The word 'utopia', invented by More as the name of his fictional island and used as the title of his book, has since entered the English language to describe any imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The antonym 'dystopia' is used for hypothetical places of great suffering or injustice, including systems that present or market themselves as utopian but actually have terrible other sides to them.
Although he may not have directly founded the contemporary notion of what has since become known as Utopian and dystopian fiction, More certainly popularised the idea of imagined parallel realities, and some of the early works that owe a debt to Utopia must include The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella, Description of the Republic of Christianopolis by Johannes Valentinus Andreae, New Atlantis by Francis Bacon and Candide by Voltaire.
Utopian socialism was used to describe the first concepts of socialism, but later Marxist theorists tended to see the ideas as too simplistic and not grounded on realistic principles. The religious message in the work and its uncertain, possibly satiric, tone has also alienated some theorists from the work.
An applied example of More's Utopia can be seen in Vasco de Quiroga's implemented society in Michoacán, Mexico, which was directly inspired by More's work.
During the opening scene in the film A Man for All Seasons, Utopia is mentioned in a conversation. The alleged amorality of England's priests is compared to that of the more highly principled behaviour of the fictional priests in More's Utopia when a character observes wryly that "every second person born in England is fathered by a priest."
In 2006, the artist Rory Macbeth inscribed all 40,000 words on the side of an old electricity factory in Norwich, England.[21]
The fantastic voyage genre owes to Lucian's A True Story; in his lifetime More was better known as a translator of Lucian's satires, with Erasmus, than for Utopia.[22]
