Ecotopia
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Imagine a future that works! |
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Authored by Ernest Callenbach in 1975 and set Twenty Minutes Into the Future.
We are in the year 1999. Since 1980, Ecotopia has been isolated, Chinese fashion. Now, finally, an official visitor is admitted. He is Will Weston, crack investigative reporter. Like a modern Gulliver, Will is sometimes horrified, sometimes overwhelmed by strange practices and sensual encounters. He discovers a nation which, in lucky circumstances, has taken charge of its own biological destiny. As Will becomes deeply involved with a sexually forthright Ecotopian woman, ritual war games and a female-dominated "stable-state" government, his confusion of values intensifies and reaches a startling climax. The novel of your future.
Tropes used in Ecotopia include:
- Anti-Air: The missiles the Ecotopians used to take down attacking U.S. helicopters.
- Author Appeal: Female dominated hippie-esque society, Eternal Sexual Freedom, mysticist-erotic rituals.
- Author Tract
- Blood Sport: Of the "ritual war game" variety.
- Cowboy: Working cowboys and cattle drives have made a comeback for beef production in Ecotopia.
- Crazy Survivalist: The ruling party in Ecotopia is actually called the Survivalist Party, although they're based more on back-to-the-land communal hippies (which is what people in The Seventies thought of when they heard the word "survivalist") than the heavily armed Right Wing Militia Fanatics commonly associated with the term today.
- Divided States of America: Ecotopia is formed from all of the West Coast minus Southern California, with its capital at San Francisco.
- Eagle Land: Flavor #2 all the way. There's a reference to an ongoing war in Brazil, and to annual war dead numbering around 5,000.
- Eternal Sexual Freedom
- Green Aesop: The whole damn book.
- Lady Land: The Ecotopian government is dominated by women.
- Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Marissa is this for Will, introducing and converting him to the Ecotopian lifestyle.
- No Endor Holocaust: Northern California supplies most of the water that is used by Southern California. Ecotopia, which includes all of Northern California, no longer exports water or other resources. Draw your own conclusions.
- To say nothing of the vast food resources produced by California's Central Valley...
- Our Elves Are Better / Screw You, Elves: As much as the book is built around its Green Aesop, Will is still not above taking pot shots at the elf-like smugness of Ecotopia's inhabitants.
- The Apartheid Era: It's implied that South Africa is still under an apartheid government, judging by reference to revolutionaries there.
- The Great Politics Mess-Up
- Utopia: Of course.