A term you'll meet in literary genre.
A utopia is an imagined society organised so well that it seems ideal. The word was coined by Thomas More in 1516 as the title of his book — a pun in Greek between eu-topos ("good place") and ou-topos ("no place"). The joke is built in: the perfect society is also, by definition, nowhere.
Utopian fiction is rarely just daydreaming. By describing a society where property is shared, or work is fair, or war has ended, the writer is implicitly indicting the real world for failing to do the same. More's Utopia is a critique of Tudor England; Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward imagined a cooperative future to shame the inequalities of the 1880s.
Utopia and dystopia are two sides of one coin. A dystopia is what you get when one group's utopia is imposed on everyone — the "perfect" order of Brave New World is a nightmare for anyone who wants to be unhappy. Many of the most interesting modern works live in the tension between the two.
The richest examples question their own perfection. Ursula K. Le Guin subtitled The Dispossessed "An Ambiguous Utopia," portraying a society that is genuinely freer than ours and yet still cramped, poor, and prone to quiet tyranny. The story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" asks whether any paradise is acceptable if it rests on a single hidden cruelty.
When you meet a utopia, ask two questions: what is this society fixing about the author's real world, and what does it have to suppress to stay perfect? The genre's lasting power is that the second question is never fully answerable.
Lexio is a free Chrome extension and web app that reads a word's actual context and tells you what it means in this sentence, not from a generic dictionary.
Try Lexio — free →
Read deeper. Understand everything.
© 2026 Lexio · Privacy · Credits