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[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

[regularpapi.livejournal.com]

If it were me, I don't think I'd do dystopias--on the theory that a class on utopia will inevitably involve dystopia anyway (as in "ew, who'd want to live in that sanitized evironment anyway--seems more like dystopia"). Runs the risk of losing focus, since there are zillions of bad imagined worlds. My friend Marshall used to say that all imagtined futures were either the dirty future (ie, blade runner) or the clean future (ie, Logans Run). I guess you could say that the clean future tends to be about the relatioonship between utopia and dystopia. I'd imagine that there's be hundreds of books that deal with the relationship between the two modes. One might be the cloning novel Never Let Me Go, which begins with a kind of utopian innocence in what seems to be a boarding school and then turns into a sci-fi future dystopian larger world.

People teach whole classes on renaissance utopias--More, Bacon's New Atlantis, etc. All that new world fantasia stuff. The Tempest.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I was imagining that we'd spend a lot of time critiquing utopias and heading into dystopia, much as you say. And I have to decide whether I can shed my historians' cloak (which would drive me to read Plato and More and the others) or just teach a modern literature class.

Which would be a fun thing for a medieval historian to do.