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.