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The initial three books that I have read for my survey of the history of science fiction in literature are utopian works from the 1500s and 1600s.  They are, in order of publication, Utopia by Thomas More, 1516; City of the Sun, written by the Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella in 1602; and The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon, 1627.

More’s Utopia was ostensibly the first book written about an ideal human society since Plato’s Republic and began a new trend in literature to which it supplied a name.  Published in Latin in 1516, it is built as a conversation between More and two friends, one of whom is a traveling man who describes a state discovered in the New World that had perfected a socio-politico-legal system, ensuring a healthy, productive society virtually free of strife.  City of the Sun follows this same basic structure, using a conversation between two men, one of them a traveler, to describe Campanella’s own ideal society in as much detail as More.  Bacon’s New Atlantis was an incomplete, abandoned manuscript that I presume, if finished, would have contained descriptions encapsulating all aspects of his fictional society, much like Utopia and City of the Sun.  The fragment that does exist describes in detail the House of Solomon, a scientific college on New Atlantis that was in all ways superior in the arts of science to any other known country in the world at that time and employed what was essentially the Baconian Method, a precursor to our modern Scientific Method.

These books form perhaps the most down-to-earth element of science fiction’s genesis in that they are but extensions of philosophical discussions of their day, fictional means by which the authors sought to state what, in their opinions, would be the best way for a society of mankind to operate.  There is little in the way of fantastical elements, little that requires the suspension of disbelief (save one common theme throughout many utopian works, which I will address presently).  They are rooted solidly in matters of governance, horticulture, diplomacy, social structure, and the like, a far cry from another prelude to science fiction that arose at roughly the same time: “science fantasy”, in which authors began to look outward to the heavens by having characters travel to the moon via ludicrously primitive and even occult machinations that barely attempted to trouble themselves with credibility.  Why, then, do these utopias count as forebears of science fiction?

There are several things at which science fiction excels, one of which is to examine current culture and society through the lens of the future or, more pointedly, to pronounce judgement on culture or governance or other such things through a veil of fictional settings far removed from our own.  It is this major theme of science fiction that can be traced back to More and his successors; they were the first to ask “what IF society were to be structured like so, rather than the way we have it now?”  (It should also be noted that the societies in both City of the Sun and New Atlantis have attained scientific knowledge and ability that greatly outstrips that of their contemporary real-world nations, foreshadowing another central tenet of science fiction - the advancement of man’s understanding of, and manipulation of, the earth and the cosmos).

This, though, is where utopian authors commonly introduce their one major foible.  In constructing their ideal societies, they imbue the human subjects with ideal qualities.  In other words, the human denizens of these heavens on earth don’t act like humans at all.  As Charles M. Andrews, Ph.D., states in the introduction to Famous Utopias, these works are generally “peopled by ideal human beings uninfluenced by personal jealousies or individual passions, [and] are based, with but little regard for the complexities and varieties of real society, upon what the writer thinks ought to be, rather than upon the collective experience of mankind.”  This disregard for individuality or control over one’s own earthly destiny is distasteful to modern sensibilities, and this distaste is compounded by the fact that what few observances of individual whims and passions are made by these societies come in the form of totalitarian decrees and capital punishment.

Humanity on earth is irrevocably flawed; this is something that I hold to be true.  We are finite beings with finite ability, finite knowledge, and finite capacities for love, grace, compassion, selflessness, and the like.  No perfect society is possible.  Are utopias, then, a literary form destined for failure from the outset?  Inasmuch as they must always employ an unrealistically idealized human in one form or another, yes; the “answers” they seek to give when posing the question of a perfect society will always be unattainable.  However, this is not to say that they are aren’t useful means of exploring new ideas that may benefit human social, political, and legal structure, and science fiction has indeed carried on this tradition for many years with great diversity of form.

-Brenton

Resources:
-Utopia (the Penguin Classics edition, with an English translation dating to, I believe, the 1960s)
-Famous Utopias (published in 1901, this contained older English translations of City of the Sun and New Atlantis)