#utopian book

[hvacinth]

books i've read in 2024: Titan by Mado Nozaki

You don’t have to keep working if you don’t want to… You have the right to choose how you live your life.

[melodead]

once upon a time, a child from nowhere dreamt a strange, enchanted forest of centuries ago. the soft grass, ever the slightest damp with morning dew, tickled little ankles. the watery dawn tipped over the horizon, spilling through the gaps in the foliage. a small hand rose to the air. scraped yet still soft, it closed around nothing. light fell through those fingers into memory.

in this long-forgot forest, the child met a boy spun from moonlight and dawn. twilight’s scion. they are but children, yet the child knows this in that young, blundering heart: this has happened before, histories ago. it will happen again, long after this star-blessed meeting. it is a reunion across worlds and a chance encounter and an inevitability stitched into fate’s eternal loom. it is a waking prophecy.

you wake to a dream again.

the reverie, untouched by the eternity between your childhood and now, wraps around you like an embrace. the pale, gilded dawn spills across your skin—warm and cold, barely even there—and drenches you in its impossibility. your fingers sink into the soil beneath your knees. you peer up into the rosy sky, hoping to find an answer.

(you find a kindness you have never been able to afford in your life, and you are certain: this is a dream, and it is wrong.)

rustling rapidly approaches. you look just in time to see him emerge from between the hazy arbor.

even in sleep, silver is loved by the world. the wind combs through his hair lightly. flora seems to turn to him as he passes by, unwilling to look away from this vision. it is through this that you know this dream loves him. you’re almost envious of how loved he is—but you can’t be, because, if not this false reality, the fondness that rests in your chest is not a lie.

his hand reaches out. silver bends to meet you as you rise from the ground, falling into your orbit as though he were made to do so. he thinks it true sometimes: that somewhere, in some way, he was meant to meet you. an ancient piece of his soul belongs to you, has belonged to you for longer than this lifetime, and as he gazes at you, dawn-kissed and ephemeral and real, he knows his fate is sealed.

brilliant. clever. brave. silver knows what you’ve realized it before you even speak, the truth of this crafted reality. he knows you’ve realized the same of him. the clarity of your eyes tell it all.

“we need to wake up,” you whisper as your fingers cradle his face. he leans into your touch, presses a kiss into your palm, and hopes it won’t fade with waking. he knows, he knows, he knows—

“will you find me, silver?”

he would follow you to the end of the earth if you wished it. “anywhere.”

you—brilliant, brave, clever you—will find your way out of this if he cannot. you always do. but even if the long-forgot forest may disappear from his conscious, these feelings will linger. it is the only thing he can count on for himself.

(he hopes you won’t be alone.)

his hand curls around yours, and you wake.

[thanatika]

so, one thing i've noticed about the writing of pathologic 3 is that they're using a lot more real world proper nouns, which is interesting. the first game avoided this, which is why the game is set on the backdrop of The Town, The Capital, The Inquisition, The War. they don't explicitly establish the town as being in the russian steppe, or call the capital st. petersburg or moscow, or refer to the inquisition as the okhrana or cheka or kgb, or explicitly name the great war or the russian civil war. i don't think the first games ever even confirmed that the setting is in russia, though it pretty obviously is.

i think the lack of proper nouns was a better approach that fit the allegorical, fairytale tone of the story way better. that said, if it were going to feature in any of the character's routes, it should be the bachelor's, since he's more connected to the outside world. and the historical references do allow us to make more inferences about the setting of the world, which is fun. like, the mention of okhrana agents (along with other mentions of "empire" throughout the demo), cements that the game takes place during the rule of tsarist russia (or at least a proxy for it), which i always suspected but was previously left ambiguous. the Okhrana was the secret police force of the russian empire. as for what okhrana agents do...

that last tidbit feels extremely reminiscent of how the inquisition is described, with a very small number of inquisitors. from yulia in P2: "An organization of geniuses. I believe the Inquisitorial Corps is nineteen strong. Or was it eighteen…? No, nineteen, unless Orff resigned."

though in the game's case, the small number of inquisitors is framed more as attributable to the extremely high, "genius" standard required of an inquisitor, rather than underfunding. i'm not sure if we're supposed to read the okhrana as actually existing in the world of P3 separately from the inquisition, or perhaps if the inspector from the demo is meant to be an agent of theirs, but it's interesting.

[hidelifetime]

Hellloo!!

I’m going to book-shopping later, recommend some books I read almost everything and willing to try new genres,

Help a girl out 🎀🌐

Edited: Thank you all so much!! I look forward to find some of those books!! And I’m Adding everything to my tbr 🥰

[rachel-sylvan-author]

"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

Thank you @book.lady.life for the rec! ❤️

[carlossreaders]

Nice ask attack! 💛 If you were given a huge monetary advantage to write a novel with no time limit and unlimited resources to do it, what would it be about?

oh wow, this is a really good one! hmmm, maybe a utopian? a novel about the world we live in today, and the world that we could have lived in. you know, if things had gone just a tad 🤏🤏 bit differently. thank you for sending!! 💗

[sea-changed]

Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions (1948)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

@moms4liberty is what happens when a customer complaint makes a wish upon a burning cross to become a political movement and starts wanting to speak with all the managers.

[The Daily Don]

* * * *

"Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise - the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence.

Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer."  

- Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

[thanks to whiskey river]

[yellow-yarrow]

The cosmism research is still ongoing, btw I think it would be kinda funny if elysium lore was based on cosmism but without the space element lol. Its like if you had christianity without a god. Oh wait right..

[abookisafriend]

the fifth sacred thing, by starhawk: four and a half out of five honeybees

i've been looking forward to this book for a long time. it's a classic of utopian literature…and dystopian literature. can a pacifist society survive contact with a militarized society…and keep its soul intact?

the first third or so of the book establishes the community around which the book is based. an egalitarian commune has grown out of the rubble of post-apocalyptic san francisco, and they face all the challenges of life plus the dread of what could happen when the replacement for the old u.s. government comes knocking to "claim" its old territory. that government is an amalgam of corporate rule, military domination, and pseudoreligious oppression that controls every aspect of life, down to the water.

the book was written in 1993, and -- except for the frequent mentions of the ozone layer, which we were actually able to fix, it seems prescient. early reviewers called the mixture of fascism and pseudochristianity an "overused SF bugbear" (thanks wikipedia), but it's exactly what we're facing today. the question of whether we can survive peacefully -- whether we can transform the virulent enemy culture before it kills us or makes us monsters ourselves -- is the central question of the novel.

the portrayal of fascist rule is brutal. nothing is held back. this is not a novel for people who have ptsd flashbacks.

at the same time, the portrayal of mundo bueno -- the good world -- is so lavish and loving that it's worth reading the first third of the book just to see starhawk's vision of what is possible. witness the streets with clean fishing streams running beside them, the avenues lined with sweet fruit trees and verdant gardens. witness the love and freedom possible with a community of lovers. that's a major aspect of the book: it's an advertisement for the future. the future we can win if we set down divisions and power struggles of "race," gender, and class…a shamelessly queer and polyamorous future, i might add, and a future in which all ancestries and cultures are celebrated in a kind of joyful melange anchored in respect for the four sacred things, which cannot be owned or stolen -- earth, air, water, and fire -- and the most subtle of all, the fifth sacred thing, spirit.

it's a novel full of magic and miracles, but the thesis of the novel doesn't depend on anything supernatural: it just depends on the question of whether humanity can be awakened even in those in whom it has been deliberately crushed to make them subservient tools of a killing machine. what it really comes down to is the conscience of the universal soldier.

i'm going to end the review with this video, in the spirit of starhawk's call to compassion. what if they gave a war and, finally, nobody came? all told, a fantastic effort; a classic: five out of five honeybees

[untitledgoosegay]

The author has a YouTube channel where he posts watercolor tutorials!

it’s a tragedy that dinotopia was adapted as a weird gritty looking tv movie with bad cgi when it’s, without exaggeration, the most ghibli any book has ever been

[bdfarrands]

Free eBook!

The Open Conspiracy, H. G. Wells

In The Open Conspiracy (1928), visionary author H. G. Wells presents a radical blueprint for reshaping human civilization. Part manifesto, part philosophical treatise, the book proposes that a loosely organized global movement—comprised of scientists, educators, and forward-thinking citizens—can rise above nationalism, capitalism, and religious dogma to establish a rational, cooperative world order. With startling prescience, Wells imagines a future shaped not by revolutions or governments, but by a deliberate, open conspiracy of enlightened minds working for humanity’s common good.

A provocative and ambitious call to action, The Open Conspiracy remains a fascinating glimpse into early 20th-century utopian thought—and a strikingly relevant reflection on today’s global challenges.

[tallysgreatestfan]

I love finally getting to interact on screen. The moral posturing, the cognitive dissonance, the appeal to Dr. Cables humanity that totally backfires...

[crudely-drawn-ben]

Listening to a publishing podcast talking about the things that they're looking for in literature - people needing books with hope, cozy mysteries and fantasy novels, and utopian visions. It's exciting because that's what I wrote! The Redstone Rescue is a hopeful utopian fantasy detective story, it's not cozy in a low-stakes way, things do get real for our characters, but it is deliberately light and fun and readable. I'd love that means that more people will read it, but the problem with self publishing is that a hojillion books come out every day and the truth is it is _very_ hard to stand out. Still, it's good to know I'm creating art people need, even if I have no way to ensure they find it.

[daisies-on-a-cup]

you can really tell that this book was written by a white woman