I very much enjoyed reading the various thoughtful comments on yesterday’s post, and following the links to learn more. There seems to be a consensus that utopia itself cannot sustain a dramatic narrative. It can sustain a polemic (as in Bacon’s New Atlantis), but only because a polemic does not require drama.<\/p>\n
So if you’re going to create something with dramatic weight, you either need to threaten the utopia (as, for example, Pandora is threatened), or you need to create a society which believes itself to be utopian, but which the reader sees as dystopian, because its core values are alien to our own. A good example of this might be Star Trek’s The Borg<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Alas, dystopian societies are so much easier for dramatists. They practically write themselves! I find myself reminded of something my friend Luke DuBois told me on the morning of this last November 9: “This is going to be great for art.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I very much enjoyed reading the various thoughtful comments on yesterday’s post, and following the links to learn more. There seems to be a consensus that utopia itself cannot sustain a dramatic narrative. It can sustain a polemic (as in Bacon’s New Atlantis), but only because a polemic does not require drama. So if you’re … Continue reading “The utopia solution”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18888"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18890,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18888\/revisions\/18890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}