Imperfect Ideal: Utopian and Dystopian Visions

by Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas More, Wisława Szymborska

The selections in Imperfect Ideal: Utopian and Dystopian Visions illustrate the best and worst of what can happen when we attempt to mold the complex communities in which we live into our vision of a perfect state. All 23 selections in this anthology challenge readers to question how society should be structured and governed, as well as what kinds of communities are most conducive to human fulfillment, both privately and in the civic arena.

Table of Contents
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Ursula K. Le Guin

Utopia*
Thomas More

Utopia
Wislawa Szymborska

Iliad*
Homer

The Shield of Achilles
W. H. Auden

A Paradise Built in Hell*
Rebecca Solnit

Time
Riichi Yokomitsu

On the Cannibals
Michel de Montaigne

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Fyodor Dostoevsky

Mencius*
Mencius

The Politics*
Aristotle

A Framework for Utopia
Robert Nozick

The City of God*
Augustine

The Jewish State*
Theodor Herzl

A New View of Society*
Robert Owen

The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Oscar Wilde

The Economic Basics of the Withering Away of the State
Vladimir Lenin

We
Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Machine Stops
E. M. Forster

Black Box
Jennifer Egan

Jon
George Saunders

Time Capsule Found on a Dead Planet
Margaret Atwood

Silent Spring*
Rachel Carson

*Indicates a selection from a longer work.

Genres: Short Stories

396 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 9, 2015

About the author

Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.

She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.