Utopia Books

As advances in AI lead some to dream of utopia, the reality is that dystopia is a lot easier to get to, says tech policy adviser Mahlet Zimeta. She recommends books to think more deeply about how technology affects the world around us, from Nietzsche to Chernobyl and from poetry to speculative fiction.

Books featuring dystopian or post-apocalyptic themes offer us an opportunity to study human nature outside of the normal structure of society, says Rosa Rankin-Gee, author of the acclaimed novel Dreamland. Here, she recommends five other books featuring a near-future dystopia, all of which explore a societal or cultural unraveling through beautiful prose.

Catherine Mayer—author, journalist and president of the Women's Equality Party—talks to Five Books about her optimism for a more equal future for society by way of her favourite science fiction visionaries and their work.

Utopia is out of fashion because efforts to set one up normally end disastrously, says author Ellen Wayland-Smith, whose forefathers set up a utopian religious community in the 1840s in Oneida, New York. And yet, they offer a critique of society that, even today, can't be ignored. She recommends four books on literary utopias and one on real-life attempts to set up idealized communities in the United States.

Warnings about the future of society contained in novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four may seem less important since the fall of the Soviet Union, but they are all too relevant to China today, argues the Chinese writer

Australian economist John Quiggin, author of Zombie Economics, says we need to inspire people with a view of a better society. In short, we need a new utopia.

Is it inevitable that the desire to build a perfect world should end in disaster? John Gray considers the flaws in utopian thinking and the essential nature of humans. He recommends the best critiques of utopia and apocalypse.

British novelist James Miller recommends his choice of the best apocalyptic novels