Utopianism for a Dying Planet

Utopianism for a Dying Planet PDF Author: Gregory Claeys
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691236690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
How the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.

Utopianism for a Dying Planet

Utopianism for a Dying Planet PDF Author: Gregory Claeys
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691236690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608

Get Book

Book Description
How the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.

Dying Planet

Dying Planet PDF Author: Robert Markley
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387271
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
For more than a century, Mars has been at the center of debates about humanity’s place in the cosmos. Focusing on perceptions of the red planet in scientific works and science fiction, Dying Planet analyzes the ways Mars has served as a screen onto which humankind has projected both its hopes for the future and its fears of ecological devastation on Earth. Robert Markley draws on planetary astronomy, the history and cultural study of science, science fiction, literary and cultural criticism, ecology, and astrobiology to offer a cross-disciplinary investigation of the cultural and scientific dynamics that have kept Mars on front pages since the 1800s. Markley interweaves chapters on science and science fiction, enabling him to illuminate each arena and to explore the ways their concerns overlap and influence one another. He tracks all the major scientific developments, from observations through primitive telescopes in the seventeenth century to data returned by the rovers that landed on Mars in 2004. Markley describes how major science fiction writers—H. G. Wells, Kim Stanley Robinson, Philip K. Dick, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Judith Merril—responded to new theories and new controversies. He also considers representations of Mars in film, on the radio, and in the popular press. In its comprehensive study of both science and science fiction, Dying Planet reveals how changing conceptions of Mars have had crucial consequences for understanding ecology on Earth.

A Dying Planet Short Stories

A Dying Planet Short Stories PDF Author:
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1839643110
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Resources running low, the population exploding, the planet is in danger: are we masters of our own destruction, or have we been invaded by aliens bent on mass extinction? Is this a pattern across the entire universe, or just our small sector of cosmic life? This new title in our successful Gothic Fantasy Short Stories series explores the theme of a dying planet, written by a fabulous mix of classic, ancient and brand new writing, with contemporary authors from all over the world. For the first time we’ve made a conscious effort to reach beyond our usual submissions seeking a broader voices. This book offers a glorious mix of American, British, Canadian, Italian, Indian, Spanish and Chinese writers with contributions from Elizabeth Rubio, John B. Rosenman, Francesco Verso, Marian Womack, Zach Shephard, E.E. King, Raymond Little, Ken Liu, Shikhandin, Alex Shvartsman and many more. In these pages too, first-time contributions jostle with the work of Camille Flammarion, Clark Ashton Smith, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Jack London, William Hope Hodgson, H.G. Wells and, stretching back much further, to the Norse Eddas and Sagas, and an Ancient Egyptian Myth on the death of humankind.

Utopia

Utopia PDF Author: Thomas More
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.

Greentopia: Utopian Thought in the Anthropocene

Greentopia: Utopian Thought in the Anthropocene PDF Author: Angela Kallhoff
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031568028
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description


The Postworld In-Between Utopia and Dystopia

The Postworld In-Between Utopia and Dystopia PDF Author: Katarzyna Ostalska
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000509966
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This collection of essays offers global perspectives on feminist utopia and dystopia in speculative literature, film, and art, working from a range of intersectional approaches to examine key works and genres in both their specific cultural context and a wider, global, epistemological, critical background. The international, diverse contributions, including a Foreword by Gregory Claeys, draw upon posthumanism, speculative realism, speculative feminism, object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and post-Anthropocene studies to propose alternative perspectives on gender, environment, as well as alternate futures and pasts rendered in fiction. Instead of binary divisions into utopia vs dystopia, the collection explores genres transcending this dichotomy, scrutinising the oeuvre of both established and emerging writers, directors, and critics. This is a rich and unique collection suitable for scholars and students studying feminist literature, media cultural studies, and women’s and gender studies.

Utopias for a Dying World

Utopias for a Dying World PDF Author: Amy Stapleton
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
The ecosystems upon which human life depends for its existence are rapidly collapsing. This book confronts that frightening realization and explores the philosophical basis for a new ecological awareness (in German the Bewusstseinswandel) which could prevent modern technological civilization from destroying itself and the world. Contemporary works of German science fiction, from both the West and the former GDR, are examined for their ability to help initiate this lifesaving new perspective."

Dystopia

Dystopia PDF Author: Gregory Claeys
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191088617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
Dystopia: A Natural History is the first monograph devoted to the concept of dystopia. Taking the term to encompass both a literary tradition of satirical works, mostly on totalitarianism, as well as real despotisms and societies in a state of disastrous collapse, this volume redefines the central concepts and the chronology of the genre and offers a paradigm-shifting understanding of the subject. Part One assesses the theory and prehistory of 'dystopia'. By contrast to utopia, conceived as promoting an ideal of friendship defined as 'enhanced sociability', dystopia is defined by estrangement, fear, and the proliferation of 'enemy' categories. A 'natural history' of dystopia thus concentrates upon the centrality of the passion or emotion of fear and hatred in modern despotisms. The work of Le Bon, Freud, and others is used to show how dystopian groups use such emotions. Utopia and dystopia are portrayed not as opposites, but as extremes on a spectrum of sociability, defined by a heightened form of group identity. The prehistory of the process whereby 'enemies' are demonised is explored from early conceptions of monstrosity through Christian conceptions of the devil and witchcraft, and the persecution of heresy. Part Two surveys the major dystopian moments in twentieth century despotisms, focussing in particular upon Nazi Germany, Stalinism, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. The concentration here is upon the political religion hypothesis as a key explanation for the chief excesses of communism in particular. Part Three examines literary dystopias. It commences well before the usual starting-point in the secondary literature, in anti-Jacobin writings of the 1790s. Two chapters address the main twentieth-century texts usually studied as representative of the genre, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The remainder of the section examines the evolution of the genre in the second half of the twentieth century down to the present.

Utopia; Or, The History of an Extinct Planet

Utopia; Or, The History of an Extinct Planet PDF Author: Alfred Denton Cridge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Utopias
Languages : en
Pages : 42

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Book Description


Macrolife

Macrolife PDF Author: George Zebrowski
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497634172
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Subtitled “A Mobile Utopia,” this pioneering novel about the meaning of space habitats for human history, presents spacefaring as no work did in its time, and since. A utopian novel like no other, presenting a dynamic utopian civilization that transcends the failures of our history. Epic in scope, Macrolife opens in the year 2021. The Bulero family owns one of Earth’s richest corporations. As the Buleros gather for a reunion at the family mansion, an industrial accident plunges the corporation into a crisis, which eventually brings the world around them to the brink of disaster. Vilified, the Buleros flee to a space colony where young Richard Bulero gradually realizes that the only hope for humanity lies in macrolife—mobile, self-reproducing space habitats. A millennium later, these mobile communities have left our sunspace and multiplied. Conflicts with natural planets arise. John Bulero, a cloned descendant of the twenty-first century Bulero clan, falls in love with a woman from a natural world and experiences the harshness of her way of life. He rediscovers his roots when his mobile returns to the solar system, and a tense confrontation of three civilizations takes place. One hundred billion years later, macrolife, now as numerous as the stars, faces the impending death of nature. Regaining his individuality by falling away from a highly evolved macrolife, a strangely changed John Bulero struggles to see beyond a collapse of the universe into a giant black hole. Inspired by the possibilities of space settlements, projections of biology and cosmology, and basic human longings, Macrolife is a visionary speculation on the long-term future of human and natural history. Filled with haunting images and memorable characters, this is a vivid and brilliant work.