I read all of the “World Made by Hand” books (there are… four of them), and I enjoyed them. But by the end I was so fed up with his love of The Good Old Days. (His modern-day characters somehow reverted to a kind of 1800s English! It drove me up the wall!)
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Back in the day, I found Geography of Nowhere a compelling treatise on urbanism and the built environment, but listening to the increasingly dreadful “Kunstlercast” podcast, where he nattered on endlessly about how horrible everything and threatening modern things are, like tattoos, electronic music, gay marriage, and béton brut, to give a few examples. Even worse, I had to listen to the execrable Deer Tick each time, but that’s an admittedly lesser atrocity than his prolonged courting of the cranky old man audience.
The sad thing is that he had some good and interesting ideas about how the built environment works and doesn’t work back in the day, then got a metastasizing case of engineer’s syndrome and became the sort of asinine, hectoring self-congratulatory rake-waver who more or less justifies the invention of “okay boomer” as a counterpoint to that variety of blathering assault on everything that isn’t in accords with the falsified history he’s so desperately hoping to return to (and proud of himself for “inventing” in his dreary novels).
I’m a little ashamed of Boing Boing for signal boosting his right wing snuff film utopianism, to be honest.
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Indeed. He clearly imagines the cultures of the Pacific Islands didn’t exist in that regard, as well, though his world appears to be centered around his prosaic and appropriately woodsy and Caucasian upstate New York environs.
Ugh, how that guy ever got play in the progressive environmentalist culture back in the day is beyond me, though I guess it does highlight the weird conservatism to be found in back-to-[whatever made-up idyllic time/place/ideal] movements. Am very glad that I lent his early books to the librarian dude I was dating, who never returned them, so they’re not stinking up my bookshelves.
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Or pre-Christian Europe? Or Africa? But if he’s a eurocentric as he’s coming off in this discussion, then I’m entirely unsurprised by that.
Hm. Maybe this addresses some of that?
Turner makes some strong connections between more recent libertarianism that has a rightward bent and the 60s utopian culture (of which the already existing sci-fi community was a part, I’d argue). Maybe see also Heinlein? 
Good riddance to bad books! 
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