Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free.

More paints a vision of the customs and practices of a distant island, but Utopia means 'no place' and his narrator's name, Hythlodaeus, translates as 'dispenser of nonsense'. This tale masks what is a serious and subversive analysis of the failings of More's society.

It's a perfect world, where everything looks right. But ugly truths lie beneath the surface!

Shevak, a brilliant scientist, wants to tear down the wall of hatred that has isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. So he journeys to the utopian Urras in an attempt to ignite the fires of change.

Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siecle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller.

Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party.

A reprint of the 1976 Macmillan edition. This fictional outline of a modern Utopia has been a centre of controversy ever since its publication in 1948. Set in the United States, it pictures a society in which human problems are solved by a scientific technology of human conduct. FROM THE PREFACE: It is now widely recognised that great changes must be made in the American way of life. Not only can

For over a hundred years the Pacific island of Pala has been the scene of a unique experiment in civilisation. Its inhabitants live in a society where western science has been brought together with eastern philosophy and humanism to create a paradise on earth.

Tally lives in a world where your sixteenth birthday brings aesthetic perfection: an operation which erases your flaws, transforming you from an 'Ugly' into a 'Pretty'. She is on the eve of this event, and cannot wait for her life to change. As well as guaranteeing supermodel looks, life as a Pretty seems to revolve around having a good time.

Presented in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and three different interlocutors, Republic is an enquiry into the notion of a perfect community and the ideal individual within it. This work addresses the purpose of education and the role of both women and men as 'guardians' of the people.

First published in 1979, Marge Piercy's novel is both a drama of survival and a Utopian epic. Connie Ramos, 37, Mexican-American and unfairly incarcerated in a mental hospital, is the enduring central character in a book about differing visions of the future.

Describes an imaginary visit to a topsy-turvy country called Erewhon, where it is a punishable offence to be physically ill, but where criminality and immorality are looked kindly upon as treatable diseases. The English church is pilloried in the system of Musical Banks, whose currency nobody believes in but everyone pretends to value.

Following a plane crash, Conway, a British consul, his deputy, a missionary and an American financer find themselves in the enigmatic snow-capped mountains of uncharted Tibet. Here they discover a seemingly perfect hidden community where they are welcomed.

A new edition of William Morris's classic text of British socialism.

Gorgeous. Popular. Perfect. Perfectly wrong.

Mr Jones of Manor Farm is so lazy that one day he forgets to feed his livestock. The ensuing rebellion under the leadership of the pigs Napoleon and Wellington leads to the animals taking over the farm. Vowing to eliminate the terrible inequities of the farmyard. But as time passes, the ideals of the rebellion are corrupted, then forgotten.

Investigates the development of the Utopian form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of Utopian thinking in a post-Communist age. This book also explores the relationship between utopia and science fiction through the representations of otherness and a study of the works of Philip Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson and others.

Mars - the red planet - is a barren landscape of mankind's dreams of space. This book follows the colonization of the planet, as a cratered wasteland is turned into a human habitation.

The time is early in the 23rd century. Mars has been terraformed and is now politically independent. Meanwhile on Earth, there is terminal overpopulation, reduced resources and the bitter nationalism that these problems create. The concluding volume in the Mars trilogy.