Reviews and Comments

For a book that decries Trump’s construction of false memory in its final chapters, how ironic that it opens with the Trumpian (this is a paraphrase) “nobody ever talks about the Diggers, the Paris Commune, or Haight-Ashbury, but they were real, and they were fantastic.” Still, amid the Freudian/Marxian contextualization, we do have a good exploration of these things—just without any framework of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, the 1450 Cade’s Rebellion, the world of 1848, the anarchist movement, or the Black and Feminist civil rights movements. Still, good case studies.

Finally a good, deep examination of Butler’s Lilith’s Brood

Everything here is about scale, breadth, entwinement, scope, and interdependence. Even utopia must reckon with the cosmos. A utopia must not be exclusive and totalizing—or else it turns dystopic—while the inclusion of non-utopia in the utopian mindset undercuts as well as defines the utopian mindset. In that same way, luckily, the utopian mindset is harbored, sheltered, and fostered within even the most dystopian society. And even within a society that grinds down the individual do we find individuals who resist and rise.

Long—with frequent ad-hominem attacks.

This really made me think about utopias more than any other book I’ve read so far. I still maintain, with Kumar, a separation between utopia (present, future) and golden ages (past) as a result of utopia being speculative and possible, while the past is necessarily beyond change, which Levitas doesn’t follow. But she’s in good company—Kumar alone seems to hold this distinction.

This is the praise I give Levitas: she made me think harder than many, many other theorists. Her form/function/substance delineation in defining “utopia” is sharp, and her analytic method is even sharper.

Wow this book is big

This book definitely has the anti-ideology of Bester's The Stars My Destination, complete with unlikeable loser of a main character, but also with the far-out, drugged-up, hardscrabble technicolor of Delany's spacescapes, especially dock towns. Certainly I see the influence of this novel on Iain M. Banks's Culture series, not merely for the flash of the writing style (vocabulary, scenes, and dialogue) and the gotta-get-there drive of the plot, but also for the way the narrative plays with our expectations, subverting and confounding the reader.

The novel equivalent of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, with almost a little Jung or Commedia Dell’Arte for good measure. The 70s were grimy and druggy, yes, but also filled with archetypes.

The novel counterpart to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Very easy to see why this won the Nebula. Really good look at linguistics (not TOO hampered by Sapir-Whorf or limited understanding of computer languages), with inventive ideas and plot—only really hampered by the pat ending.

Although I’ve read it before, my appreciation has been amplified after reading Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman: perfect communication REQUIRES telepathy, and telepathy enables communication to be perfected. Interesting that so much in the 60s-70s really focuses on telepathy, but the novum gets dropped so abruptly in the 80s.

Mitchison deeply explores the idea of galactic exploration on a scientific and ethical level through the perceptions of her narrator Mary. The novum here is not mere space travel, but “communication,” which is psychic/empathic contact rather than simple transmission or speaking, including with dogs and cows. This makes sense from a biological standpoint: the communication of bees and ants, let alone dogs and cows, is communication regardless of whether a person wants to attach the “language” label on it. As such, she can describe a deeper level of alien otherness than most authors sixty years later.