Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887

The book that named the genre. More describes an island commonwealth with no private property and uses it to hold a mirror to the Europe of his own day.

Thomas More

Three explorers stumble on a society of women that has run without men for two thousand years. Gilman uses their confusion to test how much of what we call human nature is only convention.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Wells argues that a workable utopia must be planned, global and open to revision, then narrates one. Part novel and part political essay, it is his fullest statement on how a better society might be organised.

H. G. Wells

In a bureaucratic London of 1984 where nothing surprising happens anymore, a joke of a king revives medieval pageantry and one neighbourhood takes it seriously. A comic anti-utopia about the value of the local.

G. K. Chesterton