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Kristen Simmons

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Rachel Johnson

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Cameron Stracher

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by Michael Grant

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Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

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By Margaret Atwood

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"What are the best Utopia books of all-time?" We Looked at 278 books, aggregating and ranking them, in an attempt to answer that very question.
Earlier this week we made a list of the " Best Dystopian Books of All-Time ". For this list, we looked for books that showed a brighter possibility for the future. Interestingly, there are several books that appear on both the Dystopian and Utopian book lists. One reason for this is that Utopias are, (surprise surprise) not always as good as they appear on the outside.

Below we aggregated and ranked the top 27 Utopia books, all appearing on 3 or more lists, with short summaries, images, and links. At the bottom of the page we included the remaining 215 books, as well as the sources we used, in alphabetical order.

Happy Scrolling!

The Top 27 Utopian Books

Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home is a major work of the imagination from one of America's most respected writers of science fiction. More than five years in the making, it is a novel unlike any other. A rich and complex interweaving of story and fable, poem, artwork, and music, it totally immerses the reader in the culture of the Kesh, a peaceful people of the far future who inhabit a place called the Valley on the Northern Pacific Coast.

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James Hilton's famous utopian adventure novel, and the origin of the mythical sanctuary Shangri-La.

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First published in 1602, this is a philosophical work by the Italian Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella. The book is presented as a dialogue between 'a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain'. Inspired by Plato's Republic and the description of Atlantis in Timaeus, it describes a theocratic society where goods, women and children are held in common. It also resembles the City of Adocentyn in the Picatrix, an Arabic grimoire of astrological magic.

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The Giver, the 1994 Newbery Medal winner, has become one of the most influential novels of our time. The haunting story centers on twelve-year-old Jonas, who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory does he begin to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community.

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Set in the future, "The Iron Heel" describes a world in which the division between the classes has deepened, creating a powerful Oligarchy that retains control through terror. A manuscript by rebel Avis Everhard is recovered in an even more distant future, and analyzed by scholar Anthony Meredith. Published in 1908, Jack London's multi-layered narrative is an early example of the dystopian novel, and its vision of the future proved to be eerily prescient of the violence and fascism that marked the initial half of the 20th century.

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"In a future world racked by violence and environmental catastrophes, George Orr wakes up one day to discover that his dreams have the ability to alter reality. He seeks help from Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist who immediately grasps the power George wields. Soon George must preserve reality itself as Dr. Haber becomes adept at manipulating George's dreams for his own purposes.

The Lathe of Heaven is an eerily prescient novel from award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin that masterfully addresses the dangers of power and humanity's self-destructiveness, questioning the nature of reality itself. It is a classic of the science fiction genre."

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Denver detective Win Bear, on the trail of a murderer, discovers much more than a killer. He accidentally stumbles upon the probability broach, a portal to a myriad of worlds-some wildly different from, others disconcertingly similar to our own. Win finds himself transported to an alternate Earth where Congress is in Colorado, everyone carries a gun, there are gorillas in the Senate, and public services are controlled by private businesses.

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In Tally Youngblood's world, looks matter. She lives in a society created to function with perfect-looking people who never have a chance to think for themselves. And she's tired of it. First as an ugly, then a pretty, and finally a special, Tally takes down the social infrastructure. And then, a generation later, a world obsessed with fame and instant celebrity-and filled with extras-will reap the consequences.

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Gulliver's Travels records the pretended four voyages of one Lemuel Gulliver, and his adventures in four astounding countries. The first book tells of his voyage and shipwreck in Lilliput, where the inhabitants are about as tall as one's thumb, and all their acts and motives are on the same dwarfish scale. In the petty quarrels of these dwarfs we are supposed to see the littleness of humanity. The statesmen who obtain place and favor by cutting monkey capers on the tight rope before their sovereign, and the two great parties, the Littleendians and Bigendians, who plunge the country into civil war over the momentous question of whether an egg should be broken on its big or on its little end, are satires on the politics of Swift's own day and generation.

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The final novel from Aldous Huxley, Island is a provocative counterpoint to his worldwide classic Brave New World, in which a flourishing, ideal society located on a remote Pacific island attracts the envy of the outside world.

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"Although unfinished, this story sets out a process of discovery whereby sailors, lost somewhere off the Peruvian coastline, stumble across Bensalem. While the opening passages hold only the bare bones of plot, the emphasis once the explorers arrive in Bensalem is its university - Salomon's House.

Various tenets of the society include kindness, compassion and honesty at all levels of the social strata, aesthetic beauty in public buildings and civic life, an intellectual spirit fostered among the population, a university named Salomon's House where both theoretical and applied sciences are studied and developed, and a strong sense of religious piety held by the entire population.

Today the work is most significant for its statement of the ideals of the nascent Enlightenment period, in which Francis Bacon was one of the most influential thinkers. However the text is richly interpretative, with Bensalem's conversion to Christianity and the nature of its hierarchy all poignant elements in the fiction. "

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2065: In a world that has rediscovered harmony with nature, the village of El Modena, California, is an ecotopia in the making. Kevin Claiborne, a young builder who has grown up in this "green" world, now finds himself caught up in the struggle to preserve his community's idyllic way of life from the resurgent forces of greed and exploitation.

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This book is in all probability the last of a series of writings, of which-disregarding certain earlier disconnected essays-my Anticipations was the beginning. Originally I intended Anticipations to be my sole digression from my art or trade (or what you will) of an imaginative writer. I wrote that book in order to clear up the muddle in my own mind about innumerable social and political questions, questions I could not keep out of my work, which it distressed me to touch upon in a stupid haphazard way, and which no one, so far as I knew, had handled in a manner to satisfy my needs. But Anticipations did not achieve its end. I have a slow constructive hesitating sort of mind, and when I emerged from that undertaking I found I had still most of my questions to state and solve. In Mankind in the Making, therefore, I tried to review the social organisation in a different way, to consider it as an educational process instead of dealing with it as a thing with a future history, and if I made this second book even less satisfactory from a literary standpoint than the former (and this is my opinion), I blundered, I think, more edifyingly-at least from the point of view of my own instruction.

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Without warning, giant silver ships from deep space appear in the skies above every major city on Earth. Manned by the Overlords, in fifty years, they eliminate ignorance, disease, and poverty. Then this golden age ends-and then the age of Mankind begins...

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Setting out to make his fortune in a far-off country, a young traveller discovers the remote and beautiful land of Erewhon, and is given a home among its extraordinarily handsome citizens. But their visitor soon discovers that this seemingly ideal community has its faults - here crime is treated indulgently as a malady to be cured, while illness, poverty and misfortune are cruelly punished, and all machines have been superstitiously destroyed after a bizarre prophecy. In Erewhon, criminals are considered to be ill and are 'treated' by 'straightners' who make them well, whereas those who have physical illnesses (or suffer bad luck) are considered criminal and are tried and punished. Thus an embezzler will be treated for his 'illness' and the party who was robbed will be tried in the Court of Misplaced Confidence. The consistency with which Butler carries through with this conceit is impressive and consistently entertaining, and this is only one of the 'curious' conventions of Erewhonian society. Another fascinating chapter in Erewhon explains how machines are on an evolutionary track that will surpass and then come to dominate their human creators. The detail of the argument is impressive (the discussion of 'vestigial organs' in machines is hysterical and accurate), and no matter how far-fetched it must have seemed in 1872 when the book was published, it seems much less a satire and more a serious fear today. This is a book of great intelligence and wicked humor. As a simultaneous mind stretching exercise and laugh generating experience, there are few novels of any age that are its peer.

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Austin Tappan Wright left the world a wholly unsuspected legacy. After he died in a tragic accident, among this distinguished legal scholar's papers were found thousands of pages devoted to a staggering feat of literary creation-a detailed history of an imagined country complete with geography, genealogy, literature, language and culture. As detailed as J.R.R. Tolkien's middle-earth novels, Islandia has similarly become a classic touchstone for those concerned with the creation of imaginary world.

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Looking Backward 2000-1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a journalist and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1888. It was the third-largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It influenced a large number of intellectuals, and appears by title in many of the major Marxist writings of the day.

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Men Like Gods is a novel written in 1923 by H. G. Wells. It features a utopian parallel universe.

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This volume illustrates the variety of William Morris's prose, while focusing on one theme: the earthly paradise. The "Nowhere" of News from Nowhere (1890) is England in 2102, an ideal pastoral society born out of revolution. It is as compelling a dream of the future as the nightmares of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Exhilaratingly, it reminds us that nothing is inevitable about the way we live-now or in 1890.

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The Republic is a Socratic dialogue, written by Plato around 380 BC, concerning the definition of justice, the order and character of the just city-state and the just man-for this reason, ancient readers used the name On Justice as an alternative title (not to be confused with the spurious dialogue also titled On Justice). The dramatic date of the dialogue has been much debated and though it might have taken place some time during the Peloponnesian War, "there would be jarring anachronisms if any of the candidate specific dates between 432 and 404 were assigned". It is Plato's best-known work and has proven to be one of the most intellectually and historically influential works of philosophy and political theory. In it, Socrates along with various Athenians and foreigners discuss the meaning of justice and examine whether or not the just man is happier than the unjust man by considering a series of different cities coming into existence "in speech", culminating in a city called Kallipolis, which is ruled by philosopher-kings; and by examining the nature of existing regimes. The participants also discuss the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the roles of the philosopher and of poetry in society.

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This fictional outline of a modern utopia has been a center of controversy ever since its publication in 1948. Set in the United States, it pictures a society in which human problems are solved by a scientific technology of human conduct.

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"Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy's landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures-and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before.

Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity-and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow."

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Published originally in 1516, More made popular the common usage of the term Utopia, "as a communal place where everything is perfect." A lawyer himself, Utopia includes no lawyers due to the law's simplicity. Reading More's version gives insight into the original thought of what a Utopia should be.

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Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. he will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life. Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Anarres, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.

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"A prominent turn-of-the-century social critic and lecturer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is perhaps best known for her short story ""The Yellow Wallpaper,"" a chilling study of a woman's descent into insanity, and Women and Economics, a classic of feminist theory that analyzes the destructive effects of women's economic reliance on men.
In Herland, a vision of a feminist utopia, Gilman employs humor to engaging effect in a story about three male explorers who stumble upon an all-female society isolated somewhere in South America. Noting the advanced state of the civilization they've encountered, the visitors set out to find some males, assuming that since the country is so civilized, ""there must be men."" A delightful fantasy, the story enables Gilman to articulate her then-unconventional views of male-female roles and capabilities, motherhood, individuality, privacy, the sense of community, sexuality, and many other topics."

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"Ecotopia was founded when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the Union to create a "stable-state" ecosystem: the perfect balance between human beings and the environment. Now, twenty years later, this isolated, mysterious nation is welcoming its first officially sanctioned American visitor: New York Times-Post reporter Will Weston.

Skeptical yet curious about this green new world, Weston is determined to report his findings objectively. But from the start, he's alternately impressed and unsettled by the laws governing Ecotopia's earth-friendly agenda: energy-efficient "mini-cities" to eliminate urban sprawl, zero-tolerance pollution control, tree worship, ritual war games, and a woman-dominated government that has instituted such peaceful revolutions as the twenty-hour workweek and employee ownership of farms and businesses. His old beliefs challenged, his cynicism replaced by hope, Weston meets a sexually forthright Ecotopian woman and undertakes a relationship whose intensity will lead him to a critical choice between two worlds."

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#28 to 278 Best Utopian Books

Best Utopia Book Lists

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"What are the best Utopia books of all-time?" We Looked at 278 books, aggregating and ranking them, in an attempt to answer that very question. Earlier this week we made a list of the " Best Dystopian Books of All-Time ". For this list, we looked for books that showed a brighter possibility for the future.

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213 books based on 385 votes: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, Divergent by Veronica Roth, Mockingjay by Suzanne Co...