Utopia (noun): a perfect fantasy land or world . utopian (adj). The opposite is an anti-utopia or dystopia
( dys=bad, as in dyslexic , or bad words, and muscular dystrophy , or bad nourishment of muscles.)
In Science Fiction, What It’s All About (1971), Sam J. Lundwall describes a utopia as “the dream of the country of happiness as the place where all wishes come true, where everything is orderly and beautifully thought-out, and where one, above all, lives in freedom from want.” The word comes from Thomas More’s novel Utopia , written in 1516. (More was beheaded by King Henry VIII, so he never found his utopia on Earth.
Perhaps he knew he wouldn’t: The word comes from the Greek au topos , meaning “nowhere.”) In J.R.R.
Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the author places the pastoral utopia of the Shire on a pedestal, but also points out that humans can’t get there anymore.
Beginning in the 1930s with the Great Depression, positive, hopeful Utopian novels were overtaken by negative, anti-Utopian (dystopian) works with little hope for the future. Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers
(1959) injects fascism into his future utopia: Only those who have served in the military can vote. Robert
Shirley’s Teenocracy (1969) envisioned a government by the young, with enforced coolness. And thanks to the cyberpunk movement, the future is often envisioned as a dystopia controlled by industrial, corporate interests, where citizens are slaves to drugs and consumerism.
Utopias are “oversimplified, escapist dreams,” Lundwall writes, their main flaw being that, since there is nothing to overcome, they are boring. “The perfect Utopia is like an army camp: you get fed, clothed and exercised, and nice people do your thinking for you. But who wants to live in an army camp for the rest of his life?” Also, they usually have an unsettling aspect or two by today’s standards, such as requiring an unswerving obedience to authority bordering on slavery and often including eugenics programs (breeding only among the elite) and fixed social status, with contempt for those lower on the chain. The Roman philosopher Plato wrote about a utopian land in The Republic in 360 B.C.E., and his plan was followed almost to the letter by
Germany’s Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.
In other words, individuality and free will are stamped out “for the common good” – “Think what you wish, but think right.” Utopian literature is all about power, Cyril M. Kornbluth writes, and utopian and dystopian are actually two sides of the same coin: The anti-utopian novel is saying: “I will show you what will happen if you don’t listen to me and do as I say,” while utopian novels say: “See here how beautiful and orderly everything will be if you make me dictator over the world.” Not much difference, really – you must only decide when you want to be told what to do.
Utopian writers are “obviously incapable of understanding that man might want something more than food, sleep and housing,” Lundwall writes, and evidence an “inability to regard man as a thinking, illogical creature with a will of his own.” In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , John Savage tells the World Controller:
“I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” Mustapha Mond replies: “In fact, you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
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Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death . He writes:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies. … As Huxley remarked in Brave New
World Revisited , the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984 , Postman added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World , they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

 communist, all goods given out. export only extra stuff after 2-year storage.
 everyone must spend time living in country to learn agriculture
 same plain wool clothes except male/female, married/unmarried
 learn your parent’s trade, but if you are good at something else you are adopted out
 cities can’t go over 6,000 families, if population too low others moved in
 men stay in household; women married out at 18 (men 22); premarital is strongly punished and shames family
 engaged shown naked to other so they can’t hide anything; no divorce. cheaters become slaves
 oldest male rules in house, parents rule kids, elder rule younger
 must have 10-16 adults per family; kids given to childless couples if number would go over
 all laws must be debated three times in public; death to anyone talking politics outside assembly
 must work 6 hours and sleep 8, can’t be idle; most read, attend lectures or garden
 slaves, esp to hunt and butcher animals so citizens don’t get too unfeeling. only criminals, foreigners sentenced to die and poor foreign volunteers
 free hospitals, public cafeterias
 need a passport to travel, given free wagon, no supplies needed
 terminal patients urged to suicide since they are not doing their share; other suicides get thrown in ditch for same reason.
 iron is useful. use gold to hire mercenaries, bribe enemies. chamber pots, chains for slaves. gems given to kids.
“[T]hey have fallen upon an expedient, which, as it agrees with their other policy, so is it very different from ours, and will scarce gain belief among us, who value gold so much and lay it up so carefully. They eat and drink out of vessels of earth, or glass, which make an agreeable appearance though formed of brittle materials: while they make their chamber-pots and close-stools of gold and silver; and that not only in their public halls, but in their private houses: of the same metals they likewise make chains and fetters for their slaves; to some of which, as a badge of infamy, they hang an ear- ring of gold, and make others wear a chain or coronet of the same metal; and thus they take care, by all possible means, to render gold and silver of no esteem. And from hence it is that while other nations part with their gold and silver as unwillingly as if one tore out their bowels, those of Utopia would look on their giving in all they possess of those (metals, when there was any use for them) but as the parting with a trifle, or as we would esteem the loss of a penny. They find pearls on their coast, and diamonds and carbuncles on their rocks; they do not look after them, but, if they find them by chance, they polish them, and with them they adorn their children, who are delighted with them, and glory in them during their childhood; but when they grow to years, and see that none but children use such baubles, they of their own accord, without being bid by their parents, lay them aside; and would be as much ashamed to use them afterward as children among us, when they come to years, are of their puppets and other toys.
“I never saw a clearer instance of the opposite impressions that different customs make on people, than I observed in the ambassadors of the Anemolians, who came to Amaurot when I was there. As they came to treat of affairs of great consequence, the deputies from several towns met together to wait for their coming. The ambassadors of the nations that lie near Utopia, knowing their customs, and that fine clothes are in no esteem among them, that silk is despised, and gold is a badge of infamy, used to come very modestly clothed; but the Anemolians, lying more remote, and having had little commerce with them, understanding that they were coarsely clothed, and all in the same manner, took it for granted that they had none of those fine things among them of which they made no use; and they being a vainglorious rather than a wise people, resolved to set themselves out with so much pomp, that they should look like gods, and strike the eyes of the poor Utopians with their splendor. Thus three ambassadors made their entry with 100 attendants, all clad in garments of different colors, and the greater part in silk; the ambassadors themselves, who were of the nobility of their country, were in cloth-of-gold, and adorned with massy chains, ear-rings, and rings of gold: their caps were covered with bracelets set full of pearls and other gems: in a word, they were set out with all those things that, among the Utopians, were the badges of slavery, the marks of infamy, or the playthings of children.
“It was not unpleasant to see, on the one side, how they looked big, when they compared their rich habits with the plain clothes of the Utopians, who were come out in great numbers to see them make their entry: and, on the other, to observe how much they were mistaken in the impression which they hoped this pomp would have made on them. It appeared so ridiculous a show to all that had never stirred out of their country, and had not seen the customs of other nations, that though they paid some reverence to those that were the most meanly clad, as if they had been the ambassadors, yet when they saw the ambassadors themselves, so full of gold and chains, they looked upon them as slaves, and forbore to treat them with reverence. You might have seen the children, who were grown big enough to despise their playthings, and who had thrown away their jewels, call to their mothers, push them gently, and cry out, “See that great fool that wears pearls and gems, as if he were yet a child.” While their mothers very innocently replied, “Hold your peace; this, I believe, is one of the ambassador’s fools.” Others censured the fashion of their chains, and observed that they were of no use; for they were too slight to bind their slaves, who could easily break them; and besides hung so loose about them that they thought it easy to throw them away, and so get from them.
“But after the ambassadors had stayed a day among them, and saw so vast a quantity of gold in their houses, which was as much despised by them as it was esteemed in other nations, and beheld more gold and silver in the chains and fetters of one slave than all their ornaments amounted to, their plumes fell, and they were ashamed of all that glory for which they had formerly valued themselves, and accordingly laid it aside...”