Nov. 17, 2006 SolarQuest® iNet News Service
Part of my 1994 Ph.D. dissertation for the Union Institute (now Union Institute and University) is the ecologically centered utopian novel, Real Time: A Japanese Utopian Romance. The novel expresses my ongoing concerns with ecology, human rights, and equalitarian social organization. The novel’s first person narrator is a resident foreign in present-day Japan who is abducted by Japanese from the year 2347. Thomas Redburn, photographer, recovering alcoholic, and family man, is taken in a time machine to a world where class, hierarchy and the centralized Stare have vanished and all aspects of life are managed democratically at the grass roots level. War and environmental pollution are unknown. Production for economic profit no longer exists. Gone is artificial overproduction and planned obsolescence. Environmentally friendly technology produces things only for the sake of utility and pleasure. The “Time Collective,” wishing to study a twentieth century person, has justified abducting Tom by rationalizing that they have saved him from a fatal accident. They presume he will be happy in their beautiful world, but they are wrong. He is lonesome for his family and wants to go home to the past. An ironically unhappy man in a perfect world, Thomas Redburn critically questions all aspects of what his abductors and saviors call “Real Time.” In this way, he (and the reader) learns the inner working of a liberated society that can live within its ecological means and cheerfully prosper at the same time. Currently the novel is available as <1>Real Time: A Japanese Utopian Romance, and Scholarly Commentary by Alexander Shishin from UMI Dissertation Services, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106; Tel: 1-800-521-0600 / 313-761-4700. A revised and undated version of the novel is currently seeking a publisher.
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