(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

[morganlf.livejournal.com]

I've taught LeGuin's The Dispossessed before and it went over well.

[neogrammarian.livejournal.com]

I am told that Nalo Hopkinson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalo_Hopkinson) has some cool sci-fi utopias out there, and she's a postcolonial writer, so there's some cool cross-cultural angles there as well.

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Cool. Will you be teaching the dystopia, too?

I do a dystopia assignment with my AP Language class. Here's the assignment sheet: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg384q3w_56f7fr2c&pli=1

Race & Immigration

[neogrammarian.livejournal.com]

oh, yeah, then you def want to look at Hopkinson. As I understand it, her utopias are set w/in dystopias- and given her position as a product of colonialism, these dys/utopias are highly politicized.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Beta Colony. Jackson's Whole for the dystopia.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

LeGuin?

B

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Oh, you could also send them to one or more of the websites that asks them to learn what their actual political stances are, beyond the limited left/right spectrum. I've done this before in teaching utopia/dystopia (specifically Handmaid's Tale. I sent them there, got them to define what would constitutes "utopia" for them based on what they discover about their political tendencies and how they compare to historical ideologies (they got into groups with like-minded individuals and sketched out a rough outline of what their "country" was like). Then I gave each a random problem that their country would have to deal with, like the assassination of their leader, the breakdown of their infrastructure, a geo/environmental disaster, etc. We discussed whether their utopic vision would survive the problem, deal with it, and why/how.

Here are the sites:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/
http://www.moral-politics.com/xpolitics.aspx?menu=Home

Since you asked

[maverick-weirdo.livejournal.com]

Adiamante by L.E. Modesitt
I liked this one, in some ways it is a "realistic" utopia

for some interesting, but unrealistic utopian ideas:
The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith (a libertarian utopia)
The Truth Machine by James L. Halperin (The invention of a "infallible lie detector" leads to utopia through the surrender of privacy)

I happened to discover these two books in the same month. An interesting contrast of extremes.

it's a wonderful world

[rvrjoe775.livejournal.com]

You already mentioned Bellamy, one of my personal favorites. I also quite enjoyed Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. For some film levity, you might consider Brazil by Terry Gilliam.

Don't overlook Orwell, natch.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Not exactly Utopias, but definitely somewhat-idealized worlds:

Diane Duane's Doors books (The Door Into Fire, The Door Into Shadow, The Door Into Sunset). This is Utopia-under-attack, and the plot is about how the heros beat back said attacks. Warning: strong sexual themes, including homosexuality* and rape; nothing really graphic, but not glossed over either.

The Neandertal world in Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids trilogy. Again, not a perfect Utopia, and one of the problems with it is clearly delineated in the third book, but the notion of the Alibi Archives might be a good one for discussion. Warning: one major plot hook is the rape of the female protagonist, and the (IMO very realistic) descriptions of her PTSD-type reactions to it; also, the Neandertal society is organized around universal bisexuality.

* Actually, homosexuality and heterosexuality per se don't really exist in Duane's universe; you love who you love, and no labels are attached to it. This is part of the reason I see it as a Utopia, but people who can't accept that worldview are going to have a problem with it.

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Stranger in a Strange Land deals with the ultimate immigrant -- Valentine is from another planet -- who sets up his own utopia (which mirrors Heinlein's own utopic vision) within the society he adopts.

[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).

[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.

[bellebonnesage.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it would count, but Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age includes many many co-existing societies, each set up to allow what their members think is important.

[valancymay.livejournal.com]

Gate to Women's Country, Sheri S. Tepper.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

Sincerely meant utopias, or the "this is not as good as you think it is" utopias?

The Dispossessed is possibly the best of the bunch already mentioned, and LeGuin doesn't hide the fact that her utopian society has difficulties.

Wicked's society is becoming more and more oppressive, and the WWoftheW starts out with good intentions that go horribly wrong.

Not mentioned yet: "With Folded Hands" and The Humanoids, both by Jack Williamson. "With Folded Hands" is sufficient for finding the utopian-but-oops flavor that Williamson presents. Read the book only if you liked the short story.

Ian Banks has a series of books that contain, among other things, artificial intelligences that run a society known as The Culture, which appears to be genuinely utopian. Not all societies are part of The Culture though, so there are conflicts. Fair warning, I find Banks reliably loses my interest midway through a book, and I have to force myself to get past that to finish the book.