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Life Arts    H3'ed 9/22/22

My New (Old) Book: Impland: An Alien Utopia : A 40th Anniversary Retrospective

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A red Imp (they come in 6 colors)
A red Imp (they come in 6 colors)
(Image by Scott Baker)
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My latest book - my 4th - is an eBook, available only on Amazon, entitled: Impland: An Alien Utopia : A 40th Anniversary Retrospective

From the Amazon Description - also on the back cover:


Part science fiction, part fantasy, part retrospective, Impland presents a future vision from a child's eyes, reinterpreted through that child as a man 40 years later. The descriptions are fanciful, and not always consistent with science of the 1960s and 70s when the bulk of the 20-year project was done, but they are also prescient, anticipating the current search for worlds by decades. Meticulously laid out in writing and illustrating, Impland depicts a radically different species, raising questions not only of adaptation, but of how a utopia should be defined.

Appealing to children and adult world-builders alike, Impland traces the progression of the Imp world as well as the author through childhood, as well as the troubles with trying to publish a genre-busting book in the early 1980s.

At once micro-focused on diet, households, social relations and spirituality, and macro-focused on planetary and moon orbital dynamics, ecology, life in a cavern, and governance, Impland asks questions that all sentient readers can learn from, no matter what their species.

I began drawing Imps when I was 3, though the "Imp Sketchbook" as it came to be known by the time I abandoned it at age 6, has been lost. The current version of "Impland" does, however, contain some pages from the first edition of The Imp Scrapbook, before I abandoned that and started over as a teenager with the second edition: Impland: An Alien Utopia.

This year, I was finally able to find an industrial scanner to scan the whole portfolio of 13" X 17" (the size of my mother's typewriter) over-sized illustrated pages with embedded type, then augment them with about 25% new material to link together, explain further, and reflect upon, those pages made 41-51 years ago (or longer in the case of the selectively scanned pages from the first edition).

I wasn't able to find any self-publisher who could produce a book larger than 8.5" X 11", except for one "Coffee Table" publisher who wanted me to do such a large run of 500 copies that it would have been completely cost-prohibitive. There is a significantly missed market in the self-published book publishing industry.

Anatomy of an Imp - numbered items explained on separate page.
Anatomy of an Imp - numbered items explained on separate page.
(Image by Scott Baker)
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So much for technical details.

The content is entirely my own: part science fiction, part portfolio, part memoir. It was time to do this, for posterity and legacy, and for myself. I am surprised how well the more than 3 dozen original pages have held up, considering I was considering alien civilizations when science had not even confirmed the existence of other planets outside our solar system. Yes, there were many science fiction books in the early 1960s-early 1980s, but a lot of them seemed to just transpose human-like aliens to another world, with poor explanations about how that actually worked. I wanted to explain all of that and illustrate it too, in an age before personal computers or digital effects were accessible to the public, let alone children on a tight budget. Everything in Impland is hand drawn and typed, so, apologies for the typos and shaky lines in advance.

Kirkus Reviews gave me a nice review:

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Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.

His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:
http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/

Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of (more...)
 

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