Utopias are one of the earliest, most straightforward forms of speculative fiction. Beginning with Thomas More’s 1516 faux travelogue about the strange, egalitarian land of Utopia that gave the concept its name, telling stories whose chief aim is to describe what an ideal world might look like became an enduring art form. Yet critics don’t usually place the genesis of science fiction until the Industrial Revolution — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often cited as the starting pistol of the genre.
Which, fair enough — utopias usually took the form of a travelogue; a visitor to a new fantastic and ostensibly perfected place would record and relay his adventures to readers back home. But Francis Bacon’s _New Atlantis, _published in 1626,was different. It featured plenty of what we’d recognize as major elements of modern science fiction; detailed technological speculation, a wide embrace of science as the key ingredient to a better future, and so on. In fact, it’s regarded as the first scientific utopia — the first major articulation of the idea that technology and science might eventually perfect our lives if only innovation were allowed to flourish and to take center stage.
This has proved time and again to be a deeply problematic notion, of course — but it’s an unquestionably influential one. It might just be one of the most influential ideas of the last few centuries. Given that, and the fact that _New Atlantis _was recently reissued in a handsome edition, along with selections from Bacon’s also-interesting Sylva Sylvarum by Repeater Press, it’s an ideal time to take stock of this curious work’s impact. So, I reached out to Robert Barry, the writer who offers a lengthy introduction and contextualization for the new volume, to dig into this forgotten but influential utopia.
OneZero: New Atlantis can lay a claim to being the first “scientific” utopia — a detailing of a society where the promise of technology and science will be unlocked to usher in more perfect lives for all of its citizens. Why is the book still resonant now?
**Robert Barry: **It’s kind of an interesting time to think about Francis Bacon and what he represented. He’s such a man of his time, in many ways — the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the end of the Tudor era and beginning of the Jacobean, after Henry VIII but before the civil war, the time of Shakespeare, Descartes, and Galileo. The beginning of modern science, but also of modern bureaucracy. In other ways, Bacon feels oddly contemporary. He was, after all, essentially a spin doctor. A courtly advisor and speechwriter, who was often much better at gaining power for other people than himself. And what writer Evgeny Morozov refers to as “technological solutionism,” this idea that for every problem, there is an app for that, some quick tech fix to brush away all of society’s ills (viz, Elon Musk’s Twitter feed) basically starts with Bacon and finds its most imaginative expression in New Atlantis.
But while Bacon’s project involved bringing together what had previously been two quite separate things — knowledge of the world and its remaking, that is science and technology or philosophy and practical magic; today we can see, in the kind of stuff that James Bridle outlines in the New Dark Age (like shopping algorithms that turn racist, flash crashes on the stock market, airplanes derailed by clear air turbulence caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the air), that science and technology are starting to slip apart again, as high speed and highly recursive computing systems drive technological systems to develop and expand in a way that is too fast and too complex for our understanding of them to keep up.
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