In Utopia

Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better Paradise

J.C. Hallman

St. Martin's Press

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In 2005, J.C. Hallman came across a scientific paper about “Pleistocene Rewilding,” a peculiar idea from conservation biology that suggested repopulating bereft ecosystems with endangered “megafauna.” The plan sounded utterly utopian, but Hallman liked the idea as much as the scientists did—perhaps because he had grown up on a street called Utopia Road in a master-planned community in Southern California. Pleistocene Rewilding rekindled in him a longstanding fascination with utopian ideas, and he went on to spend three weeks at the world’s oldest “intentional community,” sail on the first ship where it’s possible to own “real estate,” train at the world’s largest civilian combat-school, and tour a $30 billion megacity built from scratch on an artificial island off the coast of Korea. In Utopia explores the history of utopian literature and thought in the narrative context of the real-life fruits of that history.

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A JOKE
Only in us does this light still burn, and we are beginning a fantastic journey toward it, a journey toward the interpretation of our waking dream, toward the implementation of the central concept of utopia. To find it, to find the right thing, for which it is worthy to live, to be organized, and to have time: that is why we go, why we cut new, metaphysically constitutive paths, summon what is not, build into the blue, and build ourselves into the blue, and there seek the true, the real, where the merely factual disappears—incipit vita nova.

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About the Author

J.C. Hallman

J.C. HALLMAN grew up in Southern California. He is the author of The Chess Artist, The Devil is a Gentleman, and the collection of short stories, The Hospital for Bad Poets.

J. C. Hallman

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In Utopia
Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better Paradise
J.C. Hallman

Hardcover

Hardcover
St. Martin's Press
August 2010
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780312378578
ISBN10: 0312378572
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 288 pages, Includes 40 b&w illustrations throughout
$25.99
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