I wore my Just Utopias badge to a school event recently and it proved a conversation starter. On the spot, I was asked for utopian book recommendations. I can’t believe I didn’t have an answer prepared for this scenario, but there you go.
So, what would I recommend to someone completely new to the genre? Where is the ideal starting point for utopia?
This is highly subjective and I would love to hear other people’s suggestions (pop them in the comments below!). But these were my quick-fire utopian book recommendations, and I stand by them.
1. & 2. – Ursula K. Le Guin
I think the best introduction to utopia is through Ursula K. Le Guin. For Le Guin, utopia isn’t about building a colony on Mars or even seizing control and doing a better job of running things here on Earth. Her utopias are about finding a dynamic balance, where everything is always mindfully changing, shifting and compensating, but not striving towards anyone’s fixed idea of progress or perfection.
Le Guin’s books suggest we can think outside of whatever structures we happen to be living within. She’s the author behind the much-shared quote:
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
So, my first utopian book recommendation is to read Ursula K. Le Guin. And, without apology, my second utopian book recommendation is… to read Ursula K. Le Guin.
The Dispossessed
Shevek lives in an anarchist-communist community on Anarres, a barren moon-like planet. His community separated itself from the rest of civilisation living on Urras, Anarres’s capitalist sister planet. However, Shevek is a brilliant physicist and in order to see his most important ideas come to fruition he needs to travel and work between the two worlds. To do so he must challenge the dogma surrounding the foundation of his own community and avoid being used by both sides as a political pawn.
The Dispossessed is interplanetary, extraterrestrial and undoubtedly sci-fi. However, for readers new to utopia (a subgenre of sci fi) there’s nothing too weird to get your head around. Unlike, say, Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, where everyone shifts between genders and being genderless. It is also a traditional novel, unlike Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, which is a collection of snippets about a fictional society, including stories, plays, poems, recipes, drawings and music. Both The Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home come highly recommended but I think The Dispossessed is the best starting point.
A Wizard of Earthsea
The first in the Earthsea cycle, this book follows Ged, a young magician. He is incredibly powerful but is yet to learn how to control his magic powers, and his ego. In attempting to prove himself superior to another, older, student of magic, he accidentally releases a shadow-creature. It’s then up to him to travel across Earthsea and destroy the beast he set loose.
A Wizard of Earthsea isn’t a utopia at all but it is an introduction to Ursula K. Le Guin, who is a utopian. The book is suitable for children (probably about 11+ to read alone, a little younger if being read to). It has proved formational to many, including other writers including Neil Gaiman and David Mitchell. Bearing in mind I was asked for recommendations at a school event, I had to promote this one. The more minds, young and otherwise, that discover Earthsea, the more hope there is for us all.
3. The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin
In a world seemingly ironically called The Stillness, earthquakes are commonplace. Occasionally there will be a quake strong enough to set off a ‘fifth season’, a kind of nuclear winter outside of the usual spring, summer, autumn, winter.
Amongst the inhabitants of The Stillness are people known as orogenes, who have the power to both quell and start quakes. They are feared and, if not killed on discovery, ostracised to an educational facility where they are trained to be of use to society.
The Broken Earth trilogy follows one such orogene as she questions and relearns her place in society during a fifth season, and grapples with whether the world needs to be destroyed before it can accommodate everyone fairly, including orogenes.
The trilogy is a fantastic read, and it’s not just me that thinks so. Each instalment won the Hugo Award for Best Novel (voted for by readers) in the year it was published. It’s full of utopian themes and ideas, including the notion that the status quo is not inevitable. The way things are is not the way they’ve always been, and it isn’t the way they always will be either. Everything is subject to change, and that brings about the utopian possibility of things being different, and better.
In our own world where the climate is breaking down, racism is systemic and the far right seems to be on the rise, it’s increasingly obvious that tinkering around the edges is insufficient. As such, The Broken Earth trilogy is a utopia for our times. We may need to relearn our history, and allow our current world to be destroyed. But when a world is rotten, why save it? The best thing to do might be to start again.
