Today, examining the utopias of Bellamy and Wells with all the benefits conferred by hindsight, their regimentation appears more than a little alarming. While the subjection of individual conduct to incessant public scrutiny, the subordination of private freedoms to the interests of public welfare, are equally characteristic of the Renaissance utopia, the eagerness of Bellamy and Wells to use the resources of modern technology in the service of an imposed, centralized social order now seems decidedly suspect. To be fair, neither writer had any real experience of what a modern, centralized, totalitarian state could be like—but such innocence of the consequences of seeking to impose order on humanity in its own best interests soon becomes impossible. Where the utopian dream of order appears later in the twentieth century (with the exception of such maverick productions as B.F. Skinner's Walden Two), it is most strikingly in the form of parodic inversion—in the nightmare visions of Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, and more recently, Atwood.

Challenges to the utopian ideal, of course—whether in the form of direct rebuttal or of parody—are hardly an exclusively modern phenomenon. Examples of the former range from Aristotle's strictures on Plato, through J. Lesley's attack on James Harrington, ‘A Slap on the Snout of the Republican Swine that rooteth up monarchy,’ to the numerous abusive reviews of Walden Two ; while in the latter category one might include Jonathan Swift's grotesque send-up of the Baconian scientific ideal in Book III of Gulliver's Travels, as well as his far more disturbing portrait of the ‘perfect’ society of the cold, rational, genocidal Houhyhnhnms in Book IV. Bellamy's Looking Backward inspired a veritable rash of parodic responses, primarily designed to show what his utopian ideal would lead to in practice—perhaps the most noteworthy being A.D. Vinton's Looking Further Backward, which portrays a future United States in which individual initiative has been so far sapped by the abandonment of the capitalist competitive ethic that it easily falls prey to a Chinese invasion.

Yet it is only in the twentieth century that dystopian fiction, combining a parodic inversion of the traditional utopia with satire on contemporary society, begins to take on the kind of mythic resonance that underlies the appeal of the traditional utopia from the time of More on.