It's like a mix of Donnie Darko and William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition. No, it's like a mix of a Dennis Potter series and a Ben Templesmith comic. Maybe it's like Fringe, only a lot more sick and violent. Actually, the new British TV series Utopia, which started last week, is all of these things. It's a…

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic draws on everything from the musicals of Stephen Sondheim to Lord of the Rings. But is their a classic philosophical touch to the social structure of pony-filled land of Equestria? An essay on the aptly titled site Overthinking It examines the parallels between Equestria and…

You probably think we'll never actually live in Utopia — because Utopia is a perfect society that can never be achieved in real life. But think again. Thomas More's Utopia, the book that gave us the word for a perfect society in the first place, contains a large number of somewhat wacky descriptions of how the Utopians …

The whole point of Utopia — at least according to sixteenth century writer Thomas More, who invented the term — is that all property is shared. In that spirit, NYU media studies professor Stephen Duncombe has created the first completely open, digital copy of the book. Not only can you read and download the book in…

Communes once dotted the United States. Their occupants believed that if we just gave up sexual prudery and practice free love, the world would be better. Others abhorred the use of animals as servants and tried to live without animal products or labor. Others fell in love with the concept of socialism. Yes, it was a…

This week an intriguing new film, Utopia in Four Movements, screened at Sundance. It explores the way people in the past imagined the future. We can't wait for it to bust out of the festival circuit.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who maintain the infamous "Doomsday Clock," have moved the clock's hand back by one minute. Now we are six minutes to world destruction, rather than five.

The 2000s left us feeling battered, but the 2010s are looking awesome. Thanks to recent scientific research and an explosion of cultural interest in science fiction, there are at least 15 brilliant reasons to stick around for another decade.

Marge Piercy explored both utopian and dystopian futures in Woman On The Edge Of Time, and she explained the difference between the two modes of imagining the future, in a speech at the University of New Mexico.