Reading The Hopeful, Part 1: Reading The Dead

Topographic Map of Utopia Planitia on Mars

In case you needed any evidence that I've been ranting on similar topics pretty consistently since this blog came into being in 2007, I used my search function to look up mentions of "utopia." One post in particular struck a chord with recent navel gazing on my part: "Who Can Really Save The World?" from July 2, 2009.

As I look back over these last seventeen years, things seemed almost benign and innocent in those days. The post's focus was on the question of individual vs. collective action as a means to fix things. The consensus of the replies to my take was that we need both. We can't do it alone, but we can't just ignore the impact of individuals. Since then, I've been reading both fiction and non-fiction considerations of possible solutions. But in 2009, our country had elected a thoughtful constitutional scholar who was also Black. I'm pretty sure I was a good deal more optimistic in those days than I am now.

In the 1990s I had read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars), and spent a great deal of time reading Ursula K. Le Guin's newer, more political works (I'd been reading her since the 70s). A bit later I began to discover hard science-fiction writers like Stephen Baxter, Liu Cixin, and Andy Weir, as well as visiting and revisiting the classics that had nourished my interest in SF since I first discovered Heinlein and Asimov and Clark as a ten year-old.

Lately, though, I've been especially gratified by Robinson's more recent contributions to my quest for a tinge of optimism. A few nights ago I finished (for the third time) his rather astonishing look at possibility: The Ministry For The Future. The particularly striking element of this long, dense extrapolation of possibility into practicabilty (not sure that's a word, actually), is that since the first time I read it, many of the near-future events depicted reflect current concerns and solutions in process. Nothing's pat, certain, or simple. But the thread of hope is there, and some very interesting ideas are worked through. This is not in any sense a Morrisian utopia, because the revolution Morris envisioned could not have happened without completely destroying the world as he knew it. 

So: I thought it might be helpful to compile a list of works--fiction, non-fiction, political/philosophical, interdisciplinary--that I've been reading or intend to read while I try to  make myself not-crazy. I've decided to begin with what amount to two literary obituaries, because they're still top of mind. [Note: I'm not linking the books mentioned because I don't have any affiliate agreements with booksellers and figure that you know where you shop.]

Reading the Dead

I have an unfortunate ability to discover potentially really inspiring or intellectually challenging writers just before or not long after they die. The first such discovery was the desert writer Ellen Meloy, who wrote The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (Pantheon, 2002). A  blurb for Howard Berkes's interview with Meloy on NPR's "All Things Considered" describes it as "a look at how color and light inform human behavior and in particular, the color turquoise, which ties together cultures from the American Southwest to ancient Persia and Afghanistan." A brief glance through the table of contents and a chapter or two were enough for me to buy it on the spot, and to read it almost immediately. At the time, I was just settling into my career as a design-school educator, still working on my not-yet-abandoned dissertation, getting used to life as a bungalow-owner, and still enormously homesick for the desert southwest. I'd had bypass surgery in 1995 after a trip home to the Owens Valley, and by 2002 I had started working on More News From Nowhere. A couple of years later I picked up a copy of her last book, Eating Stone, and found out that she had died suddenly at 58 in 2004 of a heart ailment. She was only a year older than I was. Only four books. Not fair.

Tatiana Schlossberg published Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have in 2019. On December 8, 2025, she wrote an article for the New Yorker about her experience with a rare form of leukemia: "A Further Shore" (it appeared in the online edition of the magazine on November 22, 2025 as "A Battle With My Blood"). She died on December 30, 2025. Again, not fair. But you could read Inconspicuous Consumption, be somewhat heartened, and learn something useful. It's wise, witty, erudite, and should be read by everyone.

Of course, when you get to be as old as I am, and your research focuses on "dead white guys," or "the canon," you rely on solid journalism and criticism to discover younger, promising, multi-colored, -gendered, or ethnically diverse writers who appear in the pages of book reviews (in my case) in The New York Times or The Guardian or The New Yorker or The Idler or New Scientist. My tastes are eclectic and often whimsical. So my discoveries are often serendipitous and almost always surprise me. 

As I work on finishing More News From Nowhere, I'm going through several stacks of recent acquisitions with an eye toward annotating my sources, and in the next few posts I want to "out" some of the most thought-provoking works that have come to my attention recently.  I've divided my stacks into related volumes, and will offer them up in sequence to keep the posts short. 

I hope friends, followers, and accidental readers might find these helpful if you, like I, are finding the world as it is increasingly difficult to navigate. Good books with good ideas and helpful outlooks seem always to have a place in our lives, whether their writers are still with us or not. 

If you have suggestions to make in any of the categories I'll be including, please let me know--and offer your own observations about their worth. 

Topics to come: Enough, Analog, Slow, and various aspects of political economy and Tikkun Olam [link is to search results on The Farm]

Image notes: Whenever possible I like to exploit the good will of organizations I support, like Wikimedia Commons and the Public Domain Review, so while looking for depictions of "utopia" I was pretty sure that an image of this segment of Mars would show up. But the colors here were a real surprise, so I thought it might be interesting to see what the ESA came up with to describe the image: 

This colour-coded topographic image shows part of Utopia Planitia, a large basin on Mars. It was created from data collected by ESA’s Mars Express on 9 November 2024 (orbit 26327) and is based on a digital terrain model of the region. 

A wide, horizontal view of a planetary surface shown in cool turquoise and greenish-yellow tones. The terrain looks smooth in places and mottled in others, with faint circular shapes suggesting shallow craters. Subtle colour variations ripple across the surface, giving it a softly textured, almost painted appearance.  

When I was reading the Mars trilogy, I really wanted some good photos, and this would have been wonderful to use as a bookmark.