Among humankind no urge seems stronger than the desire for a better world. From Thomas More’s Utopia or even earlier, from Plato’s Republic, from the chiliastic dreams of Christianity, or Confucius’ concept of a harmonious society, to the recent fictional representation of a world of cloned humans by Michel Houellebecq, human beings have been thinking of alternatives to their present life with its misery, want, and worries. There is no reason for assuming that the representation of such imagined worlds will ever come to a halt.

The combination of desire and imagination has pushed the shape of these other worlds into varying directions. Different from the bucolic idyll and the fairy tale, utopian fiction offers an alternative society that, in addition to being attractive, could be realized in principle. The utopian narrative teaches us how to live; it is always more or less didactic. It does not simply indulge in wishful thinking or fantasy, but includes details about the political and economic aspects of society, notably in the European variant of the genre. Yet it differs from the political tract and party program, which aim at short-term change, as it may make a great leap forward into an imagined future that still may be hundreds of years away.

In order to be convincing it will tell about a secluded world, uncontaminated by the evils of contemporary life. Usually it begins with a journey to an island or an inaccessible mountain range, to some imaginary country or another planet, or into faraway times. Utopian fiction is a genre that clearly depends on our willingness to accept the improbable setting. Thus it calls for a robust activation of the literary convention originally defined by Coleridge as the “willing suspension of disbelief” (1907: vol. 2, 6). Writers of utopian narratives therefore affirm their literary lineage rather ostentatiously by way of explicit intertextual relations, such as Huxley referring to Shakespeare, Swift and Wells to More and Plato, Houellebecq to Wells, Lao She to Swift, Lin Yutang to Rousseau and Zhuang Zi.