Artless Utopia?

All literature is utopian in that fictive worlds are literally ou topos, i.e., no place. Implicitly or explicitly, literature is almost always a criticism of life because imagined reality is inevitably comparable to sensibly perceived reality. Actions can scarcely be compared without an implicit judgment. It is a rare author who does not mean his tale “to point a moral.” Utopian literature, as a genre, is a blatantly moralistic mode that has always been associated with philosophical discourse. Plato, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and B. F. Skinner—a mixed group—have all written utopias. Novelists, however, have tended to write negative utopias, nightmarish visions of totalitarian society; Aldous Huxley, Eugene Zamy...