Genres
Utopia
An imagined community or society with highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its residents; the mirror opposite of dystopia.
A utopia is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its residents. Thomas More coined the word for his 1516 book describing a fictional island society, built from Greek as "no place" and punning on "eutopia", "good place"; some scholars read the book as satire of his contemporary England rather than a blueprint. Plato's Republic, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Morris's News from Nowhere and Banks's Culture series line the shelf, and the mode has fresh subgenre life inside climate fiction's repair futures.
Dystopia is the opposite of utopia, and it overtook utopia in fiction from the 1950s onward after Nineteen Eighty-Four. That is the craft warning: a perfect society resists plot, so utopian fiction finds its stories at the seams, in the costs the design hides and the outsiders it rests on.