Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias

by Kim Stanley Robinson (Editor)

Ernest Callenbach's classic novel Ecotopia sparked a movement that is growing rapidly around the world. Ecotopians embrace high technology as a tool for preserving and living gently within the natural environment of Planet Earth.

Kim Stanley Robinson has gathered in this volume Future Primitive bright tales of Ecotopian futures, as well as a few cautionary ones. Writers and poets, from Gary Snyder to Ursula K. LeGuin to Ernest Callenbach himself have contributed their visions, along with many more.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Solarpunk, Speculative Fiction, Anthologies, Environment

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He has published 22 novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his Mars trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes and feature scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. The Atlantic has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." According to an article in The New Yorker, Robinson is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers."

Reviews

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

House of Bones by Robert Silverberg ★★★★★
The quality of writing immediately transported me to the Pleistocene; cold, alien, and vibrantly alive with a grounded society that had worked for thousands of years and would continue to work for thousands more. It was beautiful.


Chocco by Ernest Callenbach ★★★★★
Gorgeous story that should have shared the book’s title: Future Primitive. But I guess Callenbach’s point is that it’s condescending to call simple, sustainable, practical practices primitive. This is the story of a community thriving thirty generations after the collapse of our own society. I would be there in a heartbeat!


Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands by Garry Kilworth ★★★★½
“It was a very happy time for the old woman.
Until, one night, it all went wrong.”

Ooh, this was good. A lonely old woman in a thought control chair trades in pieces of her body to be made into a menagerie of companion animals. It’s a Croneberg Mother Hubbard that is eerily idyllic... right up until it goes full Clive Barker!


Mary Margaret Road-Grader by Howard Waldrop ★★★½☆
A post apocalyptic Native American resurgence transitioning from diesel punk to solarpunk.


In The Adobe of the Snows by Pat Murphy ★★★½☆
A lonely man travels to the mountains of Nepal in search of his father’s legacy, of the yeti, of himself.


The Bead Woman by Rachel Pollack ★★★½☆
A story of the mystical female grouping, the Furies, or the Valkyrie, or in this case, the Fates. It was rather beautiful and a little boring.


Bears Discover Fire by Terry Bisson ★★★☆☆
Bears have opted to stop hibernating now that they have learned, or rediscovered, fire. Some scientists say the shorter, warmer, winter has caused this change. Some say it’s the new species of berries that have developed by the highways.

This natural wonder is juxtaposed against a family about to lose their grandmother who had, until the bears, seen it all.

It’s a, very strange, story about change.


Boomer Flats by R.A. Lafferty ★★★☆☆
A psychedelic anthropological journey to the edges, and foundation, of humanity.


Rangriver Fell by Paul Park ★★★☆☆
Sad story of alien world where one sentient primitive culture wipes out the other in religious warfare.


Newton’s Sleep by Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★☆☆
Space colonists who escaped a dying earth find themselves going mad with the guilt of all they left to die. This was more zany than graceful.


Looking Down by Carol Emshwiller ★★½☆☆
A native woman captures a weakened birdman. She chains him to a throne, rapes him, and convinced her tribe he is a god. Only by finally speaking his truth is he freed.

From The New World by Frederick Turner
No Rating

This was a long poem that I read, then skimmed, slightly understood, and don’t feel qualified to judge.

“A Story,” by John V. Marsch by Gene Wolfe DNF
I’m not keeping up with this SciFi/indigenous myths story.

I rated 11 out of 14 stories/poems for an average of 3.59 stars which I will happily round up to 4. The best stories were memorable!

[Rand · Rating 5 out of 5]

It appears that we are destroying the Earth, polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans, dehumanising ourselves, robbing our children of a future, so forth and so on. I believe what is in fact going on is that we are burning our bridges, one by one. We are burning our bridges to the past. We cannot go back to the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa, or the canopied rainforests of five million years ago. We can’t even go back to the era of the Houston six-shooter [??] of two hundred years ago. We have burned our bridges; we are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape.—Terence McKenna

The arrangement and selection of these stories and poems will evoke cellular memories of our origins and the yearnings for a future more kind than now.

You may find this book shelved as "science fiction" but it really is more fantasy or speculative in nature. These are stories which take place during or after some flavor of ecological armageddon or war. Each piece is different and the only ones that could be considered "weak" are the excerpts from novels—which is understandable given that novels have a different pacing than a short story. But, truly, this book is brilliant, as is Kim Stanley Robinson's method for dividing the contents thematically. The entire thing is prefaced by Gary Snyder's poem Tomorrow's Song. The other sections are Statements of Desire / Denial of the Body / But What Were They Really Like? / And Might They Ever Be Like That Again? / Parables.

This book is my favorite sort of anthology—the kind which introduces a reader to new and exciting ideas and authors. Terry Bison's story is charming (he wrote the short story They're Made of Meat—not in this anthology— which if you haven't been exposed to, go and google that now), Howard Waldrop's offering was a hoot, Rachel Pollack's Bead Woman was beautiful, Frederick Turner's poem is epic, and Ursula K. Le Guin's Newton's Sleep was haunting.

There is also a section of Endnotes for information on each author and their works.

And then there's the Further Reading section, a monster of a bibliography focusing on both the theoretical and practical concerns that are hand-in-hand with this book's focus. Because there are so many books listed in this last section (and I borrowed this from the library) I created a list of most of the titles here on goodreads. Unfortunately, listopia would not allow space for all of the titles, so there's about twenty or so of the last ones that would not fit.

The front cover notes that included is a new story by Ernest Callenbach, bestselling author of Ecotopia. The copy I read is the first edition; there is a more recent printing which presumably corrects the few minor typographical errors. Maybe they updated the Further Reading list too?

Other relevant books:
Unlearn Rewild Earth Skills Ideas and Inspiration for the Future Primitive
The Good Life Lab Radical Experiments in Hands-On Living
The Apocalypse Reader
After Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collection of ecotopias. I guess when I think 'future primitive' I think of some of the neo-primitive stuff in Robinson's later works -- some of these stories are straight up woo-woo let's all be noble savages. Probably like Avatar, if I'd seen Avatar. But there's a variety. I loved at least one of the woo-woo stoires more than I expected (Rachel Pollack's The Bead Woman), House of Bones (time-travel w/ early humans) is at least thinky interesting, Waldrop's Mary-Margaret Road-Grader is like an awesome old-timey Western Americana Mad Max, and Bears Discover Fire, by Terry Bisson, is flat out one of the best short stories I've ever read. (It's about bears that discover fire. Really!)

[Lia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some excellent stories!

The Endnotes would have been more useful to me at the beginning, or at least knowing they were there so I could see the rationale for including certain stories, because it didn't have a lot of the kind I was expecting. On the whole it was not quite as expected, but worthwhile. I want to buy it because the good stories were great, and also for the "Further Reading" recommendations list.

And now I want another anthology that is more of what I was expecting... near-futures showing sustainable lifestyles. Since this one is from 1994, there may be enough new stories to make another. I may have to write some stories, myself!

[Kevin Carson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A couple of good stories and a couple of decent ones, along with a lot of stuff that I found just mediocre. The book didn't live up to my expectations based both on KSR's involvement and on the concept implied by the title. I was expecting stories envisioning low-impact, decentralized syntheses of high tech with pre-capitalist organic social forms -- like, e.g., Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, the Acquis in Sterling's The Caryatids, Suarez's Freedom(TM), Doctorow's Walkaway, etc. There was really nothing like that in the book.

[else fine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most anthologies, this is a mixed bag - a few great pieces and some mediocre ones. Robinson's notes are thoughtful, and I thought the inclusion of poetry was ambitious, if not successful. Particularly good were the R.A. Lafferty story "Boomer Flats" and Robert Silverberg's "House of Bones".

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

There's a pretty good variety of short fiction in this anthology, mostly focusing on more utopian ideas and primitive future settings, which isn't something that's explored all that often, even today.

It is a bit older (published in 1994) so some of the stories are a bit dated now. Obsession with overpopulation, a couple of stories mention the idea of licensed marriage, and one poem actually speaks admiringly about castes! So definitely take this group with a grain of salt. A lot of the stories are definitely thought provoking, and I definitely want to read Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus now.

[Sasha Wolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with most such collections, these are variable in quality, and by the end I was starting to find them a bit same-y. The ones that most resonated with me were Pat Murphy's In the Abode of the Snows, Robert Silverberg's House of Bones and Rachel Pollak's The Bead Woman.

[Paco Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

As much as I love almost everything KSR writes, this was an anthology of other upcoming writers. Some fun stories, very loosely themed those, in case you expect it to follow the title :) Callenbach has an interesting piece in here.

[Ruth]

Read: Introduction, “Bears Discover Fire” “Chocco” “House of Bones”