This large (perfect size for reading on your lap) book contains a series of intelligent essays and sumptuous illustrations and photos mapping the history of utopia from Plato on. I believe that the thing that makes it such a spectacular work is the wide range of disciplines, works and forces that the writers identify as utopic.
When people think of utopia, they often think of science fiction, fanciful and ideal worlds that make life better than our wildest dreams. In truth, most science fiction these days explores utopia as a critical paradigm, realising that we can not live in a perfect world, they explore the possibilities, the way they work and the way they fail. I'm all for this, but the thing that I loved so much about the New York Public Libraries book on Utopia, was the way it is very solidly linked to the real world.
It is, indeed, a book that explores the search for an ideal society in the western world. From the communes of the 1960's and '70's to the environmental housing collectives of the '80's and '90's. From the South Seas in the British imagination to Urban Geography, from Communism to Architecture, Romanticism and Formalism and Futurism, this book identifies attempts at and dreams of utopia from our own history. Rather than the speculation and fabulation of science fiction, the book provides us with our own speculation and fabulation, our own hope and idealism.
I've always been fascinated by Utopia, growing up reading Ursula Le Guin, Yevgeny Zamyatin and others, Dostoevsky's happiness versus freedom dillema grounded itself deep inside me, living in New Zealand often feels like paradise, and hopes for a better world got me imagining. I have a deep attachment to science fiction, and I'm not saying that this book is good because it neglects the genre's speculation, I'm saying it's good because it provides the social context that encouraged us to speculate in the first place. This book, to me, is a background to every speculative utopia work I have ever read, and the further understanding is invaluable to me. This book is a fascinating read. Devour it.
It also contains useful notes to illustrations, an index of personal names, a chronology of utopian/dystopian cinema and an extensive chronology of utopian literature .
