: Let me give three examples of utopian novels published in the last century: B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Gidon Rothstein’s Murderer

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Let me give three examples of utopian novels published in the last century: B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Gidon Rothstein’s Murderer in the Mikdash (2005). Each of these novels, I think, illustrates a different way to handle utopia within fiction.

Walden Two has a structure very similar to the “classic” utopian novels of the nineteenth century. A skeptic shows up at the gates of Utopia and one of the residents, functioning as a sort of Intourist guide, shows him all the features and answers his questions about how this can possibly work. The conflict is purely intellectual; the arc of the viewpoint character is from ignorance to enlightenment. It’s not the kind of plot that generally engages readers today, but Walden Two did sell copies, and inspired some real-life communes (including one that is still a going concern almost fifty years later, although it ditched the Walden Two model soon after it was founded).

In Woman on the Edge of Time, the plot tension comes from the utopia being under threat from the outside. But wait—utopia, practically by definition, is the terminal state of humanity, so how can it be threatened? Piercy gets around this by making her viewpoint character a sort of time traveller who visits alternative futures, so the reader sees the dismal contemporary world that character lives in, in contrast with a happy and egalitarian utopian future and a nightmarish dystopian future. The threat comes from how our own decisions, today, could put society on a path towards one possible future or the other.

Murderer in the Mikdash is not a book I can recommend on its literary merits, but I find it fascinating as sort of an academic exercise. The author, an Orthodox rabbi, postulated what Israeli society would look like after the coming of the Messiah, and then set a murder mystery in that society. The victim’s friend plays both the amateur-detective role in the mystery genre, and the skeptical-visitor role in the utopian genre. In the course of trying to solve the mystery, she also rubs up against the unique features of this utopian society. So this is a book about a society that is ideal on the “macro” level, but still contains flawed and occasionally malicious humans on the “micro” level.

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