Publisher's Synopsis
"Another world at the edge of the world". What do we want? As world leaders hammer out ways of regulating free market capitalism and banking systems in particular, we are all addressing ideas of the future. "Landfall 216" is about 'Utopias'. Its front cover features a motorway in Seoul now transformed into an urban walkway and park. The issue suggests that in reflecting on our future (or futures) we should think of history as a messy accumulation of partly realised visions of the future, rather than as a sequence of events. This may take us to some surprising places. Read Gregory O'Brien on 'The Utopian Hamiltonians' or John Horrocks on 'Carterton -- Utopia Bypassed', for example. We reflect on what was and what might have been in Damian Skinner's essay on Theo Scoon, and Lisa Samuels' excerpt from her book-length poem Tomorrowland. And there are essays by two West Coast American theorists, along with a review of Denis Glover's 'The Magpies' by Margaret Mahy. Felicitously, the Utopian theme is continued into the titles of the joint winners of the Landfall Essay Competition, announced in this issue: 'Several Small Gulls Struggle to Find Footing on NZ & Elsewhere' by Alice Miller and 'The New Colonists' by Kirsten Warner. Judge Martin Edmond remarks that these essays shared 'anxiety about the future; a preoccupation with questions of identity...; a pervasive sense of the conditional nature of things'.
