In the Utopia, where all major decisions are made by the Computer, life is far from idyllic for many. Three ordinary people find their lives intertwined in a society that demands conformity and obedience. Deron Boyd, a man struggling with loss and addiction, has been convicted of a crime he doesn’t remember committing. Even though there’s surveillance footage of him breaking into a Store and stealing drugs, he feels that something isn’t quite right. Everything in the Utopia is free—there is no money—so why didn’t he just wait until the Store opened? Matthew Tucker is a guard who transports criminals to the Utopia’s labour camp, a place where Utopians work for twelve hours a day. He lives in constant fear of failing his duties and being sent back to the Camp himself. So when the leaders of the Utopia ask him, a lowly guard, for a meeting, he doesn’t know what to think. Sakura Saito’s story mirrors that of Deron’s, with loss and addiction affecting every part of her life. When she arrives at the Camp, she becomes a beacon of hope and love in Deron’s darkest days, though soon their relationship is strained with the inevitable hanging over them—Sakura’s release and their unavoidable separation. But a friend thinks he has a plan to keep them together, though it requires them to risk it all.

The German filmmaker Alexander Kluge has long promoted cinema's relationship with the goals of human emancipation. Jean-Luc Godard and Filipino director Kidlat Tahimik also believe in cinema's ability to bring about what Theodor W. Adorno once called a "redeemed world." Situating the films of Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge within debates over social revolution, utopian ideals, and the unrealized potential of utopian thought and action, Christopher Pavsek showcases the strengths, weaknesses, and undeniable impact of their utopian visions on film's political evolution. He discusses Godard's Alphaville (1965) against Germany Year 90 Nine-Zero (1991) and JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (1994), and he conducts the first scholarly reading of Film Socialisme (2010). He considers Tahimik's virtually unknown masterpiece, I Am Furious Yellow (1981–1991), along with Perfumed Nightmare (1977) and Turumba (1983); and he constructs a dialogue between Kluge's Brutality in Stone (1961) and Yesterday Girl (1965) and his later The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (1985) and Fruits of Trust (2009).

Utopian literature has given voice to the hopes and fears of the human race from its earliest days to the present. The only single-volume anthology of its kind, The Utopia Reader encompasses the entire spectrum and history of utopian writing-from the Old Testament and Plato's Republic, to Sir Thomas More's Utopia and George Orwell's twentieth century dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four, through to the present day. The editors of this definitive collection demonstrate the various ways in which utopias have been used throughout history as veiled criticism of existing conditions and how peoples excluded from the dominant discourse-such as women and minorities-have used the form to imagine empowering alternatives to present circumstances. An engaging tour through the dissident, polemic, and satirical tradition of utopian writing, The Utopia Reader ultimately provides a telling portrait of civilization's persistent need to imagine and construct ideal societies.

Utopia. A community or society possessing highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities. It may be a dream, but it's a dream that has inspired writers for thousands of years. Plato's "Republic" may be the very first utopia presented to a mass audience, but Thomas More coined the term with his 1516 book Utopia (included here), which describes a fictional island society in the Atlantic Ocean. The term (and its antonym, dystopia) quickly entered the English language. And here are 19 other works, famous and not, featuring utopias and dystopias...works by Samuel Butler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Bowman Dodd, William Morris, Sir Francis Bacon, and many others. Included are: EREWHON, by Samuel Butler MOVING THE MOUNTAIN, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman HERLAND, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman EQUALITY, by Edward Bellamy CAESAR’S COLUMN, by Ignatius Donnelly THE REPUBLIC OF THE FUTURE, by Anna Bowman Dodd A CRYSTAL AGE, by W. H. Hudson A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA, by W. D. Howells FREELAND: A SOCIAL ANTICIPATION, by Dr. Theodor Hertzka MIZORA: A PROPHECY, by Mary E. Bradley Lane SOLARIS FARM, by Milan C. Edson LOOKING BACKWARD, by Edward Bellamy SOME PICTURES OF A SOCIALIST FUTURE, by Eugene Richter UTOPIA, by Thomas More THE COMMONWEALTH OF OCEANA, by James Harrington THE NEW ATLANTIS, by Sir Francis Bacon THE BLAZING WORLD, by Margaret Cavendish CHRISTIANOPOLIS, by Johannes Valentinus Andreae THE CITY OF THE SUN, by Tommaso Campanella If you enjoy this book, search your favorite ebook store for "Wildside Press Megapack" to see the 150+ entries in the MEGAPACKTM ebook series, covering science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, westerns, classics, adventure stories, and much, much more!

From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.