It Was the Best of Times...Utopias Quiz

Answer: Sir Thomas More

On the island of Utopia there are no private goods--everyone uses what he or she needs. Everyone works six hours a day, there are no locks on any doors, and people trade houses every few years. Sounds good, right?

Of course, everyone also has two slaves. Great deal, if you're not a slave.

Answer: Republic

Some of the other suggestions Plato makes are: children are raised by committee, and no one knows their children or their parents for sure. Eugenics are desirable, culling out the weak. Literature that doesn't improve character is banned. Fun place, this Republic.

Answer: Lost Horizon

American president Franklin Roosevelt named the Presidential retreat 'Shangri-La' in 1942, but it was re-named 'Camp David' in 1953. Hilton's book was filmed by Frank Capra in 1937 and starred Ronald Colman and Jane Wyatt, and Sam Jaffe as the High Lama.

Answer: Tiber

The fourth river in Eden is the Euphrates. When Adam and Eve ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were expelled by God and an angel with a fiery sword was set to guard the Garden so that they might never return.

The Tiber is a river in Italy.

Answer: Horses

The Houynhnms are intelligent horses, and the Yahoos are the base, disgusting humans the horses enslave. Gulliver comes to love the land of the Houynhnms, and when he is eventually exiled (he is seen as a danger to the Utopian peace of the land), he is horrified to end up back in his own world, shuns human contact (the men are too much like Yahoos for Gulliver's taste) and spends an inordinate amount of time in the stables.

Answer: Ecotopia

Ecotopia (the country) is made up of Oregon, Washington and northern California. Recycling is commonplace, eating local foods is encouraged, most transportation is public and civic growth is slow, measured and planned. "Ecotopia" was self-published by Callenbach, but it quickly found an audience and, by the time of its third printing, Bantam had picked it up.

Answer: St. Augustine

St. Augustine of Hippo is a seminal figure in Western Christianity. With "City of God", "Confessions" and "On Christian Doctrine", he became of the Church's great earlier theologians and thinkers. Historian Thomas Cahill called him "the first medieval man and the last classical man".

Answer: Walden

Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, is now a state reservation, but it narrowly dodged other fates; there was an amusement park on its shores for a time, and Middlesex County at one point wanted to develop the land in the reservation and put in a parking lot. But the courts stepped in and barred commercial development, so now Walden Pond looks much the same as it did when Thoreau was living and writing there.

Some of Thoreau's most famous writing (and some of Transcendentalism's best ideas) come in "Walden; or, Life in the Woods". He wrote that he began his experiment in order to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Answer: Erewhon

'Erewhon' is 'No Where' spelled backwards, kind of (the 'w' and the 'h' have been transposed). The name has appealed to many people since then--it's appeared as the name of a prison in the 1997 movie "Face/Off", it's been bestowed upon planets, spaceships and space stations in science fiction novels, and there's a Camp Arowhon in Ontario, Canada.

Answer: Only women live there

"Herland", as you might suspect by the name, is a Utopian society of only women (they reproduce by parthenogenesis). As in so many Utopian novels, this one tells the story of three outsiders (men, in this case) who stumble upon the paradise, are at first skeptical, but end up being converted by their new society.

In Herland everyone is a vegetarian, no one is poor, and there are no cigarette butts in the streets. A very fun book.