Utopian

Thomas More named the form. His Utopia (1516) described an island with communal property and religious tolerance, and its title was a pun in Greek: both “no place” and “good place.” For centuries utopias were travellers' tales of distant islands, and they were as much political argument as fiction.

The nineteenth century made the future utopia a mainstream form. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), in which a Bostonian wakes in a socialist year 2000, was a huge bestseller, and William Morris answered it with the pastoral News from Nowhere (1890). Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) imagined a society of women, and H. G. Wells wrote A Modern Utopia (1905).

After the twentieth century's catastrophes, utopias became more cautious. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia, showed an anarchist society with real flaws, and Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975) and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) imagined ecological and feminist futures. More recently, solarpunk has looked for hope in a world facing climate change.

Classic utopias often use a visitor, such as a traveller or a sleeper waking in the future, who is shown around and has things explained. That makes them feel more like essays than novels to some readers. Modern utopias tend to have stronger plots and more doubt, testing the society through conflict.

Utopian fiction is a small shelf, but it's often in conversation with the large one beside it, and many readers come to it looking for an answer to dystopia.