The First Scientific Utopia Still Matters 400 Years Later

‘New Atlantis’, Francis Bacon’s pioneering work of proto-science fiction, has just been reissued. Here’s why it still matters.

Brian Merchant
OneZero
Published in
9 min readSep 1, 2020

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Image: zf L/Getty Images

Utopias are one of the earliest, most straightforward forms of speculative fiction. Beginning with Thomas More’s 1516 faux travelogue about the strange…

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Brian Merchant
OneZero

Senior editor, OneZero, books, futures, fiction. Author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, founder of Terraform @ Motherboard @ VICE.