Not quite as good as Herland, but I do appreciate future-world narratives where life is better rather than worse - though the self-satisfied destruction of big, "useless" animals such as tigers is where Gilman and I differ severely. Valuable primarily on the product-of-its-time level - it's interesting to see an early feminist utopia, but one can't overlook some of the more unsavoury elements (euthanasia of undesirables, for instance).

As in Herland, the breadth of thought given to the elements of the new society is impressive and refreshing - Gilman is always very concerned with educational reform, and the focus on schools is an interesting one. Where it stops being convincing for me is where is stops being convincing for the narrator - isolated from his former society by decades lost in Tibet, he returns to a new world and can't comprehend the relatively small time frame in which this massive social/political/economic change has taken place.

Frankly, I cant fathom it either.

I was leading a book club group, choosing Herland for the main book for discussion, but figured it wouldn't hurt to read the Herland trilogy in order to bring some more themes to the table for the discussion. I read all three in audiobook form, which can be found easily as they are all in the public domain.

The story starts off with a man who got lost in his travels and, 30 years later, is found and brought home by his sister. After 30 years of being away, a lot has changed and the main character simply can't or won't believe it because he was brought up in a very patriarchal society. While this is set up as a story, the rest of it is just his sister or other people telling him about what changed since he got lost. Really, it is Gilman telling us about what could be if we had an equalist society. The end is a little bittersweet, with the main character not able to feel as though he would fit in such a society, but upon meeting family who stuck to their ways since he had been gone, he feels that he can't fit in with them after seeing how much society has progressed for the better.

It is important to note the time in which this was written. Moving the mountain was written in 1911, well before WWI and the passing of the 19th Amendment. There are a lot of racist and ableist undertones, and yes, even sexism against women. While I would never want to enable such viewpoints, I still think much of this book is pretty progressive for its era, and it's interesting to see how radical something like that was back then. Some ideas do pull through, like some socialist matters and religious matters, even suggesting green solutions, but ultimately, I wouldn't consider this a blueprint for a utopian society if it were written today. It's historically interesting, but other than that, it's not much of a story and its ideals are very outdated.

I can't say I would recommend this book unless you are more interested in very early utopian and feminist ideas.

It was not that bad

The beginning looked really, really interesting and I was very excited to continue reading. But somewhere along the way I got somewhat bored with it (V was right!). I'm sure the next book of the trilogy will be more interesting - I certainly hope it will be!

A Fairly typical late 19th century utopian.