illegible_scribble
10/15/2017
A Philosophy set-piece thinly disguised as a story
This is a bit like a near-future, post-apocalypse version of Thoreau’s Walden, in which a time traveler from our era arrives on an island populated by anarchist utopians who survived a devastating global plague, and it consists mainly of manuscript readings of the colony’s historians with the traveler’s own personal musings. Fans of literary speculative fiction and philosophy may really enjoy it, but it’s definitely not an SF adventure.
This book uses a framing story of a time traveler from 2017 arriving in a 2056 where the human population has been devastated by a series of global plagues as a basis for a lengthy exploration of the philosophy of human striving, methods of government, and environmentalism.
If you're looking for a gripping science-fiction story, you will likely be very disappointed. If you're interested in exploring the ideas of what makes human existence worthwhile and what it truly means to be environmentally conscious, this book may be just the one for you.