In Search of Utopia (working title)

We live in times of the apocalypse. We keep dystopias like pets: imagining the end of the world is one of our favorite pastimes and a mass-culture-phenomenon. It is necessary to resist this trend with literary means. By reactivating utopia as a genre. Since previous utopias have usually been dull and schematic, mainly due to the seemingly unavoidable sociology of the fantastic, this novel will connect the positive future world with pasts known to us through the narrative means of time travel, so that – as a negative – the madness of the social, economic and political forms of existence chosen by us as well as the possible alternatives become visible. A young activist (aim: to liberate earlier generations), a time traveller, will be send – partly voluntarily partly by accident – to four different epochs: among pirates in the Caribbean around 1720, around the assassinaion attempt on Lenin by Fanny Kaplan in Moscow in the summer of 1918, at the Olympic Games in Sarajevo in 1984 and during a religious upheaval in Bombay in the present. Each of these temporal levels will make use of a certain genre and differ stylistically from the others. A series of central questions of humanity will dealt with in a playful and dramatic way. Time of course if of the essence.