As with so many Utopian stories, this combines high ideals with wonderful if improbable consequences of following those ideals. And, in some ways, this story contains remarkable prescience.
It foretells a world without men and wholly better for that omission, a fantasy that I'm sure many women have held at least briefly. But, where at least one other manless Utopia (Herland) sustained itself with miraculous parthenogenesis, Lane's women reproduce by means of Science. OK, she's a bit vague on the details, but today's bioscience gives the idea a believable sound. Lane also counts on Science to sustain youthful good health far into what we consider old age, and to keep the women's cities clean and healthful. Electric vehicles replace draft animals in this world, eliminating the unsightly and unsanitary waste that inevitably follow them. Our own pollution problems are just as bad even if different in kind, and we're only now catching up to her foresight. And, in using mechanism to replace human drudgery, Lane even proposes the robot floor-cleaner - easily recognized as today's Roomba and floor-washing Scooba. Because Lane looked to technology to solve social problems, her society equips itself well with technologists. This dreamworld features universal education; the society's highest esteem and reward go to its most skilled educators.
Credibility falters at about this point, as Lane describes how this society reshapes the people within it. They are, of course, innately moral. The only prison remains as a monument to the bad old days, unused for at least a century. (It's last inhabitant was held for the crime of striking her child!) Outward beauty necessarily follows inner, so these citizens uniformly embody beauty, the blonde and blue-eyed kind, grace, musical sense, and athleticism unconstrained by the crippling corsetry of Lane's day. As these people vanquished their darker urges, darkness of skin and hair vanished in consequence - a merger of morality and racism that today's reader finds bizarre and repugnant.
Lane's lyrical praise for Mizora's beautiful populace gets to be a bit much at times, but the story fascinates even so. And, despite its sentimentality, it leaves the reader wondering - could these ideas truly change our world for the better?
-- wiredweird
