![]() Their proposals for reform have not always been seriously meant. ![]() It is important to understand that one of the main functions of utopias, since Plato and Thomas More, has been to function as a critique of existing society, providing a kind of benchmark against which the flaws of real cultures can be more clearly revealed. There seemed no reason to believe that all of humanity’s problems could be solved through improved social organization but it seemed possible that some of them might be. After all, utopias are not required, by definition, to be perfect. What differentiated these new utopias was their attempt to evade the traditional criticisms of the old utopias like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: that they were static, boring, and unattainable. Delany’s Triton, and this novel, though there are many other examples. ![]() The most famous examples are Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, Samuel R. However, in the mid-seventies there was a spate of new utopias written by Americans inspired by the upsurge of social reform begun in the late sixties and continuing into the new decade. After World War I, the writing of utopian fiction gradually declined, until the genre almost disappeared in mid-century, to be replaced by dystopias (descriptions of ultimately evil places) like George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1948). ![]()
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