Krishan Kumar states that HG Wells “never wrote a real utopia, strictly speaking”. This may seem like a paradoxical statement regarding the author famous for being the main apostle of scientific utopias, and lends itself to the question: “what is a utopia 'in the strict sense'?” The term coined by Thomas More in his 1516 novel Utopia has a double meaning. The word comes from the Greek ou-topos, meaning “no place,” although the English homophone “eutopia” comes from the Greek eu topos, meaning “good place.” In this sense, a true utopia can be interpreted as the dream of a perfect, but also unattainable, place. Wells seems to acknowledge this in his novel A Modern Utopia through the line: “Utopias were once bona fide blueprints for a new world-creation and otherworldly completeness; this so-called modern utopia is a mere story of personal adventures among utopian philosophies. Wells's depiction of society is one of "utopian philosophies" put into practice and as a result there are flaws - in fact there is a chapter devoted to "Failure in a Modern Utopia". In implementing utopian dreams we inevitably encounter imperfections, and from this the “Anti-Utopia”, or dystopia, is born. The twentieth century saw a shift from a Victorian interest in utopia towards a marked increase in dystopias, and Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905) is a crucial moment in this transition from dreams to the practical limitations of reality. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay News from Nowhere (1890) by William Morris is an example of a utopian dream. Humanity has reached a point of realization where happiness and beauty are omnipresent, evil is almost non-existent and even the hardships of work have become a pleasure: “The more you see us, the clearer it will be to you that we are happy.” . That we live amidst beauty without any fear of becoming effeminate; that we have much to do, and on the whole we like to do it... [England] is now a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoiled, with the necessary dwellings, sheds and workshops scattered up and down the country, all clean and tidy. clean and pretty." This passage's description of a garden containing nothing but happiness and beauty is reminiscent of the Garden of Eden; it draws its gaze away from Morris's contemporary Victorian industrialism in an attempt to reclaim the world as it was before the fall . Morris is well aware that his utopia is impossible to realize, and the description of this world as “Nowhere” in the title clearly shows this deliberate irony. HG Wells is quite critical of the creation of an inaccessible paradise: “If we were free to have our desire unhindered, I suppose we should follow Morris in his Nowhere, we should completely change the nature of man and the nature of things; we should make the whole race wise, tolerant, noble, perfect – wave our hands at one splendid anarchy, in which every man does what he likes, and no one is happy to do evil, in a world good in its essential nature, ripe and sunny, like the world before autumn.” He believes it is more useful to attempt to create a formula that moves away from the generalities of previous utopias towards true human nature. Morris himself admits that his Nowhere is not a vision or projection of the trajectory of human progress, but an idealized dream. Morris is able to reject any form of government or justice system while removing any form of evil inherent in humanity. Wells, however, wishes to walk the line between idealism and a society that can be realizedpractically without the need to change human nature: “Our proposal here is at least on a more practical level than that. We must limit ourselves first to the limits of human possibility as we know them in the men and women of this world today, and then to all the inhumanity, all the insubordination of nature." Wells' utopia may not be a traditional utopia, but its imperfections don't quite reach the point of dystopia. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World extrapolates some Wellsian ideas, projecting aspects of A Modern Utopia far into the future and showing his concern about how such a society might fail. The title is a quote from Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest: “Oh, wonder! / How many good creatures are here! / How beautiful is humanity! O brave new world, / that has no such people!” There is dramatic irony in this passage in that many of the people Miranda sees here for the first time have proven not to be kind-hearted men, and in her naivety she cannot conceive of their flaws. By adopting this title for his novel, Huxley comments on the naivety of his contemporaries and those, like Wells, who failed to see the negative possibilities of the way their culture was developing. Wells continued in the Victorian style of believing in the continued development of science and technology, but also in the progress of government: “The State must be progressive, it must no longer be static.” Huxley's extension to this concept is the hypothesis that society must inevitably reach a point of fulfillment, whether in governance or mechanization. The Controller, Mustapha Mond, expresses this idea: “It is curious… to read what people in Our Ford's time wrote about scientific progress. They seem to have imagined that the thing could be allowed to continue indefinitely, regardless of everything else.” He believes that the constant drive to satiate desires through the development of technology leads us towards a distorted vision of happiness. Life becomes too easy, and as a result of this simple stasis, emotion, passion and love are incompatible with the culture of dull pleasure. Huxley is concerned that the incessant mechanization of humanity removes all components of the daily difficulties of life, but in the process also removes the true beauties of existence: “Our world is not the same as Othello's world… they cannot be made tragedies without instability,” says Mond, “Universal happiness keeps the wheels in constant motion; truth and beauty cannot.” Huxley is criticizing this very idea of ​​happiness. It is a sterile existence, undeniably without pain and suffering, but also without the major influences that characterize human nature. The Controller tries to convince the Savage that this modern world is a utopia: “The people are happy; they get what they want and never want what they can't get. They are fine; I am safe; they are never sick; they are not afraid of death; they are blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they are tormented by the absence of mothers and fathers; they have no wives, no children, no loves for which they have strong feelings; they are so conditioned that they practically cannot help but behave as they should. And if anything should go wrong, there is soma." It essentially explains that the depths of life have been removed, but ignores the fact that the heights have also been removed. It is in many ways reminiscent of The Birth of Tragedy in that Nietzsche states that societies with the greatest disruption and sensitivity produce the best works - true beauty and tragedy cannot be realized if one cannot perceive the horrors of the Dionysian spirit in response to which the Savage refutes this imagedisfigured by happiness and claims human nature: “I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." George Orwell sums this up well by saying, “although everyone is vacuously happy, life has become so pointless that it is difficult to believe that such a society can endure.” It is symbolic that the Savage returns to nature at the end of the novel, working the land by hand without the need for machinery. George Orwell believed that Huxley was directing his criticism at the “implied aims of industrial civilization”. And this is most evident in this reversal of progress and rejection of mechanization. Thomas Hardy believed that industrialization diminished humanity through its separation from nature, and this is made evident by the "machine-man" in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891): “His thoughts are turned to himself ...he almost doesn't perceive the scenes around him and doesn't care about them at all; maintaining only strictly necessary relations with the natives... The long belt that ran from the driving wheel of his engine to the red thresher under the sheaf was the only line of connection between him and agriculture. This introspective and insensitive attitude represents the narrow vision of urbanization: progress for its own sake, without considering the defects that modernity can bring. The worker is connected to the outside world only by a “single bond” and this detachment leads to a lack of care. Huxley was writing forty years after Hardy, and it seems that the march of mechanized progress had become an even more significant concern. Morris's News from Nowhere was published just a year before Tess and conveys his contemporaries' concerns about progress in a way that is markedly different from Huxley. Rather than projecting industrialization into the future and showing its follies, Morris's Nowhere is closer to a pastoral and paradisiacal Arcadia of the Middle Ages. Clive Wilmer says that “a dream set in a real or possible place can draw attention to the flaws of contemporary reality,” and Morris's dream is unmistakably England. By placing the protagonist in a place he knows well, but which has undergone many changes, Morris is able to lucidly contrast his utopia with contemporary Victorian England, and therefore criticize the latter. The most obvious difference is the rejuvenation of nature and the reduction of mechanization: “The soap factories with their smoke-spewing chimneys were no longer there; engineer jobs have disappeared; the lead works have disappeared; and from Thorneycroft came no sound of riveting and hammering in the west wind. Morris sees this new world as cleansed of evil, and a major reason for this is that man is reunited with nature: “Was not their error once again engendered by the life of slavery they had lived – a life that was always been? to regard everything except humanity, animate and inanimate – “nature,” as men called it – as one thing, and humanity as another. It was natural for people to think this way to try to make “nature” their slave, because they thought “nature” was something outside of them.” This complements Hardy's idea that industrialization causes a rift between man and nature, and that this rift may be the source of man's callous disposition towards progress. In Morris's utopia humanity has come to accept their position as part of nature, and this allows them to derive pleasure from their work and thus achieve happiness in all aspects of life: leisure and work. By slowing the march of human progress to a halt, Morris is able to critique blind forward movementof industrialization. You can criticize human progress by showing its madness in a dystopian world, but also by contrasting it with the perfect balance of a static utopia. Labor-saving machinery is taken to extreme extremes in E. M. Forster's short dystopia The Machine Stops (1909). It is an early response to Wells' idea that machinery can be constantly improved for the benefit of humanity. The purpose of machines was to make life easier and satiate humanity's daily desires and needs; Forster imagines a society in which this is taken to its furthest point, and as a result humanity has no desires outside the Machine and exists in a static realization achieved by mechanization. Human progress reaches a state where it has been consumed by technology and humanity has lost relationships with each other and with nature. George Orwell describes the Machine as “the genie which man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and which cannot be put out again”, and it is this fear of losing control that Forster expresses. Kuno, the revolutionary son of the protagonist, tries to appeal to his contemporaries: “Don't you see, doesn't it seem to all of you teachers that we are the ones who die, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now... The Machine develops, but not along our lines. The Machine proceeds, but not towards our goal. We exist only as blood corpuscles coursing through its arteries, and if it could function without us, it would let us die.” The death he refers to is not a literal loss of life, but a loss of control over one's humanity. As technology replaces the age-old idea of ​​bringing people to things with bringing things to people, the need to interact is negated. You can spend your whole life in one room, communicating only through the Machine and being supported only by the Machine. Humanity is consumed and life fades away in the body of the Machine. Forster deals with man's obsessive compulsion to replace life with technology: walking is replaced by airships (an extension of the railway), communication by a form of video calling (an extension of the telephone) and even music becomes synthetic (an extension of radio) ). Showing a world clouded by mechanization, he warns that enthusiasm for adopting technology can lead to ruin: “Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all visible creatures, the man who once had created God in his image and had reflected his strength in the constellations, the beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the clothes he had woven." It is the naive arrogance of human progress that Forster criticizes – the idea that man is so perfect, so divine that he can create a substitute for nature, for God. The progress that George Orwell worries about is less about technology. Jenni Calder states: “Orwell saw power politics, not science, as the main threat to humanity” and Orwell explains the defeat of the importance of science in 1984: “At the beginning of the twentieth century… science and technology were developing at the same prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would continue to develop. This did not happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because of scientific progress. and technical depended on an empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. Overall the world is more primitive than it was fifty years ago.” of the 20th century had been shaken by two warsworld and multiple revolutions. Although mechanization was seen as a threat, its strength had been witnessed in the form of the atomic bomb and there was more belief in the technologies' ability to destroy than in progress. Orwell therefore feared more about the growing power of extremist governments. During a brief period of the Second World War Orwell believed there could be a genuine movement towards equality, but in the post-war ashes he lost all faith. The Labor government elected in England in 1945 did not bring about the radical changes he desired, and its advances in Holland, France and Germany following the Allied armies in 1945 shocked him to the core. 1984 was an enlarged projection of a present that contained Stalinism and an immediate past of Nazism; it is clear that Orwell was concerned that the future of humanity might fall into the hands of a draconian totalitarian government. O'Brien captures the violence and oppression of this political progression in the phrase: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face - forever." The political system of Brave New World is a milder form of totalitarian government that avoids the need for violent oppression by psychological and biological conditioning. Castes from the World Controllers and Alphas to the semi-idiots Epsilons are a parody of H. G. Wells' idea of ​​the Samurai, an educated ruling class, and the division of society into Poietic, Kinetic, Dull and Basic. Wells was interested in the idea of ​​“eugenics” based on the theories developed in Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This selective breeding to create an ideal society is extrapolated in Brave New World in that all children are created to fit a certain caste. As a result, one of the fundamental human relationships, that between mother and child, is destroyed. “Viviparous” reproduction is regarded with such contempt that even the word mother is considered an obscenity. This breakdown in human relationships can be seen in The Machine Stops (“Parents, duties,” said the Machine book, “cease at the moment of birth. P.422327483”) and 1984: “Almost all children a day 'today they were horrible. The worst thing was that, through organizations like the Spies, they were systematically transformed into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency to rebel against party discipline. On the contrary, they worshiped the Party and everything connected with it... All their ferocity was directed outward, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, mental criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be afraid of their children.” The children's loyalty towards the party but also hatred towards their parents is an example of how the party channels relationships between individuals into a single relationship with the State. Communicating, even thinking and feeling, become irrelevant concepts. The only relationship left – between the state and its citizens – is the relationship between power and its victims. As familial love is removed from society, passionate and sexual love is also denied. Sexual promiscuity in Brave New World is encouraged to the extent that it removes any affiliation between the physical act and an emotional connection. Sex becomes mechanical; Lenina even describes herself as “pneumatic,” as she massages her thighs. DH Lawrence, writing in a similar period, sets out his views on his contemporaries and sex in A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover: “Culture and civilization have taught us to separate things.” the word from the act, the thought from the physical act or reaction. Now we know that the act does not necessarily follow the thought. In fact, thought and action, word and action are twoseparate forms of consciousness, two separate lives we lead. We must, sincerely, maintain a bond." This distortion of sex is an idea that Lawrence is very interested in and attributes much of it to the cause of industrialization. The description of miners as “beings as strange and distorted as men” in Lady Chatterley's Lover is an example of dehumanization that Lawrence believes is the result of mechanization. Considered in this light, Brave New World can be seen as concerned with the human progression of sexual relationships. In addition to portraying the soulless nature of sex, Huxley implies that the state fears that love will divide alliances. An important factor of totalitarian government is that society is much more important than the individual. Love empowers individuals, and as a result, the state wishes to eradicate that danger through excessive promiscuity. It is also a form of channeling any desire into harmless physical acts, rather than directing passion against the government. In Calder's words, “Huxley visualizes sex as a means of consuming excess energy, whereas Orwell's sexual repression as a means of generating it.” The energy generated in Orwell's dystopia is directed away from the Party towards figures such as Goldstein or the enemy powers of Eurasia or Eastasia. The Party's problem with sex was not simply that the sexual instinct creates a world of its own that is beyond their control; sexual repression develops into hatred which turns into “war fever” and “leader worship”. Julia describes it like this: “The way she said it was, 'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't care. They can't stand you feeling this way. They want you to always be full of energy. All this marching up and down, clapping and waving flags is just sex gone bad. There are mass demonstrations, public hangings and the Two Minutes of Hate, and all of these are outlets for sexual repression, while serving the dual purpose of allowing the individual to forget himself and strengthening the Party's power. Distorting the perception of sex and associating it with hatred diminishes human relationships, and it is these relationships that make humanity what it is. Humanity and morality are defined by relationships, and Winston comes to realize this: “What mattered were individual relationships, and a helpless gesture, a hug, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value itself... The proles had remained human. They hadn't hardened inside... "The proles are human beings," he said aloud. 'We are not human.'” This moment is epiphanic as he comes to believe that all of the Party's efforts to maintain complete control dehumanize the population. They are the “primitive emotions” that make up humanity, and the State forces them to be repressed and ultimately destroyed. Orwell shows concern that human progress is in danger of developing in a political direction that will make society dehumanized. The purpose of political power in Oceania is to eliminate memory and self-consciousness to perpetuate political power, and by eliminating memory and self-consciousness humanity is lost. Party control imposes repressed memories, isolation, and destruction of connections; eliminates human feeling. This loss of humanity is symbolized by the physical transformation that occurs to Winston: “A curved, gray skeleton-like thing was approaching him. His actual appearance was frightening, and not just the fact that he knew it was himself. He approached the glass. The creature's face seemed protruding, due to its bent posture. A desolate, convict's face, with a noble forehead that extended into a scalp.