Joad Raymond Wren's 'The Uses of Utopia' Traces Imagined Paradises from More to Le Guin

Joad Raymond Wren's new book 'The Uses of Utopia' offers an intellectual history of utopian thought, from Plato's Republic to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Published by Allen Lane (£25), the book examines how utopias function as thought experiments rather than blueprints for society. Wren traces the concept through Thomas More's 1516 Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (which he suggests inspired Marvel's Wakanda), Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Étienne Cabet's Voyage en Icarie, and H.G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. The review notes that many utopias share patterns: framing devices with accidental travel, abolition of families, and absence of lawyers. Wren argues utopias are 'organic machines for thinking about the premises of our thought,' akin to science fiction. The reviewer critiques the omission of Robert Nozick's 1974 Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which argues utopias are inherently coercive. The book also discusses Iain M. Banks's Culture novels as a popular modern utopian strain. The review concludes that the best utopian fiction is implicitly anti-utopian.