Henry Olerich (1851–1927) was an American schoolteacher, farmer, and self-published author from Iowa, best known as a writer of utopian and speculative fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in 1851 in Ohio to German immigrant parents, he later settled in Iowa, where he worked as a teacher and farmer. His best-known work is A Cityless and Countryless World: An Outline of Practical Co-operative Individualism (1893), a utopian novel notable for its early depiction of a technologically advanced, egalitarian society on Mars whose inhabitants visit Earth. The book blends cooperative economic theory with speculative fiction and is often cited by historians of early science fiction and utopian literature. He self-published most of his work through small Midwestern presses, reflecting the do-it-yourself, ideologically driven publishing common among American utopian writers of the era, and his novel is frequently compared with Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. His writing combined an interest in agrarian reform, cooperative economics, and social engineering with imaginative extraterrestrial settings — an unusual hybrid for the period. He remains a minor but recurring reference in scholarship on nineteenth-century American utopian and proto-science-fiction literature, largely on the strength of the Mars-set cooperative society in his 1893 novel.
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