Utopia, Anti-Utopia, Dystopia, Science Fiction

Although the name of utopia goes back to Thomas Moore, the genre, or its typical way of thinking seems an important tradition of western culture, which produced several important works and branches through the centuries. The lecture follows the tradition from the origins to nineteenth-century utopian novel to twentieth-century dystopias and to contemporary science fiction to see how the fantasy-created possible (and many times impossible) world becomes a carrier of social criticism. It is a returning problem if pure utopias without dystopian features can ever be written.