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The Huge Entity: Forum - Utopias Я' Us
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      CommentAuthorDanieru
    • CommentTimeApr 12th 2006 edited
     permalink
    My recent post on the ideal city has got me a thinkin' about utopia, and more specifically, what I would perceive as utopia. The subject has come up more than a few times on here already...

  1. What are your favourite fictional utopias / dystopias?
  2. How would you conceive a utopia?
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      CommentAuthoridoru345
    • CommentTimeApr 12th 2006
     permalink

    Wired News




    Star Trek is probably my favorite Utopian dream.



    The Trekian fantasy is not often thought of as Utopian because, in spite of the sublime technics, there are still the kinds of problems we're familiar with: war and the threat of war, illness, the possibility of violent death, etc. Even so, at its core, Star Trek provides a vision of what might be called a social and psychological utopia: one in which conflicts between human beings have moved to a new stage of development – that is, while there's still conflict, it's never based upon factors such as differences in skin tone or hair texture or nationality (a vague concept in the Trek universe) or region or language.

    Conflict comes from hubris or madness or, typically, an essentially constructive desire warped by circumstances into a twisted form of its original shape.
    Commonly, people focus on the dream technologies and non-human (yet, still English speaking) space-faring species as the easily referenced evidence of Trek's un-realness. For me, the smoothing out of nearly every human wrinkle has always stood out as the pop sci/fi saga's most incredible element.
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      CommentAuthorDanieru
    • CommentTimeApr 13th 2006 edited
     permalink
    I definitely have a bit of a thing for the Star Trek universe.

    I reckon Roddenbury's genius stroke was in stripping down the attributes of the human and overlaying them on distinct alien races. In this way every race became its own stereotype, an absolutely superb vehicle for story telling. Here are the obvious races I picked up on:

    Vulcans - logic, rationality
    Romulans - selfish-centered, meglomaniacal
    Klingons - primal, wild
    Ferengi - greed, competitiveness

    and many more besides...

    Interesting too how the Romulans came from planet Romulus and the Vulcans from planet Remus - I love allegory, especially double, triple, quadruple ones like this - oh how the Roman Empire did fall!
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      CommentAuthormike2050
    • CommentTimeApr 30th 2006
     permalink

    My favorite fictional utopias (or if "utopia" is perhaps too strong a term, let's call them "really really great places to live") would be:

  • Diaspar (the city) and Lys (the pastoral ex-urbs) from Arthur C. Clarke's novel The City and the Stars

  • The Culture from the sci-fi novels of Iain M. Banks

  • The Golden Oecumene from Robert C. Wright's sci-fi trilogy The Golden Age

  • Regards,

    Mike

    •  
      CommentAuthoralexanderj
    • CommentTimeMay 24th 2006
     permalink
    Well did anyone say Atlantis? Thats a nice utopian place...
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