“A princess is the larval reproductive host in the life cycle of a parasitic hereditary dictatorship.”
— “Kurt Douglas” in Charles Stross’s terrific new novel, Dark State
(review coming shortly)
(The Delirium Brief, by Charles Stross. Tor, 2017, 381 pp., $25.99)
After the last two Laundry Files novels, I thought the series was floundering. I was wrong.
The previous two books in this genre bending (sci-fi/fantasy/horror) series, The Annihilation Score and The Nightmare Stacks, marked a fairly sharp break from the five previous books in the series (not counting novellas and story collections), in that the primary narrator changed, and with it came a change of tone. The characteristic dark humor of the sardonic narrator, “applied computational demonologist” Bob Howard, was largely though not entirely absent, as was much of the pointed political and social commentary that marked the previous books in the series.
In The Delirium Brief, Bob Howard is back as the first-person primary narrator, and with him some of the humor. (There are also third-person passages from the p.o.v. of other characters.) The tale is so dark, though, that the humor is somewhat muted. But it’s there nonetheless, as is the pointed political/social commentary, which was largely absent from the previous two books. At one point early in The Delirium Brief, Stross devotes nearly a full page to a wonderfully precise description of how privatization of public services screws the public, which is reminiscent of his description of how the banks screw the public in his very funny The Rhesus Chart.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the plot of The Delirium Brief is so dependent on back story, so dependent on the reader understanding the references to events and characters from the previous books in the series, that The Delirium Chart does not work as a stand-alone novel.
I’ve read all of the previous Laundry Files books, plus much of the subsidiary material, and I had trouble remembering some of the essential references. It doesn’t help that the novels have been spread out over more than a decade, and that I’ve read at least 500 other sci-fi novels since the first Laundry Files book, The Atrocity Archives, came out in 2004, but still….. The upshot is that only readers fresh to the series who read all of the books in a fairly short period, or readers willing to reread the previous ones, will fully appreciate this very dark tale that leaves the reader hanging, eagerly awaiting the next installment in the series.
And damn it! I want it now!
Recommended with the above provisos.
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Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia (pdf sample here). He’s currently working on the sequel, a nonfiction book skewering Christianity, a translation of a nonfiction anarchist history book, and an unrelated sci-fi novel in his copious free time.
(The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O, by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. William Morrow, 2017, 752 pp., $35.00)
reviewed by Zeke Teflon
Well, from Stephenson, this is something completely unexpected and different: a light, comic, genre-bending (sci-fi & fantasy) novel that mixes quantum physics with computer science, magic, witchcraft, time travel, and parallel universes. If this sounds more than a bit like the set-up of Charles Stross’s “Laundry” novels, it is.
Another similarity is that the protagonists in both the Laundry Files novels and The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. work for super-secret government agencies dealing with the occult. There are, however, major differences between the Stross and Stephenson/Gallard novels. One is that the “Laundry” stories feature first-person narration from a single point of view, and The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. has first-person narration from eight p.ov. characters (four male, four female), and the story is told via journal entries, memos, historical documents, transcripted conversations, and e-mail exchanges. This sounds like it could be a mess, but it’s not: the story is quite easy to follow, which given the narrative complexity is no mean feat.
All of the characters are well drawn, with distinctive behaviors, physical appearance, dress, speech patterns, writing styles, and personality quirks. Those characters range from the very sympathetic (Melisande, the primary character, and Tristan, the primary male character), to the utterly loathsome (Blevins, an abusive, puffed up hypocrite).
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. begins with a time-lock device: we learn from Melisande’s first journal entry that something has gone horribly wrong, and she’ll be stranded in 1851 unless she’s rescued within a few weeks.
From there, the story unwinds detailing the development of D.O.D.O. (Department of Diachronic Operations) from its humble beginnings with Tristan, who works for the Department of Defense, recruiting Melisande, an ancient language expert, to work on a nascent time travel project. Following that, D.O.D.O mushrooms, with Tristan and Melisande quickly recruiting Frank, a physicist working in the area of (what else?) quantum physics, who creates a time travel machine in which witches can practice magic and send people back in time.
Shortly, the DOD begins using the time machine to alter the past, and shortly after that the DOD official overseeing the project, General Frink, appoints a slimy, incompetent crony as its administrator in place of the competent Tristan. From there, several disasters ensue, ending with the time-lock situation (Melisande stranded in 1851) described at the beginning of the book.
There’s no point in detailing the plot further, except to say that it makes sense as much as any time travel plot can make sense (ultimately, they don’t — they’re inescapably paradoxical). So, time travel is one of the book’s two “gimmes”; the other is the existence of magic and witchcraft.
One very attractive feature of the book is that it has many genuinely funny moments, including a wonderful three-page passage on the reactions of surveillance personnel forced to watch the virtually nonstop sexual antics of two of the characters. This is the high, or at least the funniest, point in the interplay between the male and female characters, which is both amusing and believable throughout the book.
If there’s any lesson to be drawn from The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., it’s that hierarchical institutions are inherently dangerous, in part because incompetents in command positions can and do make terrible decisions, overriding the concerns of the competent people beneath them.
Other than that, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. has no redeeming social value other than being for the most part — it’s a bit on the long side — highly entertaining.
That’s more than enough to justify picking it up.
Recommended.
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Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia (pdf sample here). He’s currently working on the sequel and on an unrelated sci-fi novel in his copious free time.
(Empire Games, by Charles Stross. Tor, 2017, 331 pp. $25.99)
reviewed by Zeke Teflon
At long last, Charles Stross has produced another book in the “Merchant Princes” universe, a series which is basically near-future sci-fi in alternative-timelines guise. Empire Games is the first book in a new trilogy, with the second and third books scheduled for January 2018 and January 2019 respectively
Unfortunately, the book prior to Empire Games, The Trade of Queens, which concluded the original series, appeared in 2010, so even for those who read that series the characters and plot lines will likely have become hazy over time. I read the original series when it came out, and since then have started probably 500 or 600 sci-fi novels and finished maybe a third of them (so many books, so little time). If the characters and events from the earlier series were fresher in mind, I’d almost certainly have enjoyed Empire Games more than I did. Throughout the book, I found myself muttering, “now who exactly is that and what’s the back story here?”
Stross does, however, provide enough information within Empire Games so that a reader unfamiliar with the original series can follow the book, if not fully enjoy it.
As for the plot, backdrop and characters, Empire Games starts in 2020 in a parallel timeline to our own, in which renegade members of a ruling elite/criminal syndicate nuked the White House in 2003, and were in turn, along with the rest of their society, nuked back to the Stone Age by President Rumsfeld.
The resulting American society is similar to the present-day USA, but under the thumb of an even more oppressive security state which utilizes nearly all-pervasive surveillance, and in which the government seems to be a theocracy, with the fundies, Mormons, and (yes!) Scientologists embedded in the power structure.
In this horrid situation, a branch of the DHS makes an offer she can’t refuse to Rita Douglas, the (unavoidably abandoned) daughter of Miriam Burgeson, a minister in a democratic government in a third timeline, that is in arms race with the reactionary, monarchist French Empire, and that is conducting a crash technological/industrial revolution due to terror that the paranoid, violence-prone “Americans are coming.” This leads to the reason, in part, why the DHS forcibly recruited Rita — to act as a spy on her mother’s government and society.
This is a grossly inadequate summary of Empire Games, but there are six previous books in this “universe” that provide the necessary back story, and it’s impossible to summarize them in a few hundred words (even if I remembered them more clearly).
That said, there’s a lot to like about Empire Games, starting with the dedication: “For Iain M. Banks, who painted a picture of a better way.” Other positive aspects include Stross’s (as always) well drawn characters, intricate plot, and his accurate portrayal of the ruthlessness of the American government. The book even has an intriguing and unexpected twist right at the end.
One inadvertently funny facet of the book is that several of its characters live in the Phoenix suburbs, and Stross mentions with apparent horror a temperature of “almost a hundred Fahrenheit outside.” I couldn’t help but smile when I read that. In Arizona, we have a term for temperatures of “almost a hundred Fahrenheit”: “Winter.” (Here in Tucson, the forecast is for a high of 88 on Friday [Feb. 10], and it’ll quite possibly hit the mid-90s in Phoenix on that same day.)
The only real complaint I have about Empire Games is that an explanatory prologue would have been a huge help in comprehending and fully enjoying a book so far separated from its predecessors.
Highly recommended, nonetheless. But read the previous six “Merchant Princes” books first.
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(Reviewer Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia. He’s currently working on its sequel and an unrelated sci-fi novel. A large sample from Free Radicals, in pdf form, is available here.)
Sharp and Pointed has been around for just over three years, and we’ve put up just over 1,000 posts — this is number 1,001 — in 37 categories. Coincidentally, we reached 30,000 hits yesterday.
Science fiction is probably our most popular category, and we’ve put up nearly 100 sci-fi posts. Here, in no particular order, are those we consider the best.
This is the first of our first-1,000 “best of” posts. We’ll shortly be putting up other “best ofs” in several other categories, including Addictions, Anarchism, Atheism, Economics, Humor, Interviews, Music, Politics, Religion, Science, and Skepticism.
(The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross. New York, Ace, 2016, 385 pp., $27.00)
reviewed by Zeke Teflon
It’s always sad to see one of your favorite series running out of steam, but that’s what seems to be happening with Stross’s “Laundry Files” novels (regarding “applied computational demonology” — the summoning of “tentacled Lovecraftian horrors,” either intentionally or unintentionally, via mathematics or computation) .
This first became apparent with the last novel in the series, The Annihilation Score, in which Stross ditched his longtime central character, the sardonic, very funny, perpetually harassed Bob Howard, in favor of Bob’s believably drawn and sympathetic, but humor-devoid wife, Mo. Why? Apparently just to do something different. He apparently felt that he’d run out the string with the Howard character, and would, after five very successful novels, try another central character.
Here, he’s turned to yet another central character, Alex one of the PHANGs (Post Human vampires infected with other-dimensional parasites) formerly at the heart of an investment bank and now a “Laundry” employee, introduced in probably the best “Laundry” novel, The Rhesus Chart. Alex is a 24-year-old math-nerd virgin, and the character provides fertile ground for Stross’s dark humor. The description of Alex’s family get-together with his other-dimensional girlfriend, his kid sister, and her trans lover is cringe-inducing but extremely funny. As is a lot of the other material in the book. (At one point, Stross compares wearing a tie with castration.)
All of these very entertaining diversions aside, it’s difficult to see where Stross can go with this series after The Nightmare Stacks. He killed off one of his most intriguing secondary characters in The Rhesus Chart, whose tense relationship with Howard was one of the driving forces of the series. And in the last novel, The Annihilation Score, he seemed to have nowhere to go but to amp up the weirdness with everyday characters receiving super-hero powers.
Here, he’s ramped it up even more with a full-blown, and very lengthily described, alien invasion from another dimension.
It’s hard to see where he can go after this. I’ll read the next novel, yes–I’ve read the first seven–but I’m not especially looking forward to it.
Recommended only for “Laundry Files” completists.
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Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia. He’s currently working on the sequel and an unrelated sci-fi novel.
We started this blog in July 2013. Since then, we’ve been posting almost daily.
When considering the popularity of the posts, one thing stands out: in all but a few cases, popularity declines over time.
As well, the readership of this blog has expanded gradually over time, so most readers have never seen what we consider many of our best posts.
So, over the next week or two we’ll put up lists of our best posts from 2014 and 2015 in the categories of atheism, religion, anarchism, humor, politics, music, science fiction, science, skepticism, book and movie reviews, writing, language use, and economics.
We’ve already put up the best posts of 2013 and the best religion and atheism posts of 2014. Because there were considerably more posts in 2014 and 2015 than in 2013, we’ll be putting up several posts for those years divided by category. Here’s the second of them, the best 2014 posts on science, skepticism, and science fiction. We hope you enjoy them.
Science
Skepticism
Science Fiction
(The Annihilation Score, by Charles Stross. Ace, 2015, 401 pp., $26.95)
reviewed by Zeke Teflon
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The Annihilation Score is the latest in Stross’s “Laundry Files” series, which blends sci-fi, fantasy, horror, political and social commentary, sly references, playfulness, and caustic humor. Until now, the primary character in all of the novels has been mild-mannered computer science geek Bob Howard, who, in the first “Laundry” novel, The Atrocity Archives, inadvertently summoned unspeakable tentacled horrors from a parallel universe, and quickly found himself conscripted into “The Laundry,” a super-secret British government agency dealing with the occult via “applied computational demonology.”
This latest in the series departs significantly in that the p.o.v. character is Howard’s wife, “Mo” O’Brien, another Laundry operative who’s in charge (barely) of “Lecter,” a violin with vast paranormal powers, which is made of human bones, is sentient, manipulative, and which is “hungry” to feed on the souls of those it kills. The novel largely revolves around Mo’s frightening and disturbing relationship with Lecter, and with their struggles to control each other.
The background for this struggle is that (due to ever-increasing computational power) the number of people who accidentally invoke entities from parallel universes, and interpret the abilities those entities give them as superpowers, seems to be increasing exponentially. Thus, there’s an outbreak of lycra-clad “superheroes” wreaking mayhem. One of the Laundry supervisors comments on them:
What sort of fool goes out and buys a Lycra body stocking and cape, then beats up on bank robbers for their jollies? . . . A certain level of narcissitic personality disorder goes with the territory, as does a predisposition towards authoritarianism . . . Charming people.
And those are the relatively harmless ones. Mo is put in charge of combating the “unreasonable ones: disturbed hero-worshiping nerd-bigots who, if they accidentally acquire superpowers, will go on a Macht Recht spree. . .” As a means of limiting the harm these types do, she’s to put together a team of the relatively harmless ones, with constraints on who can be in it:
There’s room for one person of color, one female or LGBT, and one disability in a team of four–if you push it beyond that ratio it’ll lose credibility with the crucial sixteen to twenty-four male target demographic, by deviating too far from their expectations.
Mo is also charged with halting the depredations of a mysterious super-villain type, “Freudstein,” who begins a series of spectacular crimes by robbing and vandalizing the British Library. The novel unfolds as it follows Mo, focusing on her struggles with Lecter, her fraught dealings with her overseeing bureaucracies, and her difficulties in unmasking Freudstein. Mo’s struggles all resolve in satisfying manner in the final few pages.
However–this may in part be due to my intense dislike of the whole superhero genre–I’m reluctant to recommend The Annihilation Score. It comes up short in most of the categories that made the previous Laundry Files novels so much fun. There’s less humor in it than in the previous books, the two above quotes being the funniest passages in the whole book; the playfulness is almost entirely absent; the political and social commentary is muted, focusing mostly on the dorkishness of superhero worshipers and on the authoritarianism of the police; and there are relatively few sly references that will provoke smiles in those who recognize them.
Recommended only to those who are already Laundry Files or superhero fans.
(If you haven’t read the previous Laundry Files novels, I’d recommend reading them in order: The Atrocity Archives [2004]; The Jennifer Morgue [2006]; The Fuller Memorandum [2010]; The Apocalypse Codex [2012]; and The Rhesus Chart [2014].)
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Reviewer Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia.
MOST SCIENCE FICTION IS IRRELIGIOUS — in most sci-fi stories, religion is simply not there. Some sci-fi novels, however, are implicitly or explicitly atheist: some have atheist characters, some revolve around the conflicts of atheists with religious believers and religious institutions, and — to make the definition even looser — some that I’d classify as atheist (more accurately, atheist related) simply critique religion and religious institutions.
The following books do not comprise anything approaching a complete list, even using that loose definition of atheist science fiction. They’re merely the best atheist and atheist-related sci-fi novels that I’ve come across.
I’m sure there are many other good atheist science fiction novels, and I’ll add them to the list as I discover them. If you have any favorites not listed here, please leave a comment about them. (All links in the listings below go to book reviews on this site.)
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Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy is also well worth a read.
Iain M. Banks
The following are Banks’ “Culture” novels–space opera on a grand scale. While set in the same universe, all work as stand-alone novels. All are set in a galaxy-spanning, far-future atheist and anarchist society, where religion pops up only when there’s an “outbreak” of it somewhere. All of the Culture novels feature strong, believable characters (including AIs), complicated ethical dilemmas, and frequent dark humor. Of them, the two best are probably Player of Games and Surface Detail, and the weakest is probably The Hydrogen Sonata. The one that has the most to do with religion, revolving around the sheer viciousness of many religious believers, is Surface Detail; religious fanaticism and the ills it produces also features prominently in Consider Phlebas.
G. Richard Bozarth
John Brunner
Mick Farren
Tom Flynn
James P. Hogan
Victor Koman
Ken Macleod
I’ve read the other two books in the trilogy, Towing Jehovah (1994) and The Eternal Footman (1999) and would not recommend them; fortunately, Blameless in Abaddon works as a stand-alone novel.
Morrow has written a number of other atheistic novels and story collections, such as Only Begotten Daughter (1990) and Bible Stories for Adults (1996); I wouldn’t recommend them for the same reason I wouldn’t recommend Towing Jehovah or Eternal Footman: they’re satires, but I didn’t find them funny. The one other book of Morrow’s I would recommend is the philosophically oriented City of Truth (1990), the first portion of which is downright hilarious.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Norman Spinrad
Charles Stross
Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Charles Wilson
John Wyndham
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Zeke Teflon, compiler of this list, is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia, which deals in large part with religious and political cults.
(The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross. Ace, 2014, 359 pp., $26.95)
reviewed by Zeke Teflon
Every once in a while I crack open a science fiction novel, begin reading, start smiling a few pages in, and a few pages later mutter to myself, “Yes! This is why I read science fiction!” The Rhesus Chart is the most recent addition to the all-too-short list of such novels. (The previous two books on the list are Ken Macleod’s The Night Sessions [2012] and Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail [2010].)
The Rhesus Chart is the latest installment in Stross’s “Laundry” sci-fi/horror series, which follows the adventures of mild-mannered computer science geek Bob Howard, who, in the first “Laundry” novel, The Atrocity Archives, inadvertently summoned unspeakable tentacled horrors from a parallel universe, and quickly found himself conscripted into “The Laundry,” a super-secret British government agency dealing with the occult via “applied computational demonology.”
This latest installment deals with a nest of vampires in the heart of an investment bank. Stross, of course, takes full advantage of the comedic possibilities this offers. And, Stross being Stross, very near to the start of the book offers a convincing half-page scientific explanation of why vampires can’t exist–and then explains how nontraditional ones can, via invasion of entities from parallel universes.
On a mechanical level, The Rhesus Chart is very well written–Stross’s seamless back-and-forth switching between Howard’s first-person p.o.v. and multiple third-person points of view is particularly impressive. The plot is intricate and well thought out. Stross even manages to make banking interesting, accurately describing such screw-the-public practices as front running and high-frequency trading. And there are sly references to science fiction books and movies, politics and, especially, computers and IT throughout the book.
In the middle of all this, Stross works in horrifying (and accurate) information about mass executions by the brutal, murderous Iranian fundamentalist regime. And good for him for doing so. As a genre, science fiction is ideally suited to exploring political, social, religious, economic, and ethical theories and problems, and to critiquing and exposing the present-day powers that be. The genre would be much better overall if more sci-fi authors did so. Science fiction is supposed to be a literature of ideas, but it rarely is. The vacuousness of most science fiction, hidden behind a flashy, shiny facade, is perhaps its most irritating feature. (Even this would be forgivable if it at least delivered on its promise of entertainment, but all too often it doesn’t.)
Stross, though, does present substance in the course of this very entertaining novel. Going beyond exposing the sleaze and rapaciousness of the banking industry, and the murderous activities of Iran’s religious thugs, he also works in some humorous digs at political correctness, such as “who’s-more-oppressed Bingo” and the correct PC acronym and euphemism for zombies: “RHR’s,” “Repurposed Human Resources.”
And then there are many passages that are simply quite funny. Here’s one:
Doris Green from Health and Safety … looks round the table, her stare challenging any of us to gainsay her. Middle-aged, plump, and gallus in twinset and pearls, Doris is one of the H&S types who seems to have had her sense of humor surgically shrunken and her perm prematurely grayed by exposure to one too many inquests into bizarre workplace accidents that involve cordless hammer drills, sex toys, and the phrase “Watch this!”
Since no review is complete without a bit of carping, here are my two complaints about The Rhesus Chart: Stross uses a number of Britishisms (e.g., “take the piss,” which means to mock or take advantage of–I had to look it up) that will take the American reader temporarily out of the story; and the book is too short.
Both entertaining and substantive, The Rhesus Chart is a great read.
Highly recommended.
(If you haven’t read the previous “Laundry” novels, I’d recommend reading them in order: The Atrocity Archives [2004]; The Jennifer Morgue [2006]; The Fuller Memorandum [2010]; and The Apocalypse Codex [2012].)
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Reviewer Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia.
What exactly does “anarchist science fiction” mean? Stories written by anarchists? Stories with anarchist characters? Stories with anarchist settings? Stories that make anarchist political and social points? Stories with an “anarchist sensibility” (whatever that is)? Stories that anarchists will simply enjoy? All of the above? Who knows…..
Because of this, I’ve taken a somewhat expansive approach and have included a number of non-anarchist political sci-fi novels in this list simply because I think anarchists would enjoy them. They comprise maybe a third of the total. I’ve added brief comments about books I’ve read recently and those that particularly stand out in memory. I’m still adding to the list, which is far from complete – it’s simply a list of books I’ve read and that I recommend. (I’ve included a couple that I don’t particularly like, but included anyway because they are specifically anarchist or part of a series; in the comments preceding or following the titles, I’ve noted them.)
If you notice that any of your anarchist sci-fi favorites are missing from this list, please leave a comment mentioning them.
Here’s the list — the links go to reviews on this site.
(Note: friends in the life sciences tell me that Bacigalupi is quite inaccurate in some biological specifics, that he’s every bit as inaccurate here as he is in portraying climate change in the Southwest in his otherwise very good The Water Knife (2015). Yes, these are cautionary tales, but gross inaccuracy is gross inaccuracy, and it tends to undercut the cautionary message. Still, these are both so well written and entertaining that I highly recommend them.)
Iain M. Banks
The following are Banks’ “Culture” novels–space opera on a grand scale. While set in the same universe, all work as stand-alone novels. All are set in a galaxy-spanning, far-future anarchist and atheist society, and all feature strong, believable characters (including AIs), complicated ethical dilemmas, and frequent dark humor. Of them, the two best are probably Player of Games and Surface Detail, and the weakest is probably The Hydrogen Sonata.
Another of Banks’ sci-fi novels worth your time is
L.X. Beckett
Christopher Brown
John Brunner
Several of Brunner’s other sci-fi novels are also enjoyable, particularly Shockwave Rider (1975) and The Crucible of Time (1983). (But don’t pick up one of Brunner’s novels at random and expect a good read — his output was very uneven.)
Danvers has also written another anarchist sci-fi novel, The Watch (2003), a time travel novel set in Richmond, Virginia, featuring Peter Kropotkin as the primary character. It provides an accurate portrayal of Kropotkin and his ideas, but isn’t particularly engaging, in part because Danvers presents Kropotkin (in line with his actual character) as quite saintly and unconflicted, which isn’t a great prescription for the primary character in a novel.
Cory Doctorow
Many of Doctorow’s other sci-fi works are also enjoyable reads. One I’d recommend is The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (2011). As well, his Boing Boing blog routinely has a lot of interesting stuff.
Omar El Akkad
Mick Farren
(These are Farren’s two best sci-fi novels, and the only two I’d unreservedly recommend.)
Harry Harrison
Robert Heinlein
Ursula Le Guin
Of Le Guin’s many other novels, the one I’d most recommend is The Lathe of Heaven (1971), which holds up well nearly half a century after it appeared.
Ken Macleod
The first four novels are set in the same universe, but are not parts of a series. The next three are a loose trilogy.
Paul J. McAuley
Antiauthoritarian but not anarchist, these two novels comprise McAuley’s “Quiet War” series. They’re set in the medium-distant future following ecological collapse on Earth, and concern the brutal aggression of the authoritarian empires that emerged from the chaos against the in-some-ways anarchistic “Outers” who have colonized the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. There are two later novels set in the same universe, In the Mouth of the Whale (2012) and Evening’s Empires (2013). These are largely stand-alone novels. In the Mouth of the Whale is best avoided (very slow reading), but Evening’s Empires is a pretty decent apolitical quest/revenge tale.
Many of McAuley’s other science fiction novels are worth reading. Two that come to mind are Pasquale’s Angel and White Devils.
Morgan’s most recent sci-fi novel, Thin Air (2018), is worth a read. It’s less political than the Altered Carbon series, though its tone is similar.
Claire North
Nicholas P. Oakley
Eliot Peper
Marge Piercy
Mike Resnick
The “Revelation Space” novels comprise a fairly loose series set on and around a far future world featuring direct electronic democracy, human-machine integration, uplifted animals, class stratification, and orbiting habitats with a vast array of social structures. All of the books in the series work as stand-alone novels.
One of the sequels, The Prefect (2007), is worth reading sheerly for its entertainment value, as is the recent Elysium Fire (2018). It features the same cast of characters as The Prefect, and is a tightly written tale of murder, mystery, and revenge.
A number of readers have suggested including Robinson’s Mars Trilogy novels here (Red Mars [1992]; Green Mars [1993]; Blue Mars [1996]). I haven’t done so simply because this is a list of anarchist and anarchist-related novels that I would recommend, and I’m not a fan of those books. The two Robinson novels I would recommend (neither related to anarchism) are Galileo’s Dream (2009) and Aurora (2015). Those interested in possible political developments in China might also want to check out his Red Moon (2018).
The “ware” books comprise a very funny short tetralogy (written before the average sci-fi novel bloated to 700 pages) set in part against the backdrop of a sympathetically portrayed anarchist mechanoid society on the moon. The first two books in particular are gems.
Rucker is also a great short story writer: many of his tales are both mind-bogglingly strange and brimming with laugh-out-loud, sometimes-crude humor. His Complete Stories (2012) runs to over a thousand pages, and perhaps his two best non-“ware” humorous novels (it’s hard to pick) are The Sex Sphere (1983) and Master of Space and Time (1984).
C.J. Sansom
Norman Spinrad
Many of Spinrad’s other antiauthoritarian sci-fi novels, such as Greenhouse Summer (1999) and He Walked Among Us (2009), both of which concern the ecological crisis, are also worth reading, as is his recent oft-times humorous political genre bender (sci-fi/fantasy) The People’s Police (2017). Getting somewhat away from sci-fi, Mind Game (1980) is Spinrad’s insightful treatment of a barely disguised Church of Scientology, and probably the best novel about cults ever written.
Charles Stross
Stross’s work is antiauthoritarian, though anarchism is treated overtly only in Neptune’s Brood. Almost all of his other books, particularly Halting State (2007), Rule 34 (2011), and nearly all of the Laundry Files novels are excellent reads.
Of the Strugatskys’ many other sci-fi novels, the two I’d most recommend are their two most popular: Roadside Picnic (1971) and Hard To Be a God (1964). Both are more coherent and much more entertaining than the two novels listed above, which are primarily of political interest. (I’d recommend the older translations of both books: the recent translations read poorly due almost certainly to excessive literalism. The older versions of the Strugatsky’s works read much more smoothly than the newer, too literal translations, and are much more enjoyable.)
The quality of Turner’s science fiction novels (he was also a literary novelist) was uneven, but mostly good and sometimes great. Drowning Towers and Brain Child are by far his best books. His final two sci-fi novels, Genetic Soldier (1994) and Down There in Darkness (1999) are decidedly subpar, with the latter being downright awful. (I suspect Turner’s publisher patched together fragments of an incomplete novel.) All of Turner’s other sci-fi novels (plus one short story collection, A Pursuit of Miracles [1990]) are well worth a read.
T.C. Weber
Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
For those who’ve read and enjoyed The Illuminatus Trilogy, I’d also recommend Wilson’s Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy (1979).
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Zeke Teflon, who compiled this list, is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia, which takes place in part in an anarchist community. He’s currently working on the sequel in his copious free time.
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