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A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (England, 1905)    
In a not-too-distant future, the whole world is part of one commonwealth, and national boundaries no longer have any significance. Money, personal property and competition remain, although the Earth’s land its sources of power belong to the state. Beyond a minimum requirement of labour, individuals are free to either work more or to enjoy their leisure. The ruling Samurai caste furnish the World State with its administrators, legislators, lawyers, doctors, and other leaders. The lower classes of citizens (the dull-witted, the criminals and the deformed) are exiled from society and prevented from childbearing.

In the Days of the Comet by H. G. Wells (England, 1906)    
The life of young London socialist William Leadford is transformed as a comet smashes into a mean, capitalist world and a new inspired and caring society is constructed from its ruins. Private ownership of land, nationalism and religion are just bad memories of an earlier, unenlightened time, and free love and equality is the new mantra.

Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov (Russia, 1908)    
Subtitled “The First Bolshevik Utopia”, this novel, written in pre-revolutionary Russia and set on Mars, makes some prophetic predictions about future scientific and social developments. Ii is a socialist utopia, where males and females have complete equality and, over the years, have even come to look like one another. Workers have complete control over their working hours, and tools are displayed in art galleries as aesthetic achievements in themselves.

The Iron Heel by Jack London (USA, 1908)    
The Iron Heel of the title is an oligarchy which rules London’s fictional future USA, where political power rests with a small elite. The capitalists resort to fascism to protect the wealthy, and violently quell the downtrodden workers who revolt (ineffectively) from time to time. We learn from footnotes, that it is only after three centuries of oligarchic tyranny and struggle that a socialist democracy is finally ushered in.

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (USA, 1915)    
This is a feminist utopia (written at the peak of the fight for equal rights) about an isolated society composed solely of Aryan woman who reproduce by asexual parthenogenesis. It is a clean, peaceful, prosperous land and in every way superior to the male-dominated status quo elsewhere. The book posits the idea that gender is a purely social construct. With Her In Ourland was her 1916 sequel.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Russia, 1921)    
The protagonist, D-503, lives in the One State, an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, where everything is organized according to mathematical principles under the iron rule of the Great Benefactor. Individuality is ruthlessly suppressed, and D-503 is pushed to the brink of madness by the conflicts between himself and his society when he falls for the rebellious I-330. Eventually this results in his arrest and the ‘Great Operation’ to remove his imagination so that he can once more fit into societal norms. A disturbing precursor to, and influence on, Orwell’s 1984.

Men Like Gods by H. G. Wells (England, 1923)    
A group of Englishmen are transported to a parallel world called Utopia with advanced science and an effective socialist world government. There is no private property, no need for clothes, and people are taller, stronger more beautiful and more intelligent. However, as native pathogens were wiped out over the centuries, the Utopians’ immune systems have become weak, and the newly arrived earthlings represent a deadly threat to them.

The Millennium by Upton Sinclair (USA, 1924)    
Subtitled “A Comedy of the Year 2000”, and based on his much earlier 1907 play, this is Sinclair’s proposition of communism as the solution to all our societal woes. In a millennial world at the peak of its capitalistic excess, an accident kills all but a handful people in the world. After attempts to build a new capitalistic society fail miserably, a sub-group successfully build a utopian communistic society known as the Co-operative Commonwealth.

The Castle by Franz Kafka (Austro-Hungary, 1926)    
More of an allegory or parable than a utopia or dystopia, the novel, like Kafka’s The Trial, nevertheless has many dystopian characteristics. The narrator, K., arrives in a village ruled and dominated by the local castle, and has to come to terms with the unusual customs of the village and the bewildering bureaucracy of the castle.

Metropolis by Thea von Harbou (Germany, 1926)    
This is the novelization of von Harbaus’s screenplay from the Fritz Lang silent movie. It is set in a futuristic urban dystopia where the downtrodden working classes are human fodder for the huge machines which provide the idyllic lives of the elite management classes.

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (England, 1930)    
An early “future history” of humanity, envisioning the human race as it develops from the present time to a race of super-beings two billion year hence. Eighteen distinct human species are described over that time span, some descending into savagery, some leaping forward in sophistication so as to be totally unrecognizable as human.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (England, 1932)    
This is a stark, dystopic warning against the perils of unchecked technology and government control. In the distant future, the conditions of life are superficially idyllic, except that the universal happiness is mainly a product of elaborate sports and entertainment programs and a happiness pill called ‘soma’. Controlled genetics ensures that sufficient dull-witted drones are produced to perform the less agreeable manual jobs, as well as in-vitro conditioning of individuals for specific tasks and personality types. The amusements and the encouragement of promiscuous sex is a deliberate ploy by the government to stop people from thinking about their real conditions and their loss of individuality. In Brave New World Revisited (1958), Huxley reviews whether the real world has moved towards or away from his 1930’s vision of the future.

The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells (England, 1933)    
Not so much a novel as a fictional history of the future, Wells imagines a world war followed by a cataclysmic plague that all but destroys civilization. A benevolent “Dictatorship of the Air” succeeds, which promotes science, establishes Basic English as the world language and eliminates religion. A century later, even this utopian world state is overthrown in true Marxian fashion.

Lost Horizon by James Hilton (England, 1933)    
A British diplomat finds peace in the utopian lamasery of Shangri-La, high in the mountains of Tibet. The monks there practice a combination of Christianity and Buddhism, where peace and moderation in all things are paramount.

Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin (England, 1937)    
Originally published under the pseudonym Murray Constantine over a decade before George Orwell's 1984, this chilling dystopia is set seven hundred years after Nazism achieved power, at which time Hitler is worshipped as a god, and the world has been divided into the Nazi Empire (Europe and Africa) and the equally militaristic Japanese Empire (Asia, Australia and the Americas). It portrays a totally male-controlled fascist world in which women are kept as dehumanized breeders, and all history, education, creativity, books and art have been abolished.

Anthem by Ayn Rand (USA, 1938)    
In this dystopian science fiction novella, socialism and collectivism have all but eliminated individuality and technological advancement is severely curtailed. The word “I” is forbidden and all but unknown. The protagonist, Equality-7521, is an intelligent person forced by the system to work as a street-sweeper. He re-discovers electricity and the light-bulb through his secret, illicit scientific experiments, only to be branded as a criminal and forced to escape to the wilderness.

Kallocain by Karin Boye (Sweden, 1940)    
Pre-dating 1984 by several years, this dystopia envisages a callous and cruel totalitarian world state (reflections of the Soviet and pre-Nazi regimes of the time), and speculates on the effects of a new pacifying truth drug.

Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright (USA, 1942)    
When John Lang becomes the US consul to the remote and mysterious island of Islandia, he is gradually converted to their way of life and encourages their increasing isolation from the rest of the world. Islandia is an Arcadian, rural society where Western technology has been largely (but not completely) rejected, but where the understanding of human emotions and psychology has become much more important.

The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse (Germany, 1943)    
Set in a fictional province of a future central Europe, the scholars of Castilia are ascetic intellectuals for whom the abstract Glass Bead Game is the ultimate aspiration. The central character, though, comes to doubt whether people have the right to withdraw from life’s big problems in this way and, having finally concluded that they do not, he dies uselessly because his intellectual training has not equipped him to deal with real life.