Optimistic or Uptopian SF/F

[Andrea]

While I'm at it, I'm haven't figure out what to use for this BINGO slot either...

I might just go with the obvious Utopia by Thomas More since it's the first, but I'd like to see some other options. Especially on the "Optimistic" side of things since I can only think of Star Trek the Next Generation :) It would be kind of nice to read something positive and hopeful.

And of course fantasies welcome, I could only think of SF utopias.

[Clare]

There are not many utopian fantasies; our heroine needs a challenge. Where a land seems ideal, it will be heavily threatened from outside. (Much like when I play Civilisation.) YA:

Pegasus

SF - Iain M Banks wrote the Culture novels and said that in the first one, he deliberately set up the most benign, beneficent future galactic culture he could think of and set his hero to be the holdout opposition.
Consider Phlebas

[Tony]

A fair bit of American sci-fi from the 60s and earlier has a pretty optimistic tone, even if it goes through some conflict to get there. The Lensman series from 'Doc' Smith ends up in a utopia - even if it takes 6 books to get there :)

[Andrea]

Exactly, Utopian lit is kind of hard to find because there's not much conflict to wrap a story around if everyone is happy, so there's a lot more dystopian stuff out there. Or you might have a utopia only to find out it's really a dystopia at the core.

I figured there must have been at lot of optimistic SF though, as Tony said, around the 50-60's or so, basically what led into original Star Trek, but I'm not familiar with most of those works so wouldn't know what to look for :)

All three suggestions actually interest me. Had my eye on Pegasus since, well, it has a pegasus in it, those are harder to find than unicorns. And I think Consider Phlebas was a group read? Maybe that will be motivation for me to get around to it. And Lensman is a pretty famous classic, even I've heard of it.

[Tony]

The Lensmen series is a couple of decades earlier than the 50s - they were originally published in Astounding or Amazing (I don't remember which) as serials throughout the 30s and early 40s. And you can ignore the 7th book in the series - it's set in the same universe, but it's not really related to the original 6 books. The series has copped a lot of flak for some of its less believable occurrences, but it was the runner-up (behind the Foundation series) for Best All-Time Series in the 1966 Hugos.

[Andrea]

I had actually written this down on my BINGO planning post but had forgotten it - Dinotopia definitely qualifies as a utopia. People may not arrive there because they want to but everyone seems to live happily alongside sentient dinosaurs. Don't know if all the books in the series qualify but the handful I've read definitely do, just avoid the Tyrannosaur valley :)