Paradise

Morrison, Toni. Paradise, New York : A. A. Knopf 1998.

When freed slaves established the town of Haven during Reconstruction, they hoped to create a new world free of the tyranny and oppression of their former lives. Fast forward to the 1970s, and a group of men from that colony have set out to reconnect with the original principals of the forefathers, re-establishing their idea of paradise-on-earth, in the all-African American town of Ruby. However, the town's internal balance is disturbed when a group of women, under the leadership of enigmatic leader Consolata, take root in a local convent, attracting the sympathy of some of the town's women. The patriarchal leaders find their authority undermined, and in the process are forced to contemplate the contradictions of their own position at the apex of a hierarchy that was supposed to challenge power-relations in the first place. Written by a Nobel-lauriette, Paradise is an intricate examination of the human desire for freedom, and what happens when it comes up against the limits of authority, set to the backdrop of the social turmoil of the Vietnam era.

A Country Called Home

Barnes, Kim. A country called home, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2008.

When recently graduated doctor Thomas Deracotte takes his young wife Helen to the countryside of Idaho, the couple embark on dreams of a rural idyll, leaving civilisation behind to establish a 'back-to-the-land' existence (fitting with the decade of the novel's setting, the 1960's). However, utopias are not so simple, and human weaknesses intrude to complicate matters between the couple, whose relationship strain is exarcebated  by a growing bond between Helen and the young drifter-cum-farmhand Deracotte has hired to do the heavy-lifting on the farm, Manny. Meanwhile, the arrival of a newly-born daughter, Elise, and Thomas' descent from a physician to something of a 'wild-man' outcast, further complicates matters and tips the balance away from harmony. Pullitzer prize-holder Barne's narrative is dark and brooding, and deeply rooted in the natural setting in which it takes place. 

Herland

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland, New York : Signet Classic, [1992].

Led by sociology student Vandyk Jennings (Van), a group of explorers set out to find a mythical society composed entirely of women, supposedly hidden in the jungles of South America. Upon discovering the tribe, the men try to observe them from afar, but are lured to their village, where they are captured, accomodated and made to learn the tribe's language, culture and history. The men learn that the tribe have subsisted in isolation since inter-tribal warfare and a volcanic eruption destroyed their civilisation (and all its men) 2000 years ago, and has mastered a form of asexual reproduction. Following a foiled escape-attempt, the men are gradually afforded more freedom, as they apply themselves to proper membership of the tribe, its rites and relationships. 

Gilman's novel -serialised in 1916- has been described as an early feminist epic that inverts gender-roles, which are depicted as socially-contingent; her positioning of the novel's women as both nurturing, and fiercely independent and physically hardy, enables her to unpick several gender stereotypes, and question many of the assumptions underpinning our understanding of gender and gender-relations.

Looking Backward : 2000-1887.

Bellamy, Edward. Looking backward : 2000-1887, Cambridge, Mass : Belknap Press, 1967.

It is 2000, and Julin West has awoken from a deep-sleep began in his native Boston over one hundred years ago, to find himself in an alien United States. His hypnotic sleep has propelled him into a socialist utopia more than 100 years into the future, where all his questions and confusion about the society surrounding him are helpfully answered by the attentive Doctor Leete.

Leete shows West through modern-day Boston, and explains the many changes that have made much of the drudgery and oppression of the capital-labour relationship a thing of the past. Workers retire at 45 now, may eat in any public kitchen they chose, can consume public art and objective, publicly owned media (both in the press and at home, via 'cable telephone'), and shop on state-provided credit at co-operatives that have done away with the profit-motive.

Bellamy's political treatise was extremely popular, and led to the establishment of over one hundred clubs to propagate its ideas, throughout America's industrial north at the end of the 19th century. The book also influenced such great American labour figures as Eugene Debs, and inspired a series of replies and parodies.

Brave New World

Huxley, Aldus. Brave new world, New York : Harper and Collins, 1998.

Aldus Huxley's Brave New World mixes elements of science fiction and philosophy to examine a series of characters living in a unified, futuristic totalitarian state. Society is rigorously divided from conception, with people's roles set out through interference in their embryonic development, which takes place in the form of in-vitro fertilisation. 'Alphas' and 'Betas' are accorded a higher status, and developed to work in more challenging, intellectual roles, while 'Gammas', 'Deltas' and 'Epsilons' are consigned to lower-class positions.

Bernard and Helmholtz, a couple of Alphas, are somewhat independent-minded, and suspicious of the lack of emotion embodied by their society's obsession with obsequious consumption, drug-taking and excessive, orgiastic physical-pleasure seeking. At the same time, Bernard is compelled by the desire for acceptance, reflected in his obsession with fellow-Alpha, Lenina. A trip to the 'wilds' of the Nevadan desert bring them in to contact with an altogether different form of society, where people are more inter-dependent, emotionally-attached, and less frivolous. They bring an outcast 'savage', John, back with them, both for the purposes of anthropological investigation, and, in the case of Bernard, cynical self-aggrandisement. Trouble ensues when John's inherent dislike for all the trashy amusement's of his 'brave new world' brings him into conflict with the dictates of The World State, and its ruling clique and ethos, embodied by Resident World Controller Mustapha Mond.