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  • From: "Scott Hitchins" <ScottH@wcig.org.au>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [permaculture] Permaculture science-fiction
  • Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 08:27:43 +1000

Sounds like 'The Fifth Sacred Thing' written by Starhawk. -See her eponymous
website for details: She's a bit too left-wing for my tastes. -Which is
good: someone has to be. A good read and permaculture even gets several
mentions.
-Scott H

-----Original Message-----
From: Russ Grayson [mailto:pacedge@magna.com.au]
Sent: Thursday, 26 June 2003 7:22 PM
To: Intl permaculture list
Subject: [permaculture] Permaculture science-fiction


With regard to the current discussion about Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars
trilogy and other works, I was reminded of a book I started to read
some time back but lost track of. I don't recall who wrote it, when it
was written or what it was entitled. It was about an environmental
activist in a decaying USA - the character seemed to me to be loosely
based on a Greenpeace direct action model.

Somewhere in the novel he or another activist returns home from a
period in the field. And his home? Well, it was a community, the
description of which made it sound very much like what we would today
call an ecovillage - renewable energy and so on (though I think the
publishing date would have preceded ecovillages). The image described
is of the fortunate and affluent few in ecovillage-type settlements
which were, in reality, walled communities, amid an ocean of the
less-affluent living is their dirty, dangerous, decaying environments.

The thing with science-fiction writing is that it is free to open up
alternative vistas so we can ask whether we want society to move in
that direction. I have been told, for instance, that Star Trek (I'm not
a Trekie so I don't really know) is the only programme within the +SF
genre to paint a positive view of the future. That implies that all
other productions are dystopian in nature. That would make sense
though, because story themes about struggle against evil states/
corporations/ machines can then be more easily woven in. Blade Runner
(based on the short story: "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") is a
movie about struggle in a dystopian context.

Maybe will will see a permaculture-SF novel one day.

...Russ Grayson

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