Re: Utopia/Dystopia

From: Heather MacLean (hmaclean@KENT.EDU)
Date: Thu Apr 17 1997 - 07:26:00 PDT


At 10:20 AM 4/17/97 -0400, Joel VanLaven wrote:

> The question is how to classify a thought-experiment like Tepper's
>_Gate_to_Women's_Country_ or David Brin's _Glory_Season_ that presents a
>utopian world and critiques it without putting it in the realm of a
>dystopia? After all, I would think that _Handmaid's_Tale_ might be a
>feminist dystopia, but neither of the above comes even close to being
>similar to that book.
>

To me, utopias and dystopias are only *types* of writing, not genres in and
of themselves, and they are types that represent certain extreme limits of
the spectrum of sf. As described above, the 2 mentioned works are "simply"
sf... ("simply," because we all know how hard it is to define the beast).

Simplistically yours,
Heather ;)

hmaclean@kent.edu
http://kent.edu/~hmaclean/



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