UTOPIA
THOMAS MORE
Introduction by China MiévilleEssays by Ursula K. Le Guin
First published by Verso 2016
© Verso 2016
The text of More’s Utopia (1516) is based on the Cassell &
Company edition of 1901, edited by David Price
Introduction © China Miéville 2016
Essays © Ursula K. Le Guin
‘The Limits of Utopia’ was originally published in
Salvage #1: Amid This Stony Rubbish, 2015.
‘A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be’ was originally
published in Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1989).
‘A War Without End’ and ‘The Operating Instructions’ were originally
published in The Wave in the Mind (Boston: Shambhala, 2004).
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-760-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-761-5 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-759-2 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Fournier MT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the US by Maple Press
Contents
PART I: INTRODUCTION
by China Miéville
1. Close to the Shore
2. The Limits of Utopia
PART II: UTOPIA
by Thomas More
PART III: ESSAYS by Ursula K. Le Guin
1. A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be
2. Utopiyin, Utopiyang
3. A War Without End
4. The Operating Instructions
If you know from where to set sail, with a friendly pilot offering expertise, it should not take you too long to reach Utopia.
Since the first woman or man first yearned for a better place, dreamers have dreamed them at the tops of mountains and cradled in hidden valleys, above clouds and deep under the earth – but above all they have imagined them on islands. The island utopia has been a standard since antique times: Eusebius’s Panchaea and Iambulus’s Islands of the Sun; Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines, and Antangil, from the 1616 novel of that name; Bacon’s Bensalem; Robert Paltock’s Nosmnbdsgrutt, from Peter Wilkins; Huxley’s Pala; Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia; and countless more. And in the centre of that great archipelago of dissent and hope, one place, one name, looms largest.
This island, this book, is the paradigm. ‘More’s Utopia’, in the words of the scholar Roland Greene, ‘is perhaps the text that establishes insularity as an early modern vantage [and] introduces a way of thinking that is properly called utopian’, defined by ‘a multifarious phenomenon which I will call island logic’.
But, to repeat, it is not a long voyage to get there. Citizens of More’s Utopia ‘keep up the art of navigation’, pass back and forth on various tasks, trading surpluses of ‘corn, honey, wool, flax, wood, wax, tallow, leather, and cattle … to other nations’. Only the thinnest stretch of ocean separates Utopia from the mainland. For somewhere so famously and constitutively nowhere, this no-place Utopia is very close to the shore.
And there’s a more startling surprise with regard to its island-ness, a fact of which not nearly enough is generally made:
[T]his was no island at first, but a part of the continent. Utopus, that conquered it … brought the rude and uncivilised inhabitants into … good government … Having soon subdued them, he designed to separate them from the continent, and to bring the sea quite round them. To accomplish this he ordered a deep channel to be dug … and that the natives might not think he treated them like slaves, he not only forced the inhabitants, but also his own soldiers, to labour in carrying it on. As he set a vast number of men to work, he, beyond all men’s expectations, brought it to a speedy conclusion. And his neighbours, who at first laughed at the folly of the undertaking, no sooner saw it brought to perfection than they were struck with admiration and terror.
This most famous example of the island utopia, the ideal-type itself, is not by nature an island at all. The fifteen miles of water that keep it apart from the main body politic are not there by God’s will, but by the sweat of native people, among others, digging at an invading conqueror’s command. The splendid – utopian – isolation is part of the violent imperial spoils.
The classic reactionary attack on the utopian impulse is that it is, precisely, no place, impossibly distant. But, disavowed and right there, in More’s foundation myth of the dream polity is a very different unease: that, wrought by brutality, coerced from above, it is all too close.
There could be no one better suited to frame More’s foundational text than that great dissident utopian and dissident-utopian thinker, Ursula K. Le Guin. In her words from ‘Utopiyin, Utopiyang’, which follows More’s text in this book, ‘Every utopia since Utopia’ – at least – ‘has also been, clearly or obscurely, actually or possibly, in the author’s or in the readers’ judgement, both a good place and a bad one. Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia.’
These contradictions thrive in single heads as easily as between them, and in the texts those heads produce. The interminable debates about what More ‘really’ meant miss this obvious fact, and are thus of as much use as any other discussion of ‘actual’ artistic or political ‘intent’