![]() But to keep the outside world at bay, members must corrupt their own systems. ![]() The Arcadians live off the land, eschewing commercialism, capitalism, and even pets (keeping them is considered slavery). In Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia (Voice/Hyperion, 2012), the community of this same name is a utopia within our actual world-a flock of hippies, vegans, pacifists, and dreamers settling in upstate New York in the late 1960s. Utopian/dystopian fiction (the latter just an angle away from the former) shows what we could be at our absolute finest, but also how the strains of such goodness-and its definitions-become corrupted, co-opted, and undone. These novels’ societies hover in prophetic futures or alternative presents, in worlds that might have once been ours. ![]() ![]() While dystopian fiction never goes out of style, it’s been having a particularly modish run ( The Hunger Games, Matched, Divergent, Never Let Me Go). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |