ABSTRACT

Modern Utopia is placed in a spatially removed co-present, and the world of Men Like Gods is only three thousand years older than ours. Bulwer-Lytton’s supermen are only one kind among many in modern utopian stories. Occasionally the utopian present may then be seen as suspended between the real present and a far future which can only be perceived as through a haze. In most of the well-known utopias the adventures in utopia are the frame for one or more historical accounts, but the time journey, the rapid historical account, becomes the frame for a varying number of adventures in utopias on different time levels. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men is probably the only fully developed evolutionary utopia, and it is by far the most ambitious and sustained attempt to create an ‘evolutionary bible’. The Coming Race is an evolutionary utopia, but antiprogressive in spirit.