Moving the Mountain

John, a man who has spent the last thirty years in Tibet recovering from a head injury and totally unaware of his surroundings, regains consciousness and returns home, only to find that society has rapidly and drastically changed. The world as he knew it has become a feminist utopia, where civil rights, efficiency, and quality are of the utmost importance. The residents do their best to explain all of the societal changes that have happened in the past thirty years to John—who they consider to be a sociological dinosaur—while also pointing out all the flaws in the system they left behind. Food production and nutrition have been completely overhauled, work is nothing but a pleasure for every worker, and poverty is a concept that only exists in textbooks.

Published in 1911, Moving the Mountain is a prime example of Utopian writing, and is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s realization of the principles for societal change she outlined in Women and Economics. Following in the footsteps of H. G. Wells and other early science fiction writers, Perkins outlines a world unique and strange, yet in many ways oddly familiar to the modern reader. It forms the first part of her thematically linked Utopian trilogy.

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