Utopia and science fiction

Abstract

There are many close and evident connections between science fiction and utopian fiction, yet neither, in deeper examination, is a simple mode, and the relations between them are exceptionally complex. Thus, if one analyse the fictions that have been grouped as utopian they can quickly distinguish four types: the paradise, the externally altered world, the willed transformation, and the technological transformation. No contrast has been more influential, in modern political thought, than Engels’s distinction between ‘utopian’ and ‘scientific’ socialism. This chapter focuses on three utopian fictions of the late nineteenth century: Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race ; Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward ; William Morris’s News from Nowhere . The Coming Race is at one level an obvious example of the mode of technological transformation. Bellamy’s Looking Backward is unquestionably a Utopia, in the central sense of a transformed social life of the future, but it is in a significant way a work without desire.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 50 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.