Story: 5 / 10
Characters: 6
Setting: 10
Prose: 7.5 ( )

Ich habe ein Buch bei BookCrossing.com registriert!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13651585

Kaum zu glauben, dass das Buch schon über 40 Jahre alt, aber wie aktuell es dabei ist. Etwas zu viel Hippie-Kultur, aber absolut lesenswert. ( )

I'm of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it's an interesting and insightful set of ideas about what an independent Cascadia might look like, and the values of the culture that would grow there. On the other hand, as a book it's more than a little pulpy and chauvinistic - a relic of its time for sure. Callenbach's vision of a utopian future also misses the mark pretty significantly on race, one of the places Ecotopia has diverged quite starkly from reality. Ultimately it's an interesting read about what some people might have hoped the future held for us, and a vision of what we might aspire to, wrapped in an imperfect and in some places quite flawed package. ( )

I was first introduced to this book on the first day of my high school junior year by my chemistry teacher (Berk M.). Read the book out of curiosity and then finally bought my own book for my collection. ( )

Of course, it's fun to read SF novels that prophesize about a future date that we're either at now or have already passed. This utopian novel is set in 1999, published in 1975. SF is full of dystopian novels that're projective critiques of the present tense. This is one of the rarer ones that critiques (what was) the present tense by postulating a utopia (of sorts) that's presumably rooted in the hopes that counterculture had for communes, eg. It's, perhaps, in the company of some of the work of Ursula LeGuin & Joan Slonczewski but I think I like their work more.

On page 115, under a heading of "Workers' Control, Taxes, and Jobs in Ecotopia" it's explained that "the people, seeing the former owners depart, realized that a new era was indeed upon them and began spontaneously taking over farms, factories, and stores. The process was chaotic, but it was not anarchic; it was controlled by the local governments and local courts." Did I say "utopia"? I take that back. ( )