Eutopias and Dystopias of Science

Most utopias are based upon one or more foundations, with education, law and religion being the most common, with of course interesting shifts in dominance over time. Here, I look at another or, arguably, two others: science and technology.

Any serious scholar of science fiction will say that the attitude to science and technology in science fiction is ambivalent at best and always has been. The question in the broader utopian tradition has been less studied, but much of the scholarship has stressed the positive role of science and technology in utopianism. It is certainly the case that, beginning with Francis Bacon’s ‘New Atlantis’ (1627), many utopias have presented science and technology, properly used, as one of the major mechanisms for bringing about and sustaining the desired better society. But it is also the case that ‘science and technology’ needs to be unpacked because it covers many different ideas, and that the phrase ‘properly used’ is a particularly important qualifier.

To make my argument, I begin with Bacon simply because the ‘New Atlantis’ dominates perceptions of science in utopian literature, and then move on to the quite practical utopias of the 17th century that are more about technology than science. I then briefly discuss the 18th-century debates over reason, which directly affect the presentation of science and technology. The 19th century is the high-point of the belief that science and technology can transform life for the better. While disillusionment grows during the last years of that century and continues throughout the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, the belief in the possibility of science and technology producing eutopia never disappears. The disillusionment means that the belief in science and technology producing dystopia has become stronger.