Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2020 - Utopian Science Fiction
- Sara M.
- Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Collection
Fulfill the "Read a Science Fiction Book" prompt by choosing a book from your favorite subgenre or trying something new! Utopian sci fi features a setting that, at least on the surface, is a more or less perfect future. Of course, actual happiness is boring - expect most utopias to have a dark underbelly or a nasty neighbor bent on conquest!
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2020 reading challenge. Find more lists here.
Erewhon
Published in 2012
Erewhon (an anagram for "nowhere") is a faraway land where sickness is a punishable crime, criminals receive compassionate medical treatment, and machines are banned (for fear they'll evolve and become the masters of man). Butler's entertaining and thought-provoking Utopian novel takes aim at such hallowed institutions as family, church, and mechanical progress; its remarkable prescience in anticipating future sociological trends adds a special relevance for today's readers.
Childhood's End
Published in 2001
From the Publisher: The Overlords appeared suddenly over every city-intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind. Benevolent, they made few demands: unify earth, eliminate poverty, and end war. With little rebellion, humankind agreed, and a golden age began. But at what cost? With the advent of peace, man ceases to strive for creative greatness, and a malaise settles over the human race. To those who resist, it becomes evident that the Overlords have an agenda of their own. As civilization approaches the crossroads, will the Overlords spell the end for humankind-or the beginning?
Under Plum Lake
Published in 2011
A young boy is ushered into a subterranean world where he encounters a civilization and kingdom unlike anything above ground.
The Herland Trilogy
Published in 2013
Moving the Mountain is the first book in Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman's well known trilogy. The second book in the trilogy is her land mark classic Herland. Moving Mountain delivers Gilman's program for reforming society. She concentrates on measures of rationality and efficiency that could be instituted in her own time, largely with greater social cooperation - equal education and treatment for girls and boys, day-care centers for working women, and other issues still relevant a century later. Yet Gilman also allows for technological progress: electric power is the motive force in industry and urban society, power generated largely by the tides, wind-mills, water mills, and solar engines. Herland is a utopian novel written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women who reproduce via parthenogenesis. The result is an ideal social order, free of war, conflict and domination. The story is told from the perspective of Van Jennings, a student of sociology who, along with two friends, Terry O. Nicholson and Jeff Margrave, forms an expedition party to explore an area of unchartered land where it is rumored lives a society consisting entirely of women. The three friends do not really believe the rumors as they are unable to conceive of how human reproduction could occur without males. The men speculate about what a society of women would be like, each guessing differently based on the stereotype of women which he holds most dear With Her in Ourland is the third book in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopian trilogy which begins where Moving the Mountain and Herland left off. Gilman masterfully compares our real modern male dominated world with an imaginary perfect society comprised of only woman. Gilman was a well known and deeply respected sociologist and this trilogy holds an important place in feminist fiction.
Pandora's Star
Published in 2005
The year is 2380. The Intersolar Commonwealth, a sphere of stars some four hundred light-years in diameter, contains more than six hundred worlds, interconnected by a web of transport "tunnels" known as wormholes. At the farthest edge of the Commonwealth, astronomer Dudley Bose observes the impossible: Over one thousand light-years away, a star ... vanishes. It does not go supernova. It does not collapse into a black hole. It simply disappears. Since the location is too distant to reach by wormhole, a faster-than-light starship, the Second Chance, is dispatched to learn what has occurred and whether it represents a threat. In command is Wilson Kime, a five-time rejuvenated ex-NASA pilot whose glory days are centuries behind him. Opposed to the mission are the Guardians of Selfhood, a cult that believes the human race is being manipulated by an alien entity they call the Starflyer. Bradley Johansson, leader of the Guardians, warns of sabotage, fearing the Starflyer means to use the starship--s mission for its own ends. Pursued by a Commonwealth special agent convinced the Guardians are crazy but dangerous, Johansson flees. But the danger is not averted. Aboard the Second Chance, Kime wonders if his crew has been infiltrated. Soon enough, he will have other worries. A thousand light-years away, something truly incredible is waiting: a deadly discovery whose unleashing will threaten to destroy the Commonwealth ... and humanity itself. Could it be that Johansson was right?
Island
A Novel
Published in 2016
In his final novel, which he considered his most important, Aldous Huxley transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and-to his amazement-give him hope.
The Dispossessed
A Novel
Published in 2003
Shevek, a brilliant physicist from the anarchist moon Anarres, risks his life by traveling to the mother planet of Urras in the hope of offering wisdom to its inhabitants and to reunite the two long-alienated worlds.
This Perfect Day
Published in 2014
By the author of Rosemary's Baby, a horrifying journey into a future only Ira Levin could imagine. Considered one of the great dystopian novels-alongside Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World-Ira Levin's frightening glimpse into the future continues to fascinate readers even forty years after publication. The story is set in a seemingly perfect global society. Uniformity is the defining feature; there is only one language and all ethnic groups have been eugenically merged into one race called "The Family." The world is ruled by a central computer called UniComp that has been programmed to keep every single human on the surface of the earth in check. People are continually drugged by means of regular injections so that they can never realize their potential as human beings, but will remain satisfied and cooperative. They are told where to live, when to eat, whom to marry, when to reproduce. Even the basic facts of nature are subject to UniComp's will-men do not grow facial hair, women do not develop breasts, and it only rains at night. With a vision as frightening as any in the history of the science fiction genre, This Perfect Day is one of Ira Levin`s most haunting novels.
News from Nowhere, Or, An Epoch of Rest
Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance
Published in 2012
William Morris' classic novel News from Nowhere has been enjoyed by readers around the world for 120 years. A soft science-fiction, this is an exploration of socialist ideas, following the story of William Guest, a man who falls asleep after a Socialist League meeting to find himself waking up in a future socialist society.
Woman on the Edge of Time.
Published in 1976
Connie Ramos, a woman in her mid-thirties, has been declared insane. But Connie is overwhelmingly sane, merely tuned to the future, and able to communicate with the year 2137. As her doctors persuade her to agree to an operation, Connie struggles to force herself to listen to the future and its lessons for today ...
Pacific Edge
Published in 2015
North America, 2065. In a world that has rediscovered harmony with nature, the village of El Modena, California is an ecotopia in the making. Kevin Claiborne, a young builder who has grown up in this "green" world, now finds himself caught up in the struggle to preserve his community's idyllic way of life from the resurgent forces of greed and exploitation.The final volume in Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias triptych, Pacific Edge is a brilliant work of science fiction and an outstanding literary achievement.
Walden Two
Published in 2016
From author and psychologist B. F. Skinner, regarded by many as the most important and influential psychologist since Freud, comes "Walden Two". This fictional outline of a modern utopia has been a center of controversy ever since its publication in 1948. Set in the United States, it pictures a society in which human problems are solved by a scientific technology of human conduct. The novel describes an experimental community called "Walden Two", whose members are happy, productive, and creative; their happiness derives from non-nuclear family life; amazingly limited work hours; communal child-raising; free affection; the creation of art, music, and literature; opportunity for games of chess and tennis; and ample rest, food, and sleep. It's a utopia inspired by the experience described in Henry David Thoreau's "Walden", but "with company". Fans of philosophical writers like Ayn Rand or Karl Marx and imagined utopia's like Aldous Huxley's "Island" will enjoy broadening their minds with the challenging ideas described by Skinner in this classic novel.
Men Like Gods
Published in 2016
In the summer of 1921, a disenchanted journalist escapes the rat race for a drive in the country. But Mr. Barnstaple's trip exceeds his expectations when he and other motorists are swept 3,000 years into the future. The inadvertent time travelers arrive in a world that corresponds exactly to Barnstaple's ideals: a utopian state, free of crime, poverty, war, disease, and bigotry. Unfettered by the constraints of government and organized religion, the citizens lead rich, meaningful lives, passed in pursuit of their creative fancies. Barnstaple's traveling companions, however, quickly contrive a scheme to remake the utopia in the image of their twentieth-century world. A century after its initial publication, H. G. Wells' novel offers an enduringly relevant look at an ideal society. Conceived in the aftermath of World War I, it reflects the failings of human nature but offers hope for the future, when men and women may live like gods.