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Sunday, April 01, 2007

A Challenge (still nameless), part 2

I've been looking for possibly titles for my challenge, and this is some of what I've found. I've used multiple sources (Amazon, wikipedia, etc) and have not looked most of these up. I post them here to help save time for others:

From Wikipedia's entry on Utopian and Dystopian Fiction:
(links are from Wikipedia, I did not check them)

The word utopia was first used in this context by Thomas More in his Latin work Utopia, which literally means both "no place" and "best place" in Greek. In this work, More sets out a vision of an ideal society.
An earlier example of a Utopian-like work from classical times is Plato's The Republic (Plato), in which he outlines what he sees as the ideal society and its political system.

Other examples include Aldous Huxley's Island, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and B.F. Skinner's Walden Two. Gulliver's Travels may also be seen as a satirical utopia because it is actually a comment on the society the author lived in. The same goes for Erewhon by Samuel Butler - where "Erehwon" is "nowhere" spelled in reverse.

[Dystopias:]
Ursula K. Leguin's Always Coming Home fulfils this model, as does Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. In Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing there is no time-travelling observer, but her ideal society is invaded by a neighbouring power embodying evil repression. In Aldous Huxley's Island, in many ways a counterpoint to his better-known Brave New World, the fusion of the best parts of Buddhist philosophy and Western technology is threatened by the "invasion" of oil companies.

In another literary model, the imagined society journeys between elements of utopia and dystopia over the course of the novel or film. At the beginning of The Giver by Lois Lowry, the world is described as a utopia, but as the book progresses, dystopia takes over.


Then there is a Wikipedia entry on just Dytopia literature (not sure how this merits another entry, but oh wel. This one is just a long list of novels.

Here is an Amazon listmania list on both utopias and dystopias. And another.

Lots to choose from!


5 comments:

  1. See? Androids!! *grin*

    Check out Where Late the Sweet Bird Sang, too. It's one of my all-time favorites.

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  2. i want to do this. it scares me a little, but i still want to.

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  3. Hi Lisa,
    Could you pop over to my blog and get my email address (added to the end of "Pay It Forward" post), and email your postal address to me?
    Thanks,
    j xxx

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  4. Soooo interesting to think about all these books together and in this context. So well done, my friend! Thanks. :)

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  5. I'd like to recommend

    House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

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