beyond) male written utopian novels seem to follow a bit of a formula: a skeptical male outsider visits and is eventually converted. He had at least one previous relationship with a woman (who typifies mainstream society) but becomes involved with a liberated woman from the utopian society who he eventually decides to stay with. I will note when this occurs. There are also a bunch of more recent feminist utopian fiction which, needless to say, usually don’t follow this formula.
Here’s some brief reviews of some early (pre-twentieth century) utopian ideas and stories. Many of them are under five hundred characters each because I had originally put them on my Mastodon site:
Plato’s Republic is not a work of fiction, but a work of philosophy. The subject of this piece is justice and what it means on an individual level, but Plato begins by describing a just and fair city, that is an ideal society. He starts by describing a simple society which seems to me to be ideal, but his followers demand more “luxuries” which leads to a much more elaborate vision, which brings the need for more territory and therefore war.
Thomas More’s Utopia is the book that originally named Utopia, Utopia. It’s both a view to what could be and somewhat of a satire. The name Utopia means no place or perhaps ‘good place’ depending on how it’s spelled, and that’s a deliberate play on words. It was a progressive vision for the time and the society could be described as communist. More also admits in the book that it was a response to Plato’s Republic.
After More’s Utopia there was a lot of utopian fiction written. Probably the most important works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (which again has everything shared but it’s all run by a priest called Metaphysic and three princes symbolizing Power, Wisdom, and Love), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (which does speak of “generosity”, but mostly focuses on the technological achievements, the buildings and merchants and experiments of Bensalem), and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s The Year 2440 aka Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (already mentioned as an early work that put the utopia in the future).
In the early part of the nineteenth century, there was not only utopian fiction written but also works written suggesting people could actually live differently and some people tried it. These were the so-called Utopian Socialists and Utopian Societies. The Utopian Socialists included Charles Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier, all of whom inspired utopian communities, and I might include Étienne Cabet whose Voyage en Icarie also inspired a few communities. In addition there were dozens of new religious communities promising a better world, from the Mormons and Shakers, to the Amana and Oneida communities, which lasted quite a while but whose products (appliances and silverware) outlasted them.
And then, near the end of the nineteenth century, a couple of very influential new utopias were written.
The first was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887, which was one of the first books to locate the ideal society in the future. The future here is a very centralized nationalist socialism. While there is no wealth or poverty, everything in this utopia is run by the government and everyone works in an industrial army for twenty-four years, starting at twenty-one and retiring at age forty-five. The government supplies everything anyone needs.
And the other was William Morris’ News from Nowhere, which in many ways was a direct response to Looking Backwards. If Looking Backwards is a paradise of “State Socialism” then News from Nowhere is a communist anarchist utopia. The basic government is that there is no government. This is a society where everything is free and given freely. A problem with Morris’ utopian vision is that he assumes that, because he was a bit of a workaholic and loved making things, everyone would want to work if they got the chance
There was a lot more utopian fiction written in the twentieth century.