The Complete Ecotopia

De: Ernest Callenbach, Malcolm Margolin - foreword

Narrado por: Timothy Andrés Pabon

“One of the most important utopian novels of the twentieth century that still has very important lessons to teach us. It will always convey to perfection the wild optimism of that moment: a feeling we need to recapture, adjusted for our time.” (Kim Stanley Robinson on Ecotopia)

Collected in one handsome volume for the first time, The Complete Ecotopia presents an early classic of environmental science fiction in its entirety. Ecotopia (1975) and Ecotopia Emerging (1981), which paint detailed portraits of a healthier earth and a happier society, became foundational texts for a new wave of environmental activists, and they still contain an abundance of ideas yet to be realized. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopian saga anticipated climate fiction by more than a decade, sold approximately one million copies, and was translated into one dozen languages, and it predicted a host of innovations running from C-SPAN to widespread recycling. This edition includes two retrospective essays by the author, as well as an updated foreword by Heyday founder Malcolm Margolin. An important document of utopian ideas from the '60s and '70s, The Complete Ecotopia is also a stimulating listen for environmentalists today - one that tells a bold, inventive, and adventurous story.

©2021 The Estate of Ernest Callenbach (P)2021 Audible, Inc.

fun and believable prequel to ecotopia

I liked that it was a bit more story.Focused.Then the first book. it definitely bit more descriptive of the events leading up to the present day.

My favorite book

Fell in love with Ecotopia from the first. What a wonderful world this could be.

A classic with much to teach us

Wonderfully insightful, hopeful, and inspiring. More should read Callenbach’s visionary work. The epistle to Ecotopians at the end of this audiobook expertly contextualizes the work in relation to global economic, social, and political developments. A must-read!

A manifesto and blueprint for the world we need

What a fantastic book, and so timely. People are craving a sense of belonging, of justice, and of healing. A must read for anyone who wants to help rebuild civilization.

Great story, bad narrator

The vision shared in this novel is a beautiful one. A story of a world that we may have the option still to move towards. It is a vision of hope that I hold dearly.

The narrator has a great voice and cadence, but misread so many words. Basic things that indicate he has never been to the west coast or fixed things in his life (no offense, it just throws the reader off). Some mispronounced words: Placerville, lead (as in an electrical lead), assay... Will update as I remember and come across more. Hopefully this can be edited!

Thanks for the upload of this classic!

lessons in survival

Ecotopia gives hope that humans may learn to live in harmony with our Earth 🌎

Great topic and visionary description.

These two books provided a vision of what a sustainable world, free of the exploitation from big money corporations might look like. The second book, Ecotopia Emerging, provides the prequel to the Ecotopia story. Many of theses ideas were taking shape in the late nineteen seventies and eighties. Forty years later we see the evidence of the ecological and economic deterioration the author wrote about in his books.

The reader should have investigated the correct pronunciations for geographic place names and physical geography features. His sounding out as a second or third grader detracted from the story. They were a good story otherwise.

Intriguing Worldbuilding, But Little Else.

Three-and-a-half stars for Ecotopia and one for Ecotopia Emerging.

Ecotopia is a somewhat strange book to rate. There is, indeed, a plot and characters, even a character arc for our hero, but it’s thin. By conventional novel standards it's not that good, but I don't think it's fair to judge it on those grounds. Did anyone ever read More's Utopia for the plot?

I think this book should be approached as a cerebral thought experiment, an exploration of Callenbach's ideas for a sustainable world. From that perspective it's pretty good, intriguing and worth the time. Sustainability requires trade-offs, and Callenbach faces them squarely, more so than a lot of current writers. I especially liked how the Ecotopians discuss population and overpopulation. They do it openly and intelligently; we scream the words "plutocrat!" or "racist!" at each other.

Some of his ideas are strange. My favorite "odd" idea was his vision of how women-led politics would work. They talk aimlessly about feelings until they decide what the question is, reach agreements by consensus, then go off to comfort the losing side.

On the "con" side, this world has a tilt towards technocracy. Given the replication crisis, and the woke antics of the chattering classes, I'm unimpressed. Worse, Callenbach occasionally goes from showing to shilling. One example of this was a scene where the lead interviews people about life during and just after the secession. Of course it was hard but, Callenbach makes sure to add, that the kids viewed it as kind of a big adventure. I doubt that very seriously: according to the book, this transition involved major disruptions and strict price controls.

The influence of the 1970's can be felt through. Whether or not that is a pro or con depends on what you think of fuzzy Indian mysticism and free-love.

Ecotopia Emerging is a book I would recommend to no one. I found it a tedious, tedious book, not even mediocre. The only book I recall being more of a slog to finish was Atlas Shrugged. In terms of novel-craftsmanship, it suffers from every failing of its predecessor without the worldbuilding-exploration which is it's saving grace. I remember a creative writing lecturer half-joke that he might get the phrase SHOW, DON'T TELL on a stamp; a block of ink would have been sacrificed to this book.

It's about how Ecotopia came to secede, so I suppose it can be classified as either Alternate History or Political Drama. It fails at both. The alt-history fails as it comes in the form of infodumped bricks of legal and social history. The political drama fails because none of these people are people. No one acts believably like a person, from the rising star converting the masses via idiotic parables, to the white-hatted heroes who are borderline interchangeable, to more of those glorious, glorious Indians. It's the crazy hippie counterpart of Atlas Shrugged: a fulfillment fantasy pretending to be a political manifesto pretending to be a novel. It's plot even turns on a main character discovering a super-energy source. The only good thing I can say about it is that Callenbach's predictions about what will cause America's problems seem prescient in 2023.

There is one line I still can't get over. One character sees a sunrise. Don't look directly at it! says another, and hands him a viewing glass. "It might be ninety-three million miles away, but it can still blind you!" That is Captain Planet level, right there.

I had no problem with the narrator. He "sounded" like a good fit to the subject matter. He has that "gentle intellectual" vibe, if you know what I mean.

The two post-scripts, Afterword to Ecotopia and Epistle to the Ecotopians, are excellent but make up thirty minutes of the twenty-two hour recording. The afterword confirms what I suspected. In it, Callenbach admits Ecotopia's "modest literary merit" and tells how it was essentially a vanity publish that struck gold. The Epistle, written while terminally ill, struck me as a decent man's reflections at the end of a long life. He faced the problems his generation walked away from, and if there is a "right side of history", I think he'll be considered part of it.

Teal Deer; the first book is worth reading as a worldbuilding exercise, or as a landmark in the sustainability movement. The second is Vogon poetry.