the original utopia that wasn’t so original

Lately, I’ve been reading classics that are either dystopias or utopias. I’ve reread George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm as well as The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin1 as part of the Gazette’s book club. I already have Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World sitting on my digital bookshelf and will probably read its polar opposite Island by the same author. In one of my political theory classes, I was assigned sections from Thomas More’s Utopia, which prompted me to go for the full book because the sections I had read were interesting enough and it’s the book that gave the sci-fi utopia genre its name. So, what better distraction from my impending paper deadline on April 30th than another book added to my rotation (currently sitting at three, my own self-imposed limit)? My first impressions were admiration as the author describes things that were unthinkable in late Medieval Europe and the Early Modern Era: Gender equality, material abundance, leisure for everyone, abolition of private…