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See also Y2K Books and materials
by Jean Heglund
Two teenage sisters try to survive on dwindling supplies in their
isolated rural home as the world comes apart in the distance.
This isn't about Y2K, but it might as well be. Profound lessons
about what it means to be a human being -- by ourselves, with
each other and in the world.
by Ursula LeGuin (Harper & Row 1985, Bantam 1987)
You get to read an anthropologist's notes regarding a sane rural
society in what was once Northern California, hundreds of years
after the toxic fall of industrial civilization. You feel like
you've lived there for ages. A thoughtful reflection on the proper
role of technologies.
by Ursula LeGuin (Harper Paperbacks)
Is there such a thing as an anarchist society? In this brilliant
work of social science fiction, LeGuin imagines one possibility,
notes its contradictions, teases the reader with hints of other
possibilities, then flings the door wide open.
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Pantheon, 1979)
Three American male explorers stumble onto an all-female society
that has a lot to teach them about the nature of civilization.
by Ernest Callenbach (Banyan, 1975)
Washington, Oregon and Northern California secede from the US
to become a truly ecological society. The classic Ecotopia
has unfortunately overshadowed the far better-written prequel
Ecotopia Emerging, which describes in considerable detail
how Ecotopia "came" into being.
by Marge Piercy (Knopf [then Fawcett Crest], 1976)
Another thought (and feeling) provoking feminist utopia, which
challenges us to think about what is required to protect what
we love, and what it means to be human.
by Starhawk (Bantam 1993)
In the not very distant future, a diverse, ecological, nonviolent
San Francisco Bay Area is attacked by a militarist Southern Californian
culture -- and survives -- painfully, but flourishing.
by Paul Fleischman (Joanna Cotler, 1997)
This one takes place nowadays, in a vacant lot in inner city Cleveland.
Through the eyes of a dozen diverse residents we watch a garden
bloom, as if by accident. The sort of activities that make the
communities we want.
by Daniel Quinn (Bantam/Turner, 1993)
This conversation between a man and a gorilla reveals the fundamental
flaws in industrial culture and points the way towards a new sensibility
about our place in the world.
by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's antidote to his Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. This
utopia uses Buddhism and Hinduism to address the necessary suffering
of life, and science to address the suffering that is unnecessary.