(I, too, splashed in these murky dystopic waters, with my near-future NYC novel Shovel Ready, which came out on the very same day as another dystopian novel, Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee.) Given the dominance of dystopias, it’s possible to forget that Utopia (coined back in 1516 as the title of the book by Sir Thomas More) came first, and dystopia (coined mid-20th century) was essentially its johnny-come-lately spinoff, the Laverne & Shirley to Utopia’s Happy Days. It seems redundant to even assemble a short list of recent examples: YA blockbusters like The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner reboots of dystopian classics like Robocop and Mad Max and new dystopic novels, from Dave Eggers’s The Circle to Edan Lepucki’s California to Margaret Atwood’s trilogy-capping MaddAddam. Everyone’s got dystopia on the brain these days. Dystopia - now that’s a whole other matter. It should be interesting to see what vision of Utopia this haphazard crew comes up with, especially given that they may well be the only people in the world anymore sincerely imagining what Utopia might look like. But from the available trailers and teasers, the show might better be called “Survivor for Polyamorous Libertarians,” or perhaps “Big Brother, If You Had to Also Actually Build the Big Brother House Yourselves.” the 24/7 webcams) going live online on August 29. The show debuts September 9, with the “experiment” (i.e. Specifically, Utopia, a show in which, among others, a patriot, a pastor, an ex-con, a hillbilly, a raw vegan, a glass blower, and a guy from Salt Lake City are thrust together in the wild to build a perfect society from scratch. You can learn a lot about a society by the Utopia it envisions, and right now our Utopia is a reality show on Fox.
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