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I've been reading Hermann Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game for some time now. Hesse was a German novelist best known for his novels Steppenwolf and Siddhartha (the latter being a retelling of the life of Buddha), but TGBG was written during World War II as an examination of a potential utopian society that could be raised out of the rubble of the twentieth-century wars.

At first glance the novel doesn't seem to fit in a science fiction genre, but several aspects argue that it does. For one thing, it is set in the future—not the distant future, but still a few centuries ahead. It also examines the role a utopian society (named Castalia) might take in respect to the rest of the world around it. Most importantly, though, it spends a great deal of time looking at the separation of the world of the intellect from the rest of society; specifically, it shows how the separation of the academic world from the everyday world plays out.

In the future, a "college education" is reserved for the intellectual elite, who form an aristocratic and monastic community that has great influence on the world at large. The sciences as we think of them are demoted in favor of abstract learning: it is more important to learn about the ideas and history of science than to actually practice the sciences. One of the tensions of the novel is whether or not it is proper to become intertwined with political and social affairs, or if it is better for the intellectual to remain aloof. There is also some interplay between the world religions and this intellectual community, not dissimilar to what Walter Miller does in A Canticle for Leibowitz, although the relationship between Castalia and Buddhism is better than it is with Catholicism.

Hesse was apparently looking for a hopeful future while living in Switzerland in 1943, and he came up with a utopia that might have been as doomed as the Third Reich, if not as malicious. The novel was his magnum opus and his last. I guess you can afford to quit once you've received the Nobel Prize in Literature.