Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Anne Melano The ‘utopia of balance’ is an ideal-world form consciously positioned against dystopias of imbalance. From just two assumptions – firstly that humanity’s needs must be balanced with those of the environment and secondly that social conformity must be balanced with ideals of individual freedom – a number of decisions flow which shape the features that can be seen in utopias of balance from Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) through to Huxley’s Island (1962), Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1964), Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) through to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1990). These decisions shape use of technology (sophisticated but with low impact; a combination of low tech and high tech); social structures (decentralised, village-like clusters); religion (holism, interconnectedness of living things); individuals’ sense of social responsibility; and even leisure. Anne Melano is a PhD student at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. Her interests include utopian fictions and fantasy otherworld fictions. She works at the University of Wollongong.
