Moving into the Twentieth Century. The authors of The Utopia Reader note that several famous dystopias were written in this century and they claim it “..is generally known as the dystopian century.” They also admit, though, there were “many positive utopias” written as well.
H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia is perhaps the first utopian novel of the twentieth century. In this utopia, there is a World State that uses technology to run the world to provide “a universal maximum of individual freedom” through a group of people who “are engaged in administrative work. Practically the whole of the responsible rule of the world is in their hands.” Later, Wells wrote that “…a better society could be created only by the very best of the human community working together.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote not one but three utopian novels plus a novella and a bunch of utopian short stories. Herland is the best known of them, written in 1915. It describes a women’s culture, “a sort of Maternal Pantheism” where she claims “…women are the natural cooperators, not men!” This book is interesting for a number of reasons but one of the most important is that it is one of the first feminist utopias. There will be many more.
Olaf Stapledon’s Darkness and the Light is about a society based on a balance between mechanization and hand crafting. This society is “at once ‘super-modern’ and yet in a way medieval.” “Sub-atomic power” produces all the necessities, freeing up people to produce beautiful handmade items. Cities are replaced by “a host of villages separated by parks, market gardens, orchards, and fields.” It seems to me like he’s trying to unite Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias.
B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two was written in 1945, though it wasn’t published until 1948. Many of its critics haven’t read the book. Skinner claimed several ideas in common with Thoreau’s Walden, including: “No way of life is inevitable. Examine your own closely. … If you do not like it, change it. … Simplify, your needs. Learn how to be happy with fewer possessions.” This book looks at work, class, and sex roles, and creates a very egalitarian model–and, again, was written in the forties.
Aldous Huxley’s novel Island is a response to his dystopian novel Brave New World. It’s set on an unknown South Asian isle in what might be the present or very near future. The island is an ecological and psychological paradise created by a sort of mixture of Buddhist philosophy, pop psychology, free love/open sexuality, and psychedelic drugs. The book has some good critiques of capitalism and points out the benefits of cooperation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end well for the islanders.
Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia may be the classic ecological utopia, but it has the basic male utopian plot.The skeptical visitor is Will Weston. Ecotopia, a breakaway nation, has just allowed its first American visitor. Almost everything there is biodegradable and they are trying to actively decrease their population. In the end, Will Weston is converted enough to stay–by his female love interest in Ecotopia, Marissa. This book has become a meme, so to speak, so to speak, when people call the PNW ecotopia.
Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia Emerging Is the prequel to Ecotopia. Callenbach tries to build a bridge between now (or at least when he wrote it) and his utopian future and sketches out one way to get there. It relies a bit too heavily on technological luck (a self taught young scientist figures out a cheap way to make solar cells) and, worse, on nuclear blackmail, but it still gives some good ideas about how to create social change.
In John Michael Greer’s Retrotopia the skeptical visitor is Peter Carr who has been sent to Lakeland as a diplomatic missionary to this seemingly backward country. Of course, the longer he stays in Lakeland, the less backward it seems. There is the obligatory sexual liaison and the essential awakening of the narrator. A lot of the plot seems to have much in common with Ecotopia and I suspect that isn’t an accident. However, in this book there is a future made out of ideas from the past.
Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time is a mid-seventies classic of feminist utopian fiction (solarpunk before its time) about a woman pulled into two different futures. One is a playful utopian society (Mattapoisett) where everyone’s pronoun is per and they live happily in harmony with nature and raise their children communally. The other is a mechanistic dystopia where the corporations own everyone. It also has a strong critique of the psychiatric system.
Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean follows the feminist formula of women meeting militaristic men and defeating them by nonviolent witness. This is a world of all women, a water world where there is no land, only floating villages, to which a young man comes, gets involved with one of the women, and slowly becomes converted to their point of view. The women have adapted to their ocean environment and created a feminist and ecologically adapted culture.
Joan Slonczewski’s Daughters of Elysium takes place on the same planet as A Door into Ocean, but over a thousand years later. In this book the intersection of many cultures (the Sharers from A Door into Ocean, the Elsians who now also live on the planet, a Windclan family from Bronze Sky, the militant and patriarchal Urulans, and an emergent culture of sentient cyberbeings) raises fascinating questions and looks at issues of cultural diversity.
Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country at first seems like a somewhat typical feminist-utopian novel. There are two separate groups, the men who are in military style garrisons and the women who live in the towns. There are no women in the garrisons but there are a few men, called ‘servitors’, who live with and support the women. The book contains many surprises, some not very pleasant. Something I found interesting was the idea you could breed the violence and misogyny out of men.
Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground is a collection of stories about “the hill women”, a future separatist women’s society outside of the violent, patriarchal City where men hold sway. The women are protected by psychic power that doesn’t allow men to be potent outside of the city. The only other humans in the countryside are “the gentles” who have stopped acting like men and want to ally with the women. This book asks the question of whether any men can be trusted–and doesn’t answer it.
Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions is a raunchy, joyous story celebrating queer resistance and culture. It’s as if the servitors from The Gate to Women’s Country and the gentles from The Wanderground were queer and got to tell their story. The equivalents of ‘the women’ and ‘the men’ from those books are also here and the faggots definitely ally with the women. The book also includes some wild and ribald illustrations.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a classic sci-fi story that imagines what at first seems like an unbelievably happy utopia, except that it is bought at the cost of one wretched child’s misery. However, a few of the children and adolescents when they find out about the child, and even the occasional adult whose conscience catches up to them, decide to leave the beautiful city and search for something better.
NK Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” was written as a response to Ursula LeGuin’s “Omelas” story. Here also is a beautiful utopian city where everyone is treated as important. But Um-Helat is maintained by social workers who painlessly kill anyone who truly believes that they are better than others and tries to spread that idea. The story ends by saying this utopia could be created when enough people believe that everyone is worthwhile and are willing to fight for that.
Here’s someone keeping track of the many fictional responses to Omelas.
Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Day Before the Revolution” is a prequel to The Dispossessed. It’s a story about the woman who led and inspired the anarchists who would eventually found Anarres, at a point when she is old and suffering from strokes and is totally dissatisfied with her life, her lover and political partner has died long ago and although she is admired, she feels it’s because she is old and harmless now, since she spent much of her life in prison for her radical action.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home is not written in a typical novel format. It more seems like an almost anthropological work of speculative fiction, depicting a future society (in what had been California) through vignettes, and oral tales, and songs, and poetry, as if they were found by someone in an even more future society. A treasure chest of ideas, but not something I was able to read straight through.
Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You begins with a man who kills a woman and then flees in a car which careens off a cliff. He wakes up in Ata, a utopia where people feed each other, call each other “kin”, and sleep together at night so that they can share their dreams in the morning. The dreams are mostly prophetic and ‘kin’ mostly follow the guidance of their dreams. Slowly the man changes from a cynical skeptic to someone willing to give his life to help others.
Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton (with the subtitle “An Ambiguous Heterotopia”) has been viewed as a response to Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed (subtitled: “An Ambiguous Utopia”). It apparently talks about the difficulties a rather unhappy man has dealing with an egalitarian and sexually fluid society. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get access to the actual book, so I’m not going to review it further.
In the twenty-first century, the stories move from utopias to -punks: solarpunk, hopepunk, and lunarpunk. There’s also cli-fi, postindustrial, and Afro-futurism–but many of the stories in these genres are not hopeful. I will focus on the ones that are hopeful here.