> > >> >Are there any characters in a utopia who drink beer, play pool, and are
> > >> >rude to the neighbours now-and-again?
> > >>
>
> Well, not pool, but wrestling and softball; beer, yes; and yes to the
> neighbours too. You'll find them all in Kim Stanley Robinson's _Pacific
> Edge_ (1990), the best literary utopia (IMHO!) since Delany's Triton...
>
> Edward James
[Sorry about rather tardy contribution to this discuss, but have been
on holiday...]
Damn! I was about to make the exact same reference, even down
to the
wrestling and softball (but what with being British and all, the favoured
sport of my Robinson-style utopia would have to be football, the version
without the shoulder pads). Thanks to Edward James also for posting the
review of the Mars trilogy - since I haven't even got around to reading
the rest of the Orange County trilogy, and the Mars stuff seems equally
interesting, I can see I have a lot of catching up to do.
I'm hoping to do some work on 'Pacific Edge' in terms of how well it
works as a green utopia - the main parallels here would be with
Callenbach's _Ecotopia_ and Piercy's _Woman on the Edge of Time_ - and I'm
particularly interested in the debates between a social ecology and 'deep'
ecology that seem to run implicitly through the novel (the latter
ambiguously winning out as Kevin saves his precious piece of cliff).
Anybody have any ideas?
Insofar as it counting as a *feminist* utopia goes - well, I dunno...
Since I'm just gearing up for a rereading, and it's a while since I looked
at it, my comments may be a little offbeam, but I'm wondering whether this
quiet representation of women as simply, unquestionably "equal" (whatever
that means) 'counts' as feminist? It seems to me that there are issues
about
sex, gender, sexuality and culture simmering in the novel that the
'solutions' of
communitarian living and unproblematic equal opps don't address. Whose
version of equality are we talking about here, and whose terms is it on?
We still negotiate this utopia via our messy hero Kevin, whose boyish
vulnerability (set alongside the steeliness of his political and love
rival whose name I forget) seems to play on fairly standard cultural
assumptions and expectations?
Anybody else have any thoughts?
Lisa Garforth
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:34 PDT