By Charles Kanjama
My favourite modern thinker, G.K. Chesterton, once noted, “When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.” This means stifling restraints. Utopian literature tries to avoid the small laws by exploring the human state of blissful existence, and thus ideal society. Utopian literature takes its name from Thomas Moore’s Utopia, and includes Plato’s The Republic, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and HG Wells’s Men like Gods.