“We need a literature of winning,” author and creative-writing professor Aya de León tells California, the alumni magazine of the University of California at Berkeley (my alma mater). The theme of the spring/summer issue is “optimism,” and de León is talking about her new venture, Fighting Chance Books, which will publish books that “inspire you that hope and optimism are not only possible, but critical to changing the ending of our story as human beings.”
There’s a name for this optimistic future, says De León:
There’s a movement out of the U.K. called “thrutopia.” It’s not dystopian. It’s not utopian. It’s a thrutopia where people fight through the obstacles to get to the future that we want. That’s the idea behind Fighting Chance Books.
I had never heard of thrutopia, so I did some research. A portmanteau of through and utopia the word was coined by the British ecological philosopher and Green Party activist Rupert Read (b. 1966), who wrote about it for Huffpost UK in 2017:
What are desperately needed, but as yet barely exist, are what I term thrutopias. Thrutopias would be about how to get from here to there, where 'there' is far far away in time. How to live and love and vision and carve out a future, through pressed times that will endure. The climate crisis is going to be a long emergency, probably lasting hundreds of years. It is useless to fantasise a shining sheer escape from it to utopia. But it's similarly useless, dangerously defeatist, to wallow around in dystopias. We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul. Visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.
Thrutopia is a satisfyingly seamless portmanteau, even if you have to squint a little to grasp its intent. The word is built on the foundation of utopia, which was coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516 as the name of an imaginary island with perfect social, legal, and political systems. More created the word from Greek roots meaning “no” and “place,” with echoes of eutopia (“good place”); the title of More’s book about the island is optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia. (He originally wanted a Latin word, Nusquama, but ended up with the Greek version.)
Utopia via Academy Bookstore
According to the OED, it took more than three centuries for utopia’s opposite, dystopia, to appear in print. Glenn Negley and J. Max Patrick used dystopia in their 1952 book The Quest for Utopia: An Anthology of Imaginary Societies, which looks like a book worth owning. (A used copy can be yours for only $6.70.)
-topia became a reasonably productive combining form, or libfix (coined by the linguist Arnold Zwicky) in commercial names. I found 139 live and pending -topia trademarks in the USPTO database, including Nailtopia, Movietopia, Zentopia, Eartopia, Bouncetopia, Yogatopia, Liftopia (ski-resort info), Truffletopia, Teatopia, Viewtopia, Zoomtopia (registered to Zoom Video Corporation), and Barbie Dreamtopia (registered to Mattel). Edutopia is “a trusted source shining a spotlight on what works in education”; it’s a project of the George Lucas Foundation. Autopia is a chain of car washes in the Bay Area, a service to buy or lease cars, and, of course, the Disneyland ride, “the only existing Tomorrowland attraction dating back to Disneyland Park’s opening day in 1955.” Who would have predicted back then that the ride would now be “powered by Honda”?
Autopia via Disneyland
Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston envisioned a future, circa 1999, in which California, Oregon, and Washington have seceded from the U.S. to form a new nation, Ecotopia (an “ecological utopia”). The word and concept were absorbed into popular culture; there’s an Ecotopia Hot Springs in Southern California and a Rescue Ecotopia! game produced by PBS.
Ecotopia via Thriftbooks
The email address for de León’s Fighting Chance Books—clifi (at) shewritespress.com—includes another term worth a comment. Cli-fi (climate fiction) was coined in 2007 by Dan Bloom, an English teacher and former journalist, who patterned it after sci-fi, which had been introduced in 1954. (I wrote about sci-fi in 2009 when the Sci Fi Channel changed its name to Syfy. Remember the outrage? No? That’s because we always hate new names. And then we let it all go.)
Here’s a bit of the Merriam-Webster “Words We’re Watching” entry for cli-fi:
Alarmed by what he felt was a deficiency of attention to climate science in the popular consciousness, Bloom sought a way to promote stories that brought the subject to the forefront. “I’m looking for the On the Beach of climate change,” Bloom told The Literary Hub in 2017, referring to Nevil Shute’s 1957 Cold War classic about postnuclear apocalypse. “I’m looking for somebody somewhere in the world who can tell a story that has the power of On the Beach so it shocks people into awareness.”
Who will be that thrutopian cli-fi pioneer?
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UPDATE: One more -topia that I remembered after I clicked Publish: Radiotopia, “the first network of its kind created specifically for independent podcasts.” I like their tagline: Audio with Vision.
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