Introduction

Well, here we go...

Hi all. This is a relaunching of my old blog, A Flower in Dystopia, which I haven't updated in a long time, partly due to being too busy, partly because too unmotivated, and partly because Blogspot is owned by Google. But now I want to try out Leaflet.pub, which looks cool and is part of the ATmosphere, like how Mastodon is part of the Fediverse. Leaflet also works as a newsletter, and a much better one than, say, the extremely problematic and unethical Substack.

This is mainly going to be a mix of book reviews and musings about utopia and dystopia. As a scholar, my focus is on utopian themes in literature. I'm using the very hard-to-pin-down word "utopian" at the moment (it shifts so much...) as an umbrella term that includes eutopia, dystopia, heterotopia, ecotopia, and so on...getting into terms and definitions will be a later post. (As you can see, "topia" is as bad as "punk" with its neologisms like cyberpunk, steampunk, hopepunk, splatterpunk, dieselpunk, solarpunk, and so on.) My writings on utopia often overlap with ecocriticism and monster theory, and I mostly look at science fiction, with forays into the weird, fantasy, horror, coziness, and mainstream lit like Herman Melville.

Book reviews might include some books that I just happen to be reading at the moment, with which making a utopian connection might be quite strained. I might also sometimes mention music I'm listening to or movies/tv shows I'm watching, and things going on in the news that have some connection--let's face it, dystopian news is not hard to find, but I'll try to avoid doomerism.

A quick little introduction about me: I'm David Farnell, a professor at Fukuoka University in southwest Japan. I've lived more than half my life in Japan, and before that I am from Texas, Missouri, Hawai'i, and Germany. I teach English language skills, academic writing, and once in awhile I get to teach literature. And here's a cute dog:

Oh, one last thing: I will never use genAI/LLM to generate text or images or ideas or anything else for this blog. You don't get more dystopian than outsourcing your creativity to a nonintelligent app. If I ever share something from genAI, it will be in a "look at this garbage" way and will clearly be labelled as such.