As a rule, utopian novels have little appeal as fiction. Most of them are vehicles for purely intellectual messages, ideal patterns for the remaking of the world. Often these patterns are socialist, but even when they’re not, the demand that human life conform to an abstract pattern gives them the sterility of a centrally planned economy. And since the author’s goal is usually to create a world free of conflict, most utopias have no room for drama.

On all of these counts, Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia, originally published in 1942 and now available again, is a happy exception. Its characters are real people with passions and troubles; its setting is no empty stage for abstract serial ideals, but a country with its own history in a landscape with its own terrain, climates and lifeforms. Islandia is one of the few utopias it would actually be tempting to visit. The novel has appealed to many science fiction and fantasy writers, perhaps partly because the setting itself is a major character, in the same fashion as in those genres.

Is it a libertarian novel? Not exactly, but not exactly not. lslandia is anticapitalist; the country's laws prohibit nearly all foreign trade. But its anticapitalism grows out of libertarian and individualist impulses; for Wright’s advocates of commerce call for a more powerful government and curtailment of individualism to make trade more efficient, in the style of the Progressive movement or of the Federalists. And some Islandians find this tempting; Wright’s utopians are capable of conflict and even of wanting to be like the world outside their utopia. These conflicts are a source of the drama that so many utopias lack.