The Green Anarchist Utopia of Robert Nichols’s Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai

Robert Nichols’s Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai is a highly acclaimed but infrequently studied series of four novels from the 1970s. With a political structure consisting of communes, syndicates, and federations as well as a mixed economy and a highly developed ecological theory and practice, Nghsi-Altai offers a green anarchist utopia as an alternative to a misguided “America.” Yet the society faces potentially destabilizing problems from within, and the writing is sufficiently self-conscious to classify the utopia of the tetralogy as critical rather than programmatic.