Utopian visions in literature are largely outnumbered by their dystopian counterparts. The Brave New World's and the Nineteen Eighty-Four's of the world garner far more attention than the... uh... well...
You see? I can't even think of one off the top of my head. The closest I can come to one is a certain Ursula K. Le Guin number, and that is... well I won't get into spoilers. But read it. It's something special.
The truth is, I can think of a utopian novel off the top of my head, but it is the crux of my post today, and I thought it would take away from it's impact were I to use it in an example above.
But I digress. Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia is an utterly fascinating vision of an entirely sustainable society. Written in 1975, the novel takes place in 1999, exactly 19 years after the Northwestern United States seceded from the rest of the country. That's right baby! Speculative fiction! Boo ya! Anyway, the idea is that Washington, Oregon and Northern California got so fed up with the U.S. government's environmental policies, that they broke off from the union and formed a new country, Ecotopia.
After secession was achieved (thanks to a few nuclear bomb threats to major U.S. cities -- standard speculative fiction stuff) Ecotopia promptly closed off it's borders. The plot follows the first U.S. journalist granted access to the new country as he explores every facet of this strange new society.
Their are some genuinely fascinating sustainable concepts presented by Callenbach, like a mandate against fossil fuel powered cars, and free public bikes on every corner. And while it suffers from some mild generalizations stemming from what I will refer to as the archetypal hippy, the truly engrossing thing about Ecoptopia is the way Callenbach paints Ecotopian society as the result of a drastic ideological shift rather than a material one.
So check it out!
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