Recent reading

[luzula]

Andra vägar: tio nya utopier [Other Ways: Ten New Utopias]
Swedish science fiction short story collection, not available in English. I am annoyed at this book because the stories in it are NOT UTOPIAS. Some are even dystopias, IMO. What is going on that people can't even imagine a better world?

That said, the last story of these (by Andrea Lundberg) was brilliant. Wow. It's a documentary-type story with the log of some sort of cult members who travel through northern Sweden trying to get people to "go online" which means to enter communion with aliens. We don't know the motivations of the aliens, and there are lots of other things we don't know, either. But the cult members convince online people to come offline for a while and give testimonials to convince new people. The testimonials are pretty creepy, especially when it becomes clear that they are edited afterwards. Anyway, the story has great sense of place and use of dialect.

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (original in Spanish)
For book-club-at work, my nomination. This is the story of a woman crossing the border between Mexico and the US to fetch her brother home. Opinions were divided on this book; I was the one who liked it best. There's a fairy tale/mythological vibe to it despite the setting being definitely modern, with cars and cell phones and so on. It's like Inanna's descent to the underworld, or maybe more like a gender-switched Orpheus and Eurydice. There were bits that didn't make that much sense to me, but that's probably because I lack the cultural context. And it's weirdly like the idea of the book was sometimes more compelling to me than the book itself? Anyway, definitely worth reading.

Also, happy International Women's Day!

Comments

[oneiriad]

I must admit, I've always found it far harder to imagine utopias than dystopias - dystopias are easy, really. The world sucks and this is how and why. But utopias - they're tricky beasts. And frankly, most of the ones I have read felt like places I really didn't want to live in - but then, any utopia will be a dystopia to some, right?

Anyway, perhaps I need to track down that book.

[rachelmanija]

I guess it depends on how you define a utopia. If you define it as a place where nothing bad can happen, then it's hard to set stories there because you can't have conflict. If you define it as "a world better than our own" or a "a place you'd like to live," then it becomes much easier. For instance, Diane Duane's worlds where an Afterlife where you're reunited with everyone you've ever loved is a thing that literally exists, or Sherwood Smith's Sartor that has a lot of problems but sexual violence or coercion doesn't exist, Or Iain Banks' Culture where poverty and sickness don't exist and death is an option rather than a requirement. Or even Middle Earth, in the sense that I'd love to go there.

[luzula]

It's easy to name things that wouldn't be there in a utopia, anyway. Like, I would say that a utopia wouldn't have people who need to beg on the streets. Or if you live on a space station, it's not a utopia if you get thrown off the station if you get sacked from work. Etc. These are things that the stories in the collection had. Also there's one story about how virtual reality computer games could be used to help traumatized kids in refugee camps. That was an interesting story, but a huge refugee camp with traumatized people is NOT a utopia.

[oneiriad]

I must admit that I haven't read any of those - except Tolkien and I wouldn't describe Middle Earth as particularly utopic.

But it seems to me that you're defining utopia as the better place, and the better place is easy to imagine. No this, no that. Old-school Star Trek was utopic in this sense, an egalitarian society with no poverty, a better place than the real world.

But that's utopic. Utopia is quite literally "the good place". Not just better. Good. And that's an entirely different magnitude. I've read utopias - Moore's, of course. Huxley's Island. Ecotopia. And the thing is? I wouldn't want to live in any of them. Times have changed and the world has moved on and I am most definitely not the person who imagined them in the first place. Utopias has this nasty tendency to turn into dystopias when you weren't looking.

I suppose it makes sense that the second meaning of utopia is "the place that doesn't exist".

[luzula]

I dunno, I've read utopias that I'd live in--Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge, and also the end of his Mars books. I can't decide if I'd want to live on Anarres. *ponders*

I don't think the point of utopias are to say "this is how things should be always and forever" (utopias which are that way would probably not convince me). It's more like a vision, an idea that you throw out, that the reader could use for inspiration, or not.

Both the KSR books I mention focus on the process of being/becoming a good place, not a static structure, and I think that's what makes them utopias I could take seriously.

[luzula]

Check your email. : )

[rachelmanija]

I wish I could read the Lundberg story.

[luzula]

I think some of what resonated with me was the setting--it was science fiction set in places I have lived in northern Sweden, with descriptions that were juxtapositions of familiar and weird. Probably it would not be as good in translation, to someone who couldn't appreciate the use of dialect/setting as much. But it also made really good use of the documentary format.