Our world made new: utopias and dystopias

We will look at parts of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) which created the utopian genre, Francis Bacon’s scientific society in New Atlantis (1627) and Margaret Cavendish’s imaginary journey to The Blazing World (1666), with a brief look at how the Levellers tried to establish a perfect society during the Commonwealth. We will also look at parts of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) as an increasingly bleak satire on human nature and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) with its musical banks and punishment of people who fall ill.

Belief in creating a perfect society through socialism is discussed in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and H G Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). But fear of the results of relying on science are expressed in E M Forster The Machine Stops (1909) and this is fully explored in Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).

Finally we will look at how unease about humankind is expressed in novels like Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954), Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Why are some views of the future more memorable than others? Do some writers tap into our fears and hopes more deeply than others and, if so, how?