By the 19th century, Socialism was a powerful movement. Edward Bellamy's in 'Looking Backward (Dover Thrift Editions)' and William Morris' 'News from Nowhere and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)' both extolled the glowing virtues of communism. Bellamy chose an urban, technological, and centrally administered view, where Morris depicted a decentralized world and a pastoral people. The start of the 20th century offers 'Red star: The first Bolshevik utopia (Soviet history, politics, society, and thought)', soaked in the spirit of the Bolshevik revolution.

Political Utopias choose different founding principles, such as the feminism of 'Herland (Dover Thrift Editions)', from the early 20th century. Cicero, the Roman, explored the ideal state in 'The Republic and The Laws (Oxford World's Classics)', and came up with a polity quite like Rome itself. Less political views led to Bacon's paradise of intellect and Campanella's grim Spartans in 'The New Atlantis and The City of the Sun : Two Classic Utopias'. 'Casanova's Icosameron, Or, the Story of Edward and Elizabeth: Who Spent Eighty-One Years in the Land of the Megamicres, Original Inhabitants of Proto' depicts a highly fictional world appealing to conqistador and libertine alike: a rich land open to conquest and to forbidden passion. Huxley's 'Island (Perennial Classics)' is a simpler place of peace and plenty. 'Lost Horizon' is simpler still, an idyll of idle European faces, somewhow supported by an Asian peasant underclass.

No-deal worlds
Among dystopic views, Orwell's '1984' is often the first to come to mind, another communism, but kind that creates only crushing poverty of body and soul. Small wonder that it's appeared in the movies, in the 1956 '1984' and again in '1984' of the actual year 1984. Orwell's world of futile oppression is often paired with another and darker of Huxley's visions, 'Brave New World', superficially happy but equally futile. Both books are descendants of Zamyatin's earlier 'We', a surprising work in that it combines Huxley's pointless pleasures with Orwell's totalitarianism, and predates both. Boye's 'Kallocain' also displays a 1984-like State, but one shot through with personal corruption. Wilson's 'Utopia X' has even more similarities to the 1984 world, but bases it on a bitterly ironic kind of racism. Kafka's books, including 'The Trial' (and Orson Welles' adaptation, 'The Trial'), create a different form of faceless, senseless, crushing bureaucracy - sometimes eerily close to reality.

'The Handmaid's Tale : A Novel' is a more recent vision of social collapse, perhaps more chilling because it taps into more modern kinds of fears. 'A Clockwork Orange' extrapolates the late 20th century's fears in a different direction, brought shockingly to life in Kubrick's movie, 'A Clockwork Orange'. Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' (and its movie, 'Fahrenheit 451') also show a modern hell of social control, centered on control of media and control - burning - of books. Ironically, this book has itself been a target of censorship. Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' uses a story of social collapse differently, in condemnation of rapacious robber-barons, and in praise of the unrecognized, creative people on whom society is so unknowingly dependent. Rand's 'Anthem' is better known, a fable of crushing communalism, but with a heroic ending. Sinclair Lewis' 'It Can't Happen Here (Signet Classics (Paperback))' turns America into a prison nation, when democracy is voted out of office. Jack London's surprising socialist hymn, 'Iron Heel', launches America into a vicious civil war.

Many dystopic visions center on some technology run amok. 'Equilibrium' describes a world where pharmacology is used to crush out emotion, as does 'THX 1138 (The George Lucas Director's Cut Two-Disc Special Edition)'. 'Minority Report (Widescreen Edition)' describes a "perfect" system of justice twisted to personal goals. 'Freejack' shows a future where the human person is property,and 'Blade Runner (The Director's Cut)' and 'The Island' warn in different ways about the social consequences of mand-made men. 'Gattaca' explores biotechnology in a different way, in a poetic protest against genetic determinism. There are dozens of "machines take over" stories, too, so let 'The Matrix' represent that genre.

Post-apocalyptic stories abound, too. 'H.G. Wells - Things to Come', from the pre-WWII era, was one vision, tinged with hope. 'A Boy & His Dog' is more modern, but very much darker in mood and more visceral. Other after-the-fall stories, 'Mad Max (Special Edition)' and a gazillion others, don't examine their worlds too closely, but use them as a backdrops for action stories.

Satiric visions
Serious points can be made without a directly serious presentation, however. Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics)' may be the best-known of the satiric worlds, using sharpness of wit to puncture the pomposity of its time. 'Penguin Island' may be even funnier, and no less serious. Voltaire's little-known 'Micromegas (Syrens Series)' offers amusing and optimistic comment on human insignificance in the larger world, and his well-known 'Candide (Dover Thrift Editions)' gives a humorous homily on the happiness of everyday life. And of course, Butler uses 'Erewhon (Penguin Classics)' to exaggerate the many failings of his time into amusing inanity.

Fantasy visions
Finally, there is a class of Utopias that is pure fiction, more of a daydream than a social statement. 'The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You' is one such dream, and itself a gentle world of dreams.

Doris Lessing's 'The Making of the Representative for Planet 8' is another fantasy world, infinitely sadder but, in the end, more hopeful. The world itself it brutally hard, but a place that creates transcendant people. Other books in her Canopus series are very good and equally ambiguous, especially 'The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five'.