Literary Dystopias and Green Utopias

Here’s a quickie…some recent articles/blogs/projects that have caught my eye.

LITERARY DYSTOPIAS

I’ve come across two articles on Dystopian visions of the future this morning that both refer to a bunch of dystopian literature. Since I have not read or heard of most of them I thought you might be interested also.

First, io9 features an article in their Liberal Dystopias segment called “Best Future Dystopias Where the Liberals Have Won.” The opening line describes the raison d’etre of the piece:

“The Republican Party is gathering in St. Paul, to put forth its vision of the future. And over the next few days, you'll be hearing a lot about the horrendous futures that could take shape if gormless liberals were allowed to run the show. Which makes us wonder: what does science fiction, the literature of the future, have to say about liberal-run dystopias?”

via i09

Second, I’m a little slow to this one (its all the way back from January 2008, light years in blogtime), but Adam Greenfield did an interesting piece on dystopian science fiction literature of the 1970’s in his blog Speedbird. Called “Along the Dystopia Line 1: I am your Density” it mainly discusses how SF writers in that period viewed high density urbanization as a pretty disastrous outcome for the human race. I like how he exposes SF’s fears of multiculturalism and cities in general in his description. I wonder if that is still a common trope for SF writers to use.

GREEN AVENGERS and their UTOPIAS

via crosshatchling

Guerilla Gardening has become a hot topic recently, with all the new books (1 and 2) and everything. Archinect offers a great review of the first book called Turf Wars (and Wars on Turf).

And finally, artist Anna Garforth takes guerilla gardening to the next level with her guerilla graffiti gardening (see pic above). Take that you low-level seedbombers!! This is highly cultivated guerilla gardening (pardon the pun).