Works of utopian fiction have generally either failed as literature, or have succeeded only at the price of partially subverting the author's intent. The reason may be found in what the proverb that happy is the country that has no history, and its counterpart, reputed to be an old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." Good fiction is founded upon conflict, and conflict is precisely what is generally banished from conceptions of an ideal society. Just as one cannot write a very gripping domestic drama about a happy, placid society, so one cannot write a gripping social drama about a happy, placid society.
The temptation of the skilled utopian writer, then, is to create a counterpoint society to the ideal one, a corrupted society, and to place the two in conflict. The danger in this temptation is that the corrupt society will be far more fascinating to read about than the ideal one. The consequences can be seen in perhaps the earliest utopian work, Plato's dialogues Critias and Timaeus. Plato conterpoised an ideal former Athens, constructed along the lines of his Republic, with a corrupted Atlantis. Yet it is his Atlantis which has been a source of fascination through the centuries, while his Athens remains artistically dead.
In The Dispossessed (New York: Harper, 1974), science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin attempts to surmount this conundrum by acknowledging that her ideal society, the anarcho-syndicalist planet Anarres, is itself imperfect, with a pervasive if mild pressure of social conformity. In a further departure from utopian convention, she builds her story not around someone from the outer world who goes to her utopian society, but from a discontented member of that society, the physicist Shevak, who leaves it to travel to the neighboring planet Urras in hope of finding an intellectual freedom that is stifled at home.
This effort is only partially successful, in that the portions of the ...