(no subject)

[lollardfish]

Ok sci-fi fans, what are your favorite science-fiction utopias? I'm thinking about teaching a class on utopias next year, and want to use some reasonably contemporary fiction (as well as Plato, More, Bellamy, Lost Horizon, SimCity, and other stuff).

Comments

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I immediately thought of Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge. It's even more interesting when you consider it in conjunction with The Gold Coast and The Wild Shore. From the Wikipedia entry:

This trilogy is also referred to as the Orange County trilogy, and is the first of Robinson's important works. The component books are titled The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast (1988) and Pacific Edge (1990). It is not a trilogy in the traditional sense; rather than telling a single story, the books present three different future Californias.

The Wild Shore portrays a California struggling to return to civilization after having been crippled, along with the rest of America, by a nuclear war. The Gold Coast portrays an over industrialized California increasingly obsessed with and dependent on technology and torn apart by the struggles between arms manufacturers and terrorists, while Pacific Edge presents a California in which ecologically sane, manageable practices have become the norm and the scars of the past are slowly being healed.

Though they initially appear unconnected, the three books actually work together to present a unified statement. The first shows humanity crippled by a lack of technology, the second humanity swamped and almost completely dehumanized by too much technology (along with the attendant environmental damage) and the third a workable, livable compromise between the two. Although the third is, in effect, a Utopian novel, there is still conflict, sadness, and tragedy. The stories all contain a common character, whose circumstances serve to put the three alternatives in perspective.

I'm also surprised no one has mentioned an older book, Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islandia_(book)) (1942).

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

I would also vote for Pacific Edge; it's one of the few "utopias" that I would actually, wholeheartedly want to live in. (It doesn't hurt that Robinson is one of the best writers working today.)

It is much easier to think of interesting literature about dystopias than about utopias.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah. But I like the idea of pushing students to try and construct an ideal society, and then poking at it.