Utopia

[close] Reading all the time!

[close] 'Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano Frankivsk, Ukraine. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian. Alexievich grew up in Belarus, where both her parents were teachers. She studied to be a journalist at the University of Minsk and worked a teacher, journalist and editor. In Minsk she has worked at the newspaper Sel'skaja Gazeta, Alexievich's criticism of the political regimes in the Soviet Union and thereafter Belarus has periodically forced her to live abroad, for example in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden. Svetlana Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals. In her books she uses interviews to create a collage of a wide range of voices. With her "documentary novels", Svetlana Alexievich, who is a journalist, moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction. Her major works are her grand cycle Voices of Utopia, which consists of five parts. Svetlana Alexievich's books criticize political regimes in both the Soviet Union and later Belarus. In 2015 Ms Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.' (From the data on her Goodreads Author page) Since I found no existing group I decided to create one because I think her books are the best I have ever read. They are bigger than life. I hope to find fellow fans who agree with me. Share what you like as long as it's on topic. Сардэчна запрашаем!

[close] I'd love to connect with people interested in utopian fiction. Specifically, I am interested in speculative fiction that does NOT rely on scifi and fantasy. I love that stuff, but there are plenty of places to talk about scifi and fantasy utopias. I'm thinking about the classic utopias that used to rely on some cheap premise to justify some really cool world building. We definitely, definitely, definitely don't need to confine ourselves to those classic genres sticking close to the form of an outsider visiting an isolated utopia then returning to tell the story, but this is where it begins: More's Utopia, Perkins-Gilman's Herland, Skinner's Walden Two, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Morris's News from Nowhere, Hilton's Lost Horizon, Huxley's Island, etc... In fact, I am here to find out if there are some fresher takes on utopia. Let's talk about it.

[close] Going for twelve.