Product Description

Ernest Callenbach's classic novel Ecotopia sparked a movement that is growing rapidly around the world. Ecotopians embrace high technology as a a tool for preserving and living gently within the natural environment of Planet Earth.

Kim Stanley Robinson has gathered here in this volume bright tales of Ecotopian futures, as well as a few cautionary ones. Writers and poets, from Gary Snyder to Ursula K. LeGuin to Ernest Callenbach himself have contributed their visions, along with Pat Murphy, Paul Park, R.A. Lafferty, Rachel Pollack, Garry Kilworth, Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolfe, Howard Waldrop, Carol Emshwiller, Frederick Turner, and Robinson Jeffers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #896807 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.com Review
Kim Stanley Robinson has long been known for his excellent science fiction novels such as Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars. Here he turns his hand toward editing, with a collection of stories by writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, Pat Murphy, and Terry Bisson. These are stories of a future where "wet" technology has replaced "hard": silicon chips have given way to DNA strands, and the industrial high tech has been subsumed by environmental high tech. While all of these fine stories have been printed elsewhere, collected together they comprise a formidable and fascinating look at a future full of ectopias.

From Publishers Weekly
Hugo and Nebula Award winner Robinson has compiled a potent mixture of prose and poetry to depict futures that reject the popular theory of a machine existence, but instead illustrate life in a more primitive state. Some stories take place in a time very close to our own, such as "Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson, where bears learn to build fires and come out of hibernation, discovering that they too can use the basic elements needed for survival. Other fascinating stories exist in a more distant setting and include Gary Kilworth's "Hogfoot and Bird-Hands," the disturbing tale of a lonely woman who, by using a common surgical approach, has pets made from her own body parts. A future in the Cro-Magnon period is explored in Robert Silverberg's "House of Bones," the story of a scientist trapped forever in the past he was sent to study. The most startling in its combination of a technological future with the mysteries of the natural world is "Newton's Sleep" by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which a space colony finds that its "perfect world" has been invaded by the ghosts of earth. Broad in its appeal, this fine collection should please not only science fiction aficionados but also those with interest in philosophy, archeology and environmental ethics.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In the latest of his always superb anthologies, Robinson judiciously assembles the best literary tributes to ecological awareness, thereby demonstrating how far science fiction has evolved beyond its preoccupation with sophisticated machinery. The selections are artfully grouped under five headings, such as Statements of Desire and Denial of the Body, that express man's past and future connection to nature, and they range from poems to chapters from previously published novels. The volume begins with eco-poet Gary Snyder's Tomorrow's Song, an anthem for preservation consciousness, and ends with a hymn to nature's nobility by Robinson Jeffers. Such sf veterans as Gene Wolfe, Ursula LeGuin, and Robert Silverberg contribute absorbing meditations on man's environmental heritage as seen from the far future and the distant past. Several tales, including Pat Murphy's beautifully written In the Abode of Snows, about one man's search for the mythical yeti, have the ring and power of classics. Welcome, consciousness-raising visions for our ecologically imperiled times. Carl Hays

Customer Reviews

Rich, challenging, literary anthology that demands re-reading
At first I was a bit disappointed in this collection, because the earliest stories didn't seem ecotopian, utopian, or even SF in character. After I discovered the editor's endnotes, though, the intention behind the collection and its total vision became apparent, and the inclusion of the early stories made perfect sense.

As Dr. Robinson himself notes, the stories don't tend toward standard utopian themes---namely the planned, perfect, permanent society---but they instead reflect the dirty, earthy, organic, fertile concerns of the ecotopian. The "stories reveal everywhere their writers' belief that the societies they depict are preferable to the boxed existences of modern, urban life" (p. 346) through embodied engagement with the world of physical nature and the re-infusion of meaning into everyday life. "What these stories ask us to reconsider is what is really important in life, and thus new definitions of utopia must be reconsidered as well" (ibid).
"It's not that [these stories] advocate a simple return to nature, or a rejection of technology, which given our current situation would be nothing than another kind of ecological impossibility." Instead, these stories, "reject ther inevitability of a machine future" (p. 11).

Not all of the stories are immediately accessible, and many, if not most, demand re-reading in order to get a full appreciation of both the ideas and the writing in which those ideas are expressed. Most of the stories in the anthology really impressed me, but my favorites (at least right now) would have to be "Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands," "House of Bones," "Chocco," and "Newton's Sleep," all of which explored essential themes about what it means to be human in communion with (or separation from) the world of biological nature.

All in all this is a superb science fiction anthology that belongs on the bookshelves of anyone interested in utopian and ecotopian fiction, about the current state of humanity, and about our possible futures.

sort of excellent
By the far the two best stories in this collection are Terry Bisson's "Bears Discover Fire" and Pat Murphy's powerful and eloquently written "In the Abode of Snows." After that, the other stories didn't seem to stir me quite as much .They were well written yes, but still... The extensive reading list at the end of the book is especially helpful to those interested in the ideas behind the variuos themes in the story. For that and the 2 stories, i gave it the above score.