Arias-Maldonado defines utopia simply as:

“the desire for a better way of living.”

Interestingly, the word itself comes from the Greek ou (no) and topia (place), literally translating to “no place.” While we usually think of utopia as a “good place,” its linguistic roots remind us that it is, by definition, an impossibility. However, I don't believe that because utopias are, by definition, impossible, it means utopian visions are unhelpful.

Because depictions of utopia are typically set apart from our current reality, they establish a clear distance between the reader and the present. Even though the idea of a fully realizable utopia is less commonly held today, the human draw toward the utopian impulse remains strong.To understand this drive, Frédéric Basso and Dario Krpan (London School of Economics, 2022) studied the “transformative utopian impulse” in the context of planetary health. They developed the TUIPHS (Transformative Utopian Impulse for Planetary Health Scale), which helps measure the extent to which individuals are inclined to support systemic social change. Their work suggests that the utopian impulse is not only abstract or literary, but also has measurable effects on how people imagine and engage with collective futures. Ultimately, this desire to improve our situation is what ties the concept of utopia back to hope. If hope is understood as the “possibility space” we discussed earlier, then the utopian impulse can be understood as the energy that drives us to try to fill that space with a better way of living.

Beyond academic definitions, utopia is also deeply shaped by cultural narratives and media representations that structure how “better worlds” are imagined. In Western mythmaking, for example, utopia often takes the form of national origin stories and ideological promises. The United States has long been framed through utopian language such as the “city upon a hill,” or as the “land of the free,” positioning it as a model society that embodies freedom, progress, and moral exceptionalism. These narratives function as aspirational utopias, but they also obscure contradictions between the ideal and the lived realities of inequality, dispossession, and environmental harm.

Science fiction literature of the 20th century further complicates and expands these utopian imaginaries by staging them in speculative futures and alternative worlds. Rather than presenting stable visions of perfection, many influential works reveal utopia as fragile, constructed, or dependent on forms of exclusion and control. For example, The Giver by Lois Lowry presents a society that appears peaceful and harmonious on the surface, but only because emotion, memory, and suffering have been systematically removed. In this case, “utopia” is maintained through the suppression of difference and the elimination of authentic feeling, raising questions about whether happiness without freedom or memory can be meaningfully considered happiness at all. Similarly, 1984 by George Orwell depicts a political system that enforces total ideological control, where truth is manipulated and individual thought is eradicated. While often read as a dystopian warning, it also engages indirectly with utopian logic: the attempt to create a perfectly ordered society results in the total domination of the individual.

Taken together, these texts suggest that utopian visions in the 20th century often collapse into their opposites, either through emotional sterilization or authoritarian control. Rather than offering achievable ideals, they expose the risks embedded in the desire to eliminate conflict, uncertainty, or imperfection. In this sense, science fiction does not reject utopian thinking altogether, but instead reveals its tensions, showing how efforts to construct “perfect” societies can unintentionally produce systems of constraint. This reinforces the idea that utopia is not only an abstract philosophical idea but also a narrative structure through which societies imagine progress, critique the present, and rehearse possible futures. It is precisely this tension that keeps the utopian impulse active, linking it back to hope as a driving force for imagining and pursuing alternative ways of living.