Best of
Utopia

2015

Restless


G.S. Jennsen - 2015
    Now two individuals from opposite ends of settled space are on a collision course with the darkest of those secrets, even as the world threatens to explode around them.…or they will be, in about 8 years. Restless is a short story prequel to Starshine, Book One of the Aurora Rising trilogy.Before Alex Solovy was a successful interstellar scout, she was building starships and planning for the day when she would fly one she called her own. Before Caleb Marano was wiping out the terrorist group who murdered his mentor, he was…wiping out terrorist groups who murdered shopkeepers and threatened his friends.Catch a glimpse of Aurora Rising’s heroes while they were still becoming the individuals they will need to be in order to face the galactic threat which, for now, waits silently in the void.When faced with its greatest challenge, will humanity rise to triumph or fall to ruin?AURORA RISING is an epic tale of galaxy-spanning adventure, of the thrill of discovery and the unquenchable desire to reach ever farther into the unknown. It's a tale of humanity at its best and worst, of love and loss, of fear and heroism. It's the story of a woman who sought the stars and found more than anyone imagined possible.

The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future


Alexandra Brodsky - 2015
    An abortion provider reinvents birth control, Sheila Bapat envisions an economy that values domestic work, a teenage rock band dreams up a new way to make music, Katherine Cross rewrites the Constitution, and Maya Dusenbery resets the standard for good sex. Combining essays, interviews, poetry, illustrations, and short stories, The Feminist Utopia Project challenges the status quo that accepts inequality and violence as a given—and inspires us to demand a radically better future.

Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language


Roberto Garvia - 2015
    But the debate truly began over a hundred years ago, when the increasingly interconnected world of the nineteenth century fostered a desire for the development of a global lingua franca. Many individuals and social movements competed to create an artificial language unencumbered by the political rivalries that accompanied English, German, and French. Organizations including the American Philosophical Society, the International Association of Academies, the International Peace Bureau, the Comintern, and the League of Nations intervened in the debate about the possibility of an artificial language, but of the numerous tongues created before World War II, only Esperanto survives today.Esperanto and Its Rivals sheds light on the factors that led almost all artificial languages to fail and helped English to prevail as the global tongue of the twenty-first century. Exploring the social and political contexts of the three most prominent artificial languages--Volapuk, Esperanto, and Ido--Roberto Garvia examines the roles played by social movement leaders and inventors, the strategies different organizations used to lobby for each language, and other early decisions that shaped how those languages spread and evolved. Through the rise and fall of these artificial languages, Esperanto and Its Rivals reveals the intellectual dilemmas and political anxieties that troubled the globalizing world at the turn of the twentieth century.

Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History


Bernard Bailyn - 2015
    This is a stirring and insightful work drawing on the wisdom and perspective of a career spanning more than five decades—a book that will appeal to anyone interested in history.

Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture


Douglas Murphy - 2015
    Out of this crisis came a new generation that hoped to build a better future, influenced by visions of geodesic domes, walking cities and a meaningful connection with nature. In this brilliant work of cultural history, architect Douglas Murphy traces the lost archeology of the present day through the works of thinkers and designers such as Buckminster Fuller, the ecological pioneer Stewart Brand, the Archigram architects who envisioned the Plug-In City in the ’60s, as well as co-operatives in Vienna, communes in the Californian desert and protesters on the streets of Paris. In this mind-bending account of the last avant-garde, we see not just the source of our current problems but also some powerful alternative futures.

Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle Against Work


Harry Cleaver - 2015
    Rupturing the Dialectic brings this project up to date, interpreting capitalism's most recent crises and demonstrating how ordinary men and women can, and do, rupture the smooth functioning of the system that exploits them.Harry Cleaver retired from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012. His book Reading Capital Politically has been translated into seven languages and republished in ten countries.

Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment


Anahid Nersessian - 2015
    In Utopia, Limited she enlists William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to redefine utopianism as a positive investment in limitations. Linking the ecological imperative to live within our means to the aesthetic philosophy of the Romantic period, Nersessian's theory of utopia promises not an unconditionally perfect world but a better world where we get less than we hoped, but more than we had.For the Romantic writers, the project of utopia and the project of art were identical. Blake believed that without limits, a work of art would be no more than a set of squiggles on a page, or a string of nonsensical letters and sounds. And without boundaries, utopia is merely an extension of the world as we know it, but blighted by a hunger for having it all. Nersessian proposes that we think about utopia as the Romantics thought about aesthetics--as a way to bind and thereby emancipate human political potential within a finite space.Grounded in an intellectual tradition that begins with Immanuel Kant and includes Theodor Adorno and Northrop Frye, Utopia, Limited lays out a program of "adjustment" that applies the lessons of art to the rigors of life on an imperiled planet. It is a sincere response to environmental devastation, offering us a road map through a restricted future.