As the critic Tom Moylan points out in Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1986), the notion of an ideal place or society somewhere beyond the known has existed in human traditions since ancient times: the biblical Garden of Eden, the Buddhist Western Paradise, the Norse Valhalla, Plato's Republic, and so on. Western literary tradition took specific focus on the ideal society with Thomas More's Utopia (1517). The late nineteenth century brought H. G. Wells's early science fiction and, from an American perspective, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 20001887 (1888). Wells produced works concerned with social progress such as his A Modern Utopia (1905). Wells's perspective on future society included total sexual freedom. Bellamy, sensitized by severe labor-management conflicts in his own time, proposed a society in the year 2000 which employed improved technology to better the lives of ordinary working people, projecting developments such as radio and television as...