"Walden Two" was criticized in John Staddon's "The New Behaviorism". Skinner thought "Walden Two" an accomplishment comparable to two science-fiction classics: Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1931) and George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949). He assigned all three in his Nat Sci 114 introductory psychology course at Harvard. There is some irony in Skinner's choice, because Orwell's and Huxley's novels are both dystopias. They portray not the supposed benefits of a technological approach to human society, but the evil consequences of either coercive ("Nineteen Eighty-Four") or stealthy ("Brave New World") efforts to control or gentle human beings. On the contrary, "Walden Two" is supposed to light the technological path to utopia.