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Herland: A Classic Utopia f rom a Woman’s Point of View
THOMAS LOMBARDO CENTER FOR FUTURE CONSCIOUSNESS At this year’s World Futures Studies Federation Conference in Mexico City (September 10 to 13, 2019), I gave a presentation introducing my new book
at the conference was women perspectives on futures studies, describing Gilman’s novel is a very good way to bring together science fiction,
series Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future.1 As I explained in my talk, through its personally engaging and imaginative narratives on the future (as well as alternate realities), science fiction is a very effective, emotionally powerful way of enhancing holistic future consciousness, impacting all the psychological dimensions of the human mind (See my book Future Consciousness, 2017, for an in-depth description of holistic future consciousness. 2)
utopian thinking, and women’s views on the future. Also, given the renewed recent interest in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)3, a thoughtful and riveting, yet bleak dystopia told from a woman’s point of view, it would be valuable to examine Gilman’s equally thoughtful and engaging novel to get a positive, uplifting woman’s vision of a preferable human society.
In my new book series I chronicle the historical development of science fiction. One of the topics covered in volume two is early twentieth century utopias and dystopias. A key utopian novel examined is Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). In light of the fact that an important area of emphasis addressed 1 Thus far, volume one has been published: Lombardo, T. (2018) Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future Vol. I Prometheus to the Martians, Winchester, UK: Changemakers Books. 2 Lombardo, T. (2017) Future Consciousness: The Path to Purposeful Evolution, Winchester, UK: Changemakers Books.
18 HUMAN FUTURES
Herland, in fact, is as much a broad critique of Western society, both traditional and modern, as it is an ideal vision of a better world. The novel provides a distinctive and convincing set of arguments for a preferable human society based upon an analysis of fundamental flaws in our present human reality that need to be eradicated. The main proposals in Herland for an improved human society concern ethical, psychological, and social-cultural changes, rather than simply 3 A popular TV series, loosely based on the novel, has been running for the last three years and The Testaments (2019), a sequel to the novel, was published this last year.
