The Books Briefing: What Tech Titans Don’t Understand About Sci-Fi
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. When I read Thomas More’s Utopia in college, the main thing I retained was that the inhabitants of More’s imaginary island worked just six hours a day and earned what we might now call a universal basic income. But the fact that I came away from this 16th-century classic with only visions of a shorter workday and a generous allowance says more about my undergraduate habits than it does about More’s ideas or intentions. Looking back recently, I remembered that his civilization wasn’t exactly the campus commune of my dreams. Its citizens held slaves, some of whom were shackled for committing adultery. The punishment for premarital sex, meanwhile, was permanent celibacy; the whole place sounded like a punitive surveillance state. I’d somehow missed all of this initially. Still, as Gal Beckerman noted this week in an Atlantic essay about Silicon Valley’s misreadings of science fiction, I wasn’t the first person to make this …
