With Exile, Robert Nichols concludes his innovative utopian tetralogy, Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai. Thus far, we have peered at this imaginary central Asian land through the eyes of exploring Westerners and the inhabitants themselves, learning the ways of both city dwellers and country folk. We have come to see Nghsi-Altai––a technologically “advanced” communalized country within a “primitive” social and religious matrix-no longer as a paradox but as a civilization in balance.…

The Harditts in Sawna is the third volume of Robert Nichols’s utopian tetralogy, Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai. In the previous books (Arrival and Garh City), we were treated to tantalizing glimpses of the imaginary central Asian country of Nghsi-Altai seen through the eyes of three travelers from the West, followed by an investigation of the city in a technologically advanced society which yet maintains an elaborate, “primitive” kinship system. We now turn to six narratives of village life, focusing on members of the Harditt family.…

We are about to penetrate an imaginary land in central Asia. Nghsi-Altai––a place no better or worse than the United States, merely its opposite. Consider this: a country with an advanced, ecologically balanced technology but a rigid, even “primitive” social organization, where a communalized political structure exists in harmony with a priestly yet mystical religion. It is as if the Industrial Revolution had come to northern India in the ninth century or, in our own time, Bakunin and Kropotkin had gained control of the First International and the anarchists of Catalonia had won the Civil War in Spain.…