Zack Willis SLAMS the utopian genre! Click HERE to see what he says!

            I think that this post will focus less on Herland, and more on the Utopian genre as a whole, as I’m starting to notice certain patterns that have been developing and honestly I’m beginning to become a little detached.

            I’ll start by saying I’ve read Unveiling a Parallel before. We had to read it for Dr. Kolmerten’s seminar class, and it was by no means a bad novel, nor is Herland, but I’m beginning to see that so many of these Utopian reads lack subtlety and that feels like an issue to me. In my paper, I praised the conversational tone of Utopia, saying that it enables the reader to feel included in the conversation with Raphael Hythloday, and allows More to act as an interlocutor to help the reader explain the concepts he is putting forth. Basically, by having Utopia focus less on plot, More can put forth more ideas about what he thinks a utopian society should be. Because it’s one of the first of its kind, Utopia is an interesting read. However, if the entire genre were exactly like Utopia, it would wear out its welcome with the tired formula of “here’s a conversation between two people where the one guy explains everything and the other guy just kinda listens.”

            So what does expansion on the genre look like? I would say that Herland and Unveiling a Parallel are natural progressions from where Utopia started. Both novels are deeply preachy in the points they want to put forward, but also try to disguise it with some semblance of a plot. Herein lies my problem with these texts: the plot is secondary to the point. In some cases, and what is certainly the case here, this happens because the author wants the point to be first and foremost. It needs to be in your face and you need no chance to forget it. But as a reader, I personally am not a fan of having themes shoved in my face. I like to think a little. I won’t deny at all that these novels still certainly have things to dig through. Clearly this is true; otherwise our classes would be much shorter. However, I prefer novels like Brave New World or 1984, in which we understand the world the story is set in, but the plot comes first. We care about the characters, and because we care about them, we want to discover more about the world they live in so we can understand their motivations. Of course, these novels tend to lean more dystopian.

            So there’s my question. Can the utopian genre have an entertaining plot without the society going to hell? I think it’s possible, but the lack of conflict is certainly a hurdle. Recently I read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, which was a sort of sci-fi utopian novel about a man who travels to the distant future and discovers a utopian society, and while he kinda explains their customs and how things work, the bulk of the conflict is about his struggle to find his time machine and return to the past. I think Wells certainly did it right. It was entertaining and while the main character certainly jacked things up a little bit (i.e. setting a forest on fire), nothing indicated that the society itself was doomed.

            I don’t disagree with what I wrote in my paper. Utopia has a conversational tone, and that works for it. I think that style would work for any utopian writing. However, the genre would become oversaturated quickly. Because of this, I think utopian novels need to dig just a little deeper on plot.