A utopian reading list

Now that I’ve read them, here are the utopian novels worth studying.

At the beginning of this year, I made a list of utopian novels and set out to study them. 

Some were much more interesting than others (I loved the classic utopias and socialist utopias), some were irrelevant to today (like Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World), some I found downright intolerable (like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future—I’m sorry, I wished I could have liked it!), and many of the sci-fi utopias were interesting technologically, even if they were less interested in humanity.

My studies wound up messy and out of order and I followed my curiosity down rabbit holes I could not have foreseen. Plato’s Republic took me all year to read, but I loved it once I got to the good part. My favorite utopian novel of the year turned out to be one that wasn’t even on my list: Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. And I have been so intrigued by some of my supplementary materials that I am now devoting myself to a much deeper study of the Buddhist and the anarchist utopias (which both take a lot of inspiration from Asian philosophy).

It is only in hindsight that I can look back and see a much better curriculum emerge. If I could rewrite the utopian curriculum I followed this year for Elysian readers, it would look like this: