This approach to storytelling has its origins in what Michael Chabon has called the “utopian world” of the Bay Area and other metro regions along the Pacific coast. California was the birthplace of the modern environmental movement, thanks in part to conservationist John Muir. Without environmentalism, the Bay Area would no longer have its Bay—activists prevented developers from turning swaths of it into landfill in the 1960s. Mix those politics with the West Coast’s high-tech economy, and you have a recipe for green futurism. But this ecotopian sensibility has moved beyond San Francisco, Seattle, and everything in between. It’s part of a new wave in anti-apocalyptic American writing.
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