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WD_463/ 2008
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 5 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 40.2 x 25.2 | | Size (mm): | 1020 x 640 | | Catalog #: | WD_0463 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Utopian and dystopian fiction -
The utopia and its offshoot, the dystopia, are genres of literature that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world, or utopia, as the setting for a novel. Dystopian fiction is the opposite: creation of a nightmare world, where utopian ideals have been subverted. Many novels combine both, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take in its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other speculative fiction genres.
Utopian fiction -
The word utopia was first used in this context by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 work Utopia. The word utopia means "no place" in Greek, and resembles the Greek term for "good place", eutopia. In his book, which was written in Latin, More sets out a vision of an ideal society. An earlier example of a Utopian work from classical times is Plato's The Republic, in which he outlines what he sees as the ideal society and its political system.
Examples:
* Sir Thomas More - Utopia (1516)
* Francesco Patrizi - La Cittŕ felice (The Happy City, 1553)
* Tommaso Campanella - City of the Sun (1602)
* Johannes Valentinus Andreae - Christianopolis (1619)
* Sir Francis Bacon - The New Atlantis (1626)
* Ludovico Zuccolo - La Repubblica d' Evandria
* Samuel Hartlib - A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria
* James Harrington - The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656)
* Thomas Spence - The History of Crusonia on Robinson Crusoe's Island and Spensonia
* Charles Fourier - The New Industrial and Social World
* Étienne Cabet - Voyages en Icarie (Travels in Icaria, 1840)
* Samuel Butler - Erewhon ("nowhere" spelled backwards, almost; 1872)
* Mary Lane - Mizora (1880–81)
* Edward Bellamy - Looking Backward (1888)
* Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett - New Amazonia (1889)
* William Morris – News from Nowhere (1890)
* Alice Ilgenfritz Jones & Ella Merchant - Unveiling a Parallel (1893)
* William Dean Howells - the "Altruritan trilogy"
o A Traveler from Altruria (1894)
o Letters of an Altrurian Traveler (1904)
o Through the Eye of the Needle (1907)
* Bolesław Prus – Pharaoh (1895)[1]
* Anna Adolph Arqtiq (1899)
* H. G. Wells - A Modern Utopia (1905)
* Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Herland (1915)
* James Hilton - Lost Horizon (the original tale of Shangri-La, 1933)
* Robert Heinlein - For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (written 1936, published posthumously 2003)
* B.F. Skinner - Walden Two (1948)
* Aldous Huxley - Island (1962)
* René Barjavel - La Nuit des Temps (1968)
* Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed (1974)
Dystopian fiction -
Dystopias usually extrapolate elements of contemporary society and function as a warning against some modern trend, often the threat of oppressive regimes in one form or another.
Examples:
* Anna Bowman Dodd, The Republic of the Future (1887)
* Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar's Column (1890)
* Yevgeny Zamyatin - We (1921)
* Karel Čapek - War with the Newts (1936)
* Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange (1962)
* Isaac Asimov - Foundation and Earth in part IV: Solaria (1986)
* Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale (1986) and Oryx and Crake (2003)
* Paul Auster - In the Country of Last Things
* Max Barry - Jennifer Government
* Karin Boye - Kallocain
* Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
* Katharine Burdekin - Swastika Night
* John Carpenter - Escape from New York and Escape from L.A.
* James De Mille - A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
* Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), The Man in the High Castle (1962) and The Unteleported Man or Lies Inc. (1966)
* Harlan Ellison - "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman
* Ben Elton - Gridlock, This Other Eden and Blind Faith
* Isamu Fukui - Truancy
* William Gibson - cyberpunk novels.
* Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (1932)
* Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
* P. D. James - The Children of Men
* Stephen King - The Running Man
* Arthur Koestler - Darkness at Noon
* Cyril M. Kornbluth - The Marching Morons
* Ira Levin - This Perfect Day
* Jack London - The Iron Heel (1908)
* Lois Lowry - The Giver
* Cormac McCarthy - The Road
* Alan Moore and David Lloyd - V for Vendetta
* William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson - Logan's Run
* George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
* Ayn Rand - Anthem and Atlas Shrugged
* John Twelve Hawks - The Traveler
* Kurt Vonnegut - Harrison Bergeron and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
* Scott Westerfeld - Uglies, Pretties, Specials, and Extras
* Suzanne Weyn - The Bar Code Tattoo and Bar Code Rebellion
* D. Harlan Wilson - Dr. Identity
Combinations:
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is sometimes linked with utopian (and dystopian) literature, because it shares the general preoccupation with ideas of the good (and bad) society. Of the countries Lemuel Gulliver visits, only the Country of the Houyhnhnms approaches a utopia; most of the others have significant dystopian aspects.
Many works combine elements of both utopias and dystopias. Typically, an observer from our world will journey to another place or time and see one society the author considers ideal, and another representing the worst possible outcome. The point is usually that the choices we make now may lead to a better or worse potential future world. Ursula K. Leguin's Always Coming Home fulfils this model, as does Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. In Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing there is no time-travelling observer, but her ideal society is invaded by a neighbouring power embodying evil repression. In Aldous Huxley's Island, in many ways a counterpoint to his better-known Brave New World, the fusion of the best parts of Buddhist philosophy and Western technology is threatened by the "invasion" of oil companies.
In another literary model, the imagined society journeys between elements of utopia and dystopia over the course of the novel or film. At the beginning of The Giver by Lois Lowry, the world is described as a utopia, but as the book progresses, dystopia takes over.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_novel
James Graham Ballard (born Nov. 15, 1930, Shanghai, China) -
British writer. Ballard spent four years of his childhood in a Japanese prison camp, an experience he described in Empire of the Sun (1984; film, 1987). His science fiction is often set in ecologically unbalanced landscapes caused by decadent technological excess. His apocalyptic novels, often shockingly violent, include Crash (1973; film, 1996), Concrete Island (1974), and High Rise (1975). His later works include the short-story collection War Fever (1990) and the novels The Kindness of Women (1991) and Cocaine Nights (1998).
Quotes:
"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality."
"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul."
"A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing)."
"The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam..."
"Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave."
"Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future."
"In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!"
"Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave."
"I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead -- the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!"
"The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society."
"What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths."
"A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction."
"Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there."
"Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century."
"I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible, simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape. What we're getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising. These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies. We've got to recognize that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what one sees through a window on the street."
"People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology."
"Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute."
"The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematizing the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray's Anatomy."
"The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century -- sex and paranoia."
"Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?"
"Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time."
-http://www.answers.com/topic/ballard-j-g
J. G. Ballard -
Dystopian fiction:
Those who know Ballard from his autobiographical novels will not be prepared for the subject matter that Ballard most commonly pursues, as his most common genre is dystopia. His most celebrated novel in this regard is Crash, in which cars symbolise the mechanisation of the world and man's capacity to destroy himself with the technology he creates; the characters (the protagonist, called Ballard, included) become increasingly obsessed with the violent psychosexuality of car crashes in general, and celebrity car crashes in particular. Ballard's disturbing novel was turned into a controversial – and likewise disturbing – cerebral film by David Cronenberg.
Particularly revered among Ballard's admirers is his short story collection Vermilion Sands, set in an eponymous desert resort town inhabited by forgotten starlets, insane heirs, very eccentric artists, and the merchants and bizarre servants who provide for them. Each story features peculiarly exotic technology such as poetry-composing computers, orchids with operatic voices and egos to match, phototropic self-painting canvasses, etc. In keeping with Ballard's central themes, most notably technologically mediated masochism, these tawdry and weird technologies service the dark and hidden desires and schemes of the human castaways who occupy Vermilion Sands, typically with psychologically grotesque and physically fatal results. In his introduction to Vermilion Sands, Ballard cites this as his favorite collection.
In a similar vein, his collection Memories of the Space Age explores many varieties of individual and collective psychological fallout from –and initial deep archetypal motivations for– the American space exploration boom of the 1960s and 1970s.
In addition to his novels, Ballard has made extensive use of the short story form. Many of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories.
Bibliography -
Novels:
* The Wind From Nowhere (1961)
* The Drowned World (1962)
* The Burning World (1964; also The Drought, 1965)
* The Crystal World (1966)
* The Atrocity Exhibition (1969, also Love and Napalm: Export USA, 1972)
* Crash (1973)
* Concrete Island (1974)
* High Rise (1975)
* The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
* Hello America (1981)
* Empire of the Sun (1984)
* The Day of Creation (1987)
* Running Wild (1988)
* The Kindness of Women (1991)
* Rushing to Paradise (1994)
* Cocaine Nights (1996)
* Super-Cannes (2000)
* Millennium People (2003)
* Kingdom Come (2006)
Short story collections:
* The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962)
* Billennium (1962)
* Passport to Eternity (1963)
* The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1963)
* The Terminal Beach (1964)
* The Impossible Man (1966)
* The Venus Hunters (1967)
* The Overloaded Man (1967)
* The Disaster Area (1967)
* The Day of Forever (1967)
* Vermilion Sands (1971)
* Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971)
* Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976)
* The Best of J. G. Ballard (1977)
* The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978)
* Myths of the Near Future (1982)
* The Voices of Time (1985)
* Memories of the Space Age (1988)
* War Fever (1990)
* The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (2001)[10]
* The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 (2006)[10]
* The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2 (2006)[10]
Other:
* A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996)
* Miracles of Life (Autobiography; 2008)
Adaptations -
Films:
* When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) dir. Val Guest
* Crash! (1971) dir. Harley Cokliss[11]
* Empire of the Sun (1987) dir. Steven Spielberg
* Crash (1996) dir. David Cronenberg
* The Atrocity Exhibition (2001) dir. Jonathan Weiss[12]
* Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (2002), dir. Solveig Nordlund. Portuguese adaptation of the short story "Low Flying Aircraft".[13]
Television:
* Thirteen to Centaurus (1965) dir. Peter Potter (BBC Two)
* Home (2003) dir. Richard Curson Smith (BBC Four)
References -
Bibliography:
* Ballard, J.G. (1984). Empire of the Sun. ISBN 0-00-654700-1.
* Ballard, J.G. (1991). The Kindness of Women. ISBN 0-00-654701-X.
* Ballard, J.G. (1993). The Atrocity Exhibition (expanded and annotated edition). ISBN 0-00-711686-1.
* Ballard, J.G. (2006). "Look back at Empire". The Guardian, March 4, 2006.
* Baxter, J. (2001). "J.G. Ballard". The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 11, 2006.
* Collins English Dictionary. ISBN 0-00-719153-7. Quoted in Ballardian: The World of JG Ballard. Retrieved March 11, 2006.
* Cowley, J. (2001). "The Ballard of Shanghai jail". Review of The Complete Stories by J.G. Ballard. The Observer, November 4, 2001. Retrieved March 11, 2006.
* Gasiorek, A. (2005). "J. G. Ballard". Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719070532
* Hall, C. "Extreme Metaphor: A Crash Course in the Fiction of JG Ballard". Retrieved March 11, 2006.
* Livingstone, D.B. (1996?). "Prophet with Honour". Retrieved March 12, 2006.
* Luckhurst, R. (1998). "The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard". Liverpool University Press. ISBN 9780853238317
* McGrath, R. JG Ballard Book Collection. Retrieved March 11, 2006.
* Pringle, D. (Ed.) and Ballard, J.G. (1982). "From Shanghai to Shepperton". Re/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard: 112-124. ISBN 0-940642-08-5.
* V. Vale (Ed.) (2005). "J.G. Ballard: Conversations" (excerpts). RE/Search Publications. ISBN 1-889307-13-0
* V. Vale (Ed.) and Ryan, Mike (Ed). (2005). "J.G. Ballard: Quotes" (excerpts). RE/Search Publications. ISBN 1-889307-12-2
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard
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