The term dystopia stems from another word: utopia. The English word utopia comes from the Greek "ou-" meaning "not" and "topos" meaning "place." It translates literally to ‘no place', or nowhere. Thomas More coined the term in 1516 when he published a book that described a perfect fictional island society. He titled the book Utopia to emphasize that he was describing a made-up place that he considered perfect. The perfection that More, and other philosophers who wrote about utopias, imagined was never intended to be real. Philosophers from More to Plato understood that the perfection they wrote about did not exist in reality, it was ‘no place.'
If you think of dystopian literature as holding up a funhouse mirror to society, you can also think of utopian literature as retouching a photo of society. The overly perfected image is less concerned with reality than with showing us an unobtainable perfection.
But, by the 1900s, for the first time in human history, perfection like that seemed possible for society. Technological advances had spurred on the industrial revolution.

License information: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
MPAA: G
Go to source: https://www.commonlit.org/texts/someone-might-be-watching-an-introduction-to-dystopian-fiction