[citation needed] An earlier example of a Utopian work from classical antiquity is Plato's Republic, in which he outlines what he sees as the ideal society and its political system.
[6] A dystopia is a society characterized by a focus on that which is contrary to the author's ethos, such as mass poverty, public mistrust and suspicion, a police state or oppression.
Dystopian literature serves to "provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable".
[9] George Orwell was influenced by We when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949), a novel about Oceania, a state at perpetual war, its population controlled through propaganda.
[11] Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange is set in a future England that has a subculture of extreme youth violence, and details the protagonist's experiences with the state intent on changing his character at their whim.
[citation needed] The history of dystopian literature can be traced back to the reaction to the French Revolution of 1789 and the prospect that mob rule would produce dictatorship.
[13][14] M Keith Booker states that "The Machine Stops," We and Brave New World are "the great defining texts of the genre of dystopian fiction, both in [the] vividness of their engagement with real-world social and political issues and in the scope of their critique of the societies on which they focus.
[citation needed] Modern dystopian fiction draws not only on topics such as totalitarian governments and anarchism, but also pollution, global warming, climate change, health, the economy and technology.
Typically, an observer from our world will journey to another place or time and see one society the author considers ideal and another representing the worst possible outcome.
In Aldous Huxley's Island, in many ways a counterpoint to his better-known Brave New World, the fusion of the best parts of Buddhist philosophy and Western technology is threatened by the "invasion" of oil companies.
[citation needed] Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is also sometimes linked with both utopian and dystopian literatures, because it shares the general preoccupation with ideas of good and bad societies.
Danny Bloom coined the term "cli-fi" in 2006,[citation needed] with a Twitter boost from Margaret Atwood in 2011, to cover climate change-related fiction,[20] but the theme has existed for decades.
The novel Nature's End by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka (1986) posits a future in which overpopulation, pollution, climate change, and resulting superstorms, have led to a popular mass-suicide political movement.
In contrast, Doris Lessing's The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980) suggests that men's and women's values are inherent to the sexes and cannot be changed, making a compromise between them essential.
In My Own Utopia (1961) by Elisabeth Mann Borgese, gender exists but is dependent upon age rather than sex — genderless children mature into women, some of whom eventually become men.
[23] Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time keeps human biology, but removes pregnancy and childbirth from the gender equation by resorting to assisted reproductive technology while allowing both women and men the nurturing experience of breastfeeding.
[citation needed] Utopic single-gender worlds or single-sex societies have long been one of the primary ways to explore implications of gender and gender-differences.
In speculative fiction, female-only worlds have been imagined to come about by the action of disease that wipes out men, along with the development of a technological or mystical method that allows female parthenogenetic reproduction.
Many influential feminist utopias of this sort were written in the 1970s;[24][25][26] the most often studied examples include Joanna Russ's The Female Man and Suzy McKee Charnas's The Holdfast Chronicles.
[25] Charlene Ball writes in Women's Studies Encyclopedia that use of speculative fiction to explore gender roles has been more common in the United States than in Europe and elsewhere.