Islandia (novel)

Islandia is a classic novel of utopian fiction by Austin Tappan Wright, a University of California, Berkeley Law School Professor. Written as a hobby over a long period, the manuscript was edited posthumously and reduced by about a third by author/editor Mark Saxton with the advice and consent of Wright's wife and daughter, and was published first in hardcover format by the company Farrar & Rinehart in 1942, eleven years after the author's 1931 death.

Islandia is a fully realized imaginary country, though more akin to a utopia than a standard fantasy.

The original Islandia was conceived by Wright when he was a boy. Creating its civilization became his lifelong leisure occupation. The complete Islandia papers include "a detailed history ... complete with geography, genealogy, representations from its literature, language and culture". The complete and never published version of Islandia can be found in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. A 61-page Introduction to Islandia by Basil Davenport was published along with the original novel in 1942.

The protagonist and narrator of the novel is an American named John Lang, who graduates from Harvard University in 1905. The setting is Islandia, an imaginary country set in the real world of that time. This remote nation "at the tip of the Karain semi-continent" is near "the unexplored wastes of Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere". The citizens have imposed "the Hundred Law, limiting access to Islandia to a bare one hundred visitors at a time". Wright may have had in mind both the self-imposed isolation of Siam, starting in 1688, and that of Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate.