W. H. Hudson 3 hr 13 min read

A man tumbles into a far-future world of gentle, flower-tending humans, and finds paradise strangely cold.

W. H. Hudson's 1887 romance strands its narrator in a pastoral utopia organized around a serene matriarchal household, where the fevers of the old world, money, ambition, passion, have simply been bred away. Hudson frames it as a wistful inquiry into what we'd actually want from a better world, and whether we'd recognize contentment if we found it. A quiet, strange, influential utopia that puzzled and moved its Victorian readers. Read it for a dreamlike vision of the future that questions the very idea of an ideal society.

In its time

Published in 1887, during the 1880s, lost races and dying earths.

Reading it

3 hr 13 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).