Utopian and dystopian fiction

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Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world as the setting for a novel. Dystopian fiction is the opposite: creation of a nightmare world, sometimes also described as "the victory of forces of reason over forces of kindness". Both are commonly found in science fiction novels and stories.

The word utopia was first used in this context by Thomas More in his work Utopia, which literally means both "no place" and "best place" in Greek. In this work, More sets out a vision of an ideal society. Other examples include Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and B.F. Skinner's Walden Two. Gulliver's Travels may also be seen as a satirical utopia because it is actually a comment on the society the author lived in. The same goes for Erewhon by Samuel Butler - where "Erewhon" is an anagram of "nowhere".

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

For examples of dystopias, see James De Mille's early A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron", Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Ayn Rand's Anthem and William Gibson's cyberpunk novels.

Subgenres

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 a collection of short ecotopian fiction, called .

Another important sub genre is feminist utopias, for example Marge Piercy's novel Woman On the Edge of Time. Writer Sally Gearhart calls Feminist utopian fiction political, saying 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 post male societies where men have died out or been replaced: Joanna Russ Whileaway is a world 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 gender interdependence.

Utopian and dystopian fiction

Subgenres

See also