Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series is a masterpiece of utopian worldbuilding. The author is a historian and professor of Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Humanist studies, and she uses those ideals to build a… Continue reading Utopian Worldbuilding in Terra Ignota
Let's read Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World and it’s utopian counterpart Island and discuss the fine line between dystopia and utopia. In the former, drugs are used for numbing and self-medication, in…
In the late 19th century, two priests journeyed into the mountains of Tibet discovering a monastic community previously unknown to the Western world. Their travelogues inspired Shangri-La, the Buddhist paradise in James Hilton's 1937 novel Lost Horizon, as well as Aldous Huxley's Island, and the work of Alan Watts. For the first time, Buddhist philosophies… Continue reading Shangri-La: Buddhist Dreamscapes in the Western Imagination
