Review: Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow

(Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow. Tor-Forge, 2019, 304 pp., $26.99)

reviewed by Zeke Teflon

Radicalized consists of three novellas and one longish short story — all described as “tales” on the dust jacket, probably in part to avoid quibbles over terminology. It’s highly entertaining and provides a good example of science fiction at its best: it shows just how relevant, how useful science fiction can be. It stands in stark contrast to the escapist, often scientifically illiterate space operas, big-dumb-object stories, coming-of-age tales, superhero juvenilia, and medievalist court-intrigue/sword-and-sorcery dreck that dominate the sci-fi field.

Radicalized‘s four near-future stories deal in turn with the inhumane treatment of immigrants in the U.S.; potential nightmare scenarios due to the ever-spreading Internet of Things (which Boing Boing, Doctorow’s site, refers to as the Internet of Shit); systemic racism as seen through the eyes of a very familiar superhero (here dubbed “The American Eagle”); healthcare nightmares endemic to our for-profit healthcare system (and a possible radical response to those nightmares); and an entitled, arrogant member of the super-rich who intends to ride out social breakdown in a fortified compound.

All four stories are well plotted, feature believable, sympathetic characters (but for the mega-rich jerk in the final tale, who’s all too believable, but not at all sympathetic), Doctorow gets the science right, and there’s more on-the-nose social and political commentary in this slim volume than there is in a dozen average sci-fi novels combined.

Highly recommended.

* * *

Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia (large pdf sample here). He just finished translating Rodolfo Montes de Oca’s Venezuelan Anarchism: The History of a Movement, is currently working on the sequel to Free Radicals, a nonfiction book on the seamier sides of Christianity, two compilations, and an unrelated sci-fi novel.

Review: 84K

(84K, by Claire North. Orbit. 2018, 452 pp., $15.99)

reviewed by Zeke Teflon

 

As anyone who’s paying attention knows, the rich often get away with murder. In Claire North’s fine new dystopian novel, 84K, they always get away with it.

Why? Privatization: The takeover of state functions by corporations including, in 84K, the takeover of the legal and prison systems in the UK. As part of the revamping of those institutions, crimes, including murder, are no longer punishable by prison, but rather fines, unless the perpetrator can’t pay. So the rich get away with anything and everything, while the poor (“patties”) are thrown into private prison hell for paltry offenses, where they’re enslaved. (Not incidentally, enslavement of prisoners — the vast majority poor — in the U.S. is very common.)

In this laissez-faire nightmare of a society, human rights are nonexistent and money determines everything, including the value of a human life. Hence the title: 84K refers to the “indemnity” paid by the murderer of one of the book’s heroic characters.

That murder spurs the book’s primary character, “the man called Theo Miller,” into action after a lifetime of going along to get along, never standing up for himself or anything or anyone else. Theo is an “auditor” who assesses the fines, the  “indemnities,” for various crimes, based on the circumstances and the victims’ socio-economic status. Once he’s assigned to the “84K” murder and begins doing a more than perfunctory job, all hell breaks loose, sending him down a convoluted, dangerous path, which eventually leads to resistance to the ghastly social structures under which he lives, or rather exists.

84K has virtues aplenty. North does a fine job of showing the disastrous, degrading effects upon the poor of a privatized government (a fascist government in which political and corporate power are merged), and also the degrading effects upon the rich, who are callous, entitled, brutal, and who treat the poor as things to be bought and sold (literally) rather than as human beings. As well, North adeptly demolishes the standard bullshit talking points used to justify economic privilege and gross inequality, and to dehumanize those at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap.

The writing in 84K is skillful, with North adeptly shifting back and forth between past and present, and doing an unusually good job of portraying the primary character’s emotional and mental states. She does the latter in part through her use of idiosyncratic typography, something of which I’m most decidedly not a fan. But, strangely enough, for the most part it works, so I found it less bothersome than other instances of gimmicky typography I’ve seen over the years.

84K does, though, have problems. Theo is the only fully formed character, with most of the secondary characters being not much more than names attached to superficial physical descriptions. As well, it’s hard to buy some of the ways in which the poor vent their frustration in 84K, such as howling like dogs en masse for hours on end. The gratuitous, pointless violence North portrays as pervasive among the poor is also a bit of a stretch. And the resistance movement she sketchily describes is depressingly pedestrian, a standard authoritarian structure with, of all things, a “queen.”

If North had done a better job describing the forms a resistance movement could take, and the practices it could employ — see Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway for examples — 84K would have been a more useful book.

Still, there’s great value in pointing to the dangers of the screw-the-poor laissez-faire path down which both the USA and UK are plunging. So . . . . .

Highly recommended.

* * *

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 Spanish-English translation, a nonfiction book, two compilations, and an unrelated sci-fi novel in his copious free time.

 

Writing Tip of the Day 2-19-18 (Cory Doctorow)

“Don’t research. Researching isn’t writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don’t. Don’t give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day’s idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type ‘TK’ where your fact should go, as in ‘The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite.’ ‘TK’ appears in very few English words . . . so a quick search through your document for ‘TK’ will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards.”

— “Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction“

Review: Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow

(Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow. Macmillan, 2017, 379 pp., $26.99)

reviewed by Zeke Teflon

In Walkaway, Cory Doctorow takes on one of the most vexing matters of our time: Automation (more broadly, technological advances) is, at an accelerating rate, making human labor ever less necessary.

But what will it lead to?

A post-scarcity, egalitarian, “to each according to their wants” economy of abundance in which working is a matter of choice? Or to a version of the present artificial-scarcity economy in which there are an army of the poor and oppressed, and a few super-rich individuals who will resort to anything to retain their positions of power and privilege?

In Walkaway, the answer is both. In Doctorow’s medium-near future, there’s both a drastically more repressive version of current society — to alter the famous quotation from Lincoln Steffens, “I have seen the future, and it’s worse” — and a (small “l”) libertarian and egalitarian alternative built by those who “walk away” from the dominant “default” society, a “post-scarcity” alternative made possible by sweeping technological/productivity advances.

Therein lies the main virtue of Walkaway: Doctorow’s convincing, detailed, and attractive portrayal of that post-scarcity society and its workings.

To get a bit politically wonkish, what Doctorow describes, though he never uses the term, is an anarcho-communist society (in contrast to the other flavors of anarchism: individualist, mutualist, and syndicalist).

Other virtues include Doctorow’s insightful treatment of technological advances, notably in the liberatory and repressive possibilities they entail, and in the book’s humor, which mostly appears in its first 150 pages.

One of the main points Doctorow makes in support of a post-scarcity, egalitarian societal set-up is that meritocracy, in both authoritarian capitalist society and in libertarian alternatives, is a very bad idea, as the following dialogue between two of Doctorow’s characters, Gretyl and Iceweasel, illustrates:

“Your people are all fighting self-serving bullshit, the root of all evil. There’s no bullshit more self-serving than the idea that you’re a precious snowflake, irreplaceable and deserving . . .”

“I’ve heard all this. My dad used it to explain paying his workers as little as he could get away with, while taking as much pay as he could get away with. . . .”

“You’re assuming that because [the rich] talk about meritocracy, and because they’re full of shit, merit must be full of shit. It’s like astrology and astronomy: astrology talks about orbital mechanics and so does astronomy. But astronomers talk about orbital mechanics because they’ve systematically observed the sky, built falsifiable hypotheses from observations, and proceeded from there. Astrologers talk about orbital mechanics because it sounds sciencey and helps them kid the suckers.”

“You’re calling my dad an astrologer then?”

“That would be an insult to astrologers.”

Two other notable aspects of Walkaway are the full-spectrum sexual diversity of the characters, and that Doctorow includes two explicit, well written sex scenes. (This is in stark contrast to the usual, annoying avoidance of such scenes in the vast majority of science fiction novels, where disgustingly graphic depiction of violence is perfectly acceptable, but — horrors! — not graphic depiction of sex; the only other sci-fi authors I can think of who include explicit, fitting sex scenes in their work are Richard K. Morgan and Walter Mosley.)

As for the plot, it would give away too much to say more than that it revolves around the brutal repression of the walkaways, and their use of nonviolent resistance in response, after they develop a technology that the ultra-rich of “default” society find threatening.

The description of this conflict takes up more than two-thirds of the book, which is likely too much of it. In too many places, the latter portions of Walkaway drag. After reading the first 225 or so pages, I found myself wondering when it would ever end; I kept reading only because I wanted to see how Doctorow would resolve the conflict between the walkaways and “default.”

Anther problem with the book is that it seems disjointed at times. This is in part due to Doctorow’s using five p.o.v. characters. This isn’t necessarily a problem (see George Turner’s effective use of multiple [five] p.o.v.s in Drowning Towers), but it is here. Doctorow switches from one to another purely to advance the story, with the amount of time devoted to the different p.o.v.s varying considerably; and, as Walkaway progresses, it all but abandons the p.o.v. of what I originally thought was the primary p.o.v. character.

It doesn’t help that there’s little if any overlap — no differing views of the same things, a la Rashomon — in the events described from the different p.o.v.s, which aggravates the disjointedness problem.

Still, Walkaway‘s virtues — especially it’s detailed, attractive portrayal of a libertarian post-scarcity society — outweigh its faults.

Walkaway is quite probably the best fictional description of a post-scarcity society ever written.

Recommended.

* * *

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.

Quote of the Day 5-5-17 (Cory Doctorow)

“[T]here aren’t any ‘jobs’ left. Just financial engineering and politics. I’m not qualified for either. For one thing, I can’t say ‘meritocracy’ with a straight face. . . . It’s the height of self-serving circular bullshit, isn’t it? We’re the best people we know, we’re on top, therefore we have a meritocracy. How do we know we’re the best? Because we’re on top. QED? The most amazing thing about ‘meritocracy’ is that so many brilliant captains of industry haven’t noticed that it’s made of such radioactive bullshit that you could spot it in orbit.”

–“Hubert, etc.” in Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway

(review coming soon)

Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, Ed Finn & Kathryn Cramer, eds.

Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, Ed Finn & Kathryn Cramer, eds. (Wm. Morrow, 2014, 532 pp., $27.99)

reviewed by Zeke Teflon

This collection of 16 short stories and one novella is largely a product of Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, of which Finn is the founding director.  The book’s back cover describes it as “a manifesto and a blueprint . . . a clarion call to people everywhere to reclaim our future from grieving over what once was to celebrating all that can be achieved.”

The book succeeds — in part. Some of the stories describe innovations that seem entirely possible and achievable in the short term. The standouts here are two stories that concern the liberatory possibilities of the Internet, “Degrees of Freedom, ” by Karl Schroeder, and “Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA,” by Lee Konstantinou. The Schroeder story particularly stands out, because of its entirely believable, rather unsympathetic protagonist, and the changes wrought in his outlook through interaction with the technologies Schroeder describes.

A number of the other stories are less inspiring. The first story in the collection, “Atmosphera Incognita,” by Neal Stephenson, falls  in this category, due to its being almost entirely exposition. It reads more like a very long outline for a novel than a short story.

Others that are lacking include Madeline Ashby’s “By the Time we Get to Arizona,” due to her obvious unfamiliarity with southern Arizona (where I’ve lived for decades) and northern Sonora, and “Periapsis,” by James L. Cambias, in that its social/political background is very hard to buy.

Gregory Benford’s “The Man Who Sold the Stars” stumbles right out of the blocks, with the description in its third paragraph of a biker picking up a Honda Hawk motorcycle and throwing it “all the way across the street” on top of a Kawasaki motorcycle. At that point, I went, “Yeah, right,” and stopped reading, as would anyone else even remotely familiar with motorcycles. A Honda Hawk weighs 393 pounds dry, 412 pounds (187 kilos) fueled and lubricated. (Yes, I did just look that up.)

There are, though, several good pieces in the collection beyond the Schroeder and Konstantinou stories, including Cory Doctorow’s amusing novella, “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” Vandana Singh’s “Entanglement,” and Rudy Rucker’s flat out hilarious “Quantum Telepathy.”

But the real standout in the collection is Charlie Jane Anders’ very funny “The Day It All Ended,” the next-to-last story in the book; it concerns methods of fighting global warming through carbon capture, and contains a hilarious putdown of what certainly appears to be Apple:

‘Your products are pure evil. You build these sleek little pieces of shit that are designed with all this excess capacity and redundant systems. . . . [I]t’s the ultimate glorification of form over function —  you’ve been able to convince everybody with disposable income to buy your crap, because people love anything that’s ostentatiously pointless. . . . You use glamour and marketing to convince people to fill their lives with empty crap instead of paying attention to the world and realizing how fragile and beautiful it really is. You’re the devil.’ . . .

‘You missed one, I think,’ Jethro said, ‘The one about overproliferation. That’s where we convince people to buy three different products that are almost exactly the same . . .’

Up to that point, I’d been mulling over whether or not to recommend Hieroglyph. Of the 16 stories and one novella, I enjoyed only the six pieces mentioned above, disliked about an equal number, and was indifferent to the rest.

“The Day It All Ended” tipped the scales.

Recommended — especially if you can find a used copy or can borrow one from the library.

* * *

(Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia. He’s currently working on its sequel and on an unrelated sci-fi novel. A large sample from Free Radicals, in pdf form, is available here.)

Our First 1,000 Posts — Best Science Fiction Posts

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.

• Anarchist Science Fiction: Essential Novels
• Positive Science Fiction: Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” Novels
• Quote of the Day 3-29-16 (Ken Macleod)
• Quote of the Day 3-6-16 (George Takei)
• Dominion, by C.J. Sansom
• The Martian, by Andy Weir
• Australian Science Fiction Great George Turner (Part I)
• Australian Science Fiction Great George Turner (Part II)
• Australian Science Fiction Great George Turner (Part III)
• He Is Risen
• Abductee Blues
• The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross
• Oblivion, Joseph Kosinski director
• A Neglected Sci-Fi Gem: Code of the Lifemaker, by James P. Hogan
• Another Neglected Sci-Fi Gem: The Immortality Option, by James P. Hogan
• Insistence of Vision, by David Brin
• A Cold War Curio: Tomorrow!, by Philip Wylie
• New Earth, by Ben Bova
• The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi
• Quote of the Day 11-16-15 (Cory Doctorow)
• Lucky Strike, by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Revisiting Silverberg
• Red Planet Blues, by Robert J. Sawyer
• Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson
• Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
• Intrusion, by Ken Macleod
• Quote of the Day 3-17-15 (Mick Farren)
• He Walked Among Us, by Norman Spinrad
• Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson
• We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• TVA Baby, by Terry Bisson
• Solaris Rising 2, Nick Whates ed.

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.

Quote of the Day 11-16-15 (Cory Doctorow)

 

 

“I think that if I’m still here in ten thousand years, I’m going to be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat. you really think you’re going to be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries? Me, I’m not interested in being a post-person. I’m going to wake up one day, and I’m going to say, ‘Well, I guess I’ve seen about enough,’ and that’ll be my last day.”

–“Keep A-Movin’ Dan” on immortality, in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Related articles

• Corey Doctorow Rails Against the Effect of DRM and the DMCA

Book Review: Robot Uprisings

 

(Robot Uprisings, Daniel H. Wilson and John J. Adams, eds. Vintage, 2014, 476 pp., $15.95)

reviewed by Zeke Teflon

This anthology has two things going for it. The first is its price–$15.95 is cheap for a 476-page book. The second is that it features three excellent stories. However, it contains seventeen in all.

The three that make this collection worth reading are Charles Yu’s “Cycles,” Cory Doctorow’s “Epoch,” and Daniel H. Wilson’s “Small Things.”

Yu’s short tale is about the inner life and thoughts of a sentient alarm clock–most definitely not the strictly for-laughs, bread-obsessed Talkie Toaster from Red Dwarf. Like Talkie, Yu’s AI alarm clock is funny, but it’s much darker. In the end, it’s hard not to feel both horrified by and sorry for the consciousness trapped in the clock.

Doctorow’s much lengthier “Epoch” concerns the world’s first and only AI, BIGMAC, who is hosted on a kludged-together system of ancient servers and other components, and who is in danger of being shutdown because he’s neither interesting nor useful (!) and is expensive to maintain. The story revolves around BIGMAC’s desperate efforts to save himself by manipulating his system administrator, Odell, and the rest of the human race. “Epoch” is replete with sly references, and is one of the funniest sci-fi stories in any anthology. To fully apprecfiate “Epoch,” it helps to have some knowledge of computers beyond that of the average end user, but even those who think the Internet is “a series of tubes”  should enjoy this one.

Wilson’s “Small Things” is a sci-fi/horror takeoff on Apocalypse Now (AN), which in turn was based on Heart of Darkness. The new element here is nanobot plagues; other than that, the story closely parallels Apocalypse Now. It has a first-person narrator who’s shanghied into a mission he definitely does not want to go on (in AN, Captain Willard/Martin Sheen); he’s briefed in an air-conditioned trailer by the military (CIA and military intelligence in AN); the tale revolves around a mad “genius” in a nearly impenetrable jungle (Caldecot here rather that Kurtz in both AN and Heart of Darkness); and “Small Things”  even has a nearly exact parallel (Lt. Fritz) for the worshipful Dennis Hopper photojournalist character in AN. About all that’s missing is the famous utterance, “The horror! The horror!” Wilson has a real knack for writing the grisly and gruesome, and “Small Things” should appeal to both horror and Apocalypse Now fans.

Unfortunately, these three stories only account for about 30% of Robot Uprisings’ length. The rest of the stories range from the merely pedestrian, to what would have been a good story that’s marred by a hackneyed ending  (“Executable,” whose predictable ending might have seemed clever in 1940), to one truly awful tale (“We Are All Misfit Toys in the Aftermath of the Velveteen War”) that pulls off the trifecta of being both cloying and ridiculous, and of repeatedly hitting the reader over the head with a heavy-handed writing gimmick.

Still, Yu’s, Doctorow’s, and Wilson’s stories are enough to compensate for the dead weight in this anthology.

Recommended, if you can find a cheap used copy.

* * *

Reviewer Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia. He’s currently working on the sequel.

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• Francis Ford Coppola on the Amateur
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Review: The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, by Cory Doctorow

(The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, by Cory Doctorow. Oakland, PM Press, 2011, 136 pp., $12.00)

reviewed by Zeke Teflon

Charles Stross recently put up a post titled “On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF,” in which he decries the tendency of some sci-fi writers to place far-future stories in cultural settings indistinguishable from the present. (The two authors he cites as examples of this tendency are two that I’ve stopped reading precisely because of this.) Such use of mundane settings short changes the reader. One way mundane settings do this is that they’re simply implausible–just think about the changes in the condition and status of women and gay people over the last few decades, and the near-elimination of chattel slavery less than 150 years ago. The future will be different–and not just in terms of technology. Also, in any sci-fi story there will be at least one “gimme,” at least one implausibility such as faster-than-light travel. Wasting a “gimme” on use of the cultural present as backdrop (without critiquing it) is not only lazy, but it’s a means of lulling the reader to sleep; it’s a way to avoid challenging the reader.

The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow certainly doesn’t suffer from this problem. It’s not even set that far in the future–it seems to be set 50 to 100 years from now–but the society it portrays is almost unrecognizable. It’s a future transformed by runaway technological change and political fanaticism, a future in which primitivist zealots have repurposed “wumpusses”–machines designed to recycle toxic waste and abandoned industrial sites into healthy soil–to destroy cities, and preservationists (essentially keeping theme parks) have to resort to armed force to protect the remnants of the industrial past.

The protagonist of this story is Jimmy Yensid (reverse the spelling), a young “transhuman” boy, the son of a preservationist, who has been genetically altered to live almost forever, but whose alterations have the unfortunate side effect of keeping him in early adolescence for decades. Doctorow’s portrayal of Jimmy’s growing irritation over this is poignant. The tale traces Jimmy’s growing inner torment as he “progresses”  from one externally produced disaster to another; its technological and social oddities include dog brains in bottles, “the pack,”  controlling robot remotes, and a “wirehead” cult whose members have cranial implants that keep them in constant empathic contact with each other.

All this provides a rich background for what could be a several-hundred-page novel. Which is what makes The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow so frustrating. The novella ends before Doctorow has really explored the fascinating world he’s created. Worse, while the novella does conclude, the conclusion could have come several dozen pages prior to where it does without losing much if anything; and, late in the story, Doctorow introduces a strange, new, inadequately explained element to bring the story to a close–in other words, it leaves loose ends.

The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow could be a fine novel. As is, it’s a much-too short-novella. Let’s hope that Doctorow eventually decides to turn it into the novel it deserves to be.

The book also contains a slightly revised version of Doctorow’s address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention. Its topic is the evil and stupidity of DRM (Digital Rights Management), which is the placement of encryption software code in e-books. This was originally presented as an anti-piracy measure, but as Doctorow points out, this cannot work, and never has: if someone with any technical skill wants to “crack” a book (CD, DVD, whatever), they can do it, and then distribute  it all over the ‘net within hours. As Doctorow and others (notably Charlie Stross), have pointed out, all that DRM does is restrict end users (people who buy e-books) to particular e-readers. You cannot, for instance read a Kindle file on an iPad. And since Amazon sells over 50% of e-books and treats publishers as a “cheetah” would “a wounded gazelle” (to use Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s words), publishers who employ DRM are cutting their own throats–they’re tying their readers to Amazon.

Fortunately, the trend in recent years has been toward DRM-free e-books. TOR was the first major sci-fi publisher to do this. Others who issue DRM-free e-books include smaller publishers such as  PM Press and See Sharp Press. And this trend is gaining steam. This will ultimately bring greater flexcibility (in transferring files, in lending e-books) to e-book buyers, and will also tend to give them greater choice in e-book retailers.

Finally, in Terry Bisson’s interview with Doctorow which concludes the book, Doctorow makes a useful and unusual writing suggestion: write every day until you’ve reached a prescribed number of words,  and stop in the middle of a sentence, so that it will be  easy to get started again the following day. That makes sense, but who wants to stop when you’re on a roll?

* * *

Zeke Teflon is the  author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia.

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• Author activist Cory Doctorow will discuss human/computer overlap
• Sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow shares his views on technology, culture
• Cory Doctorow: SkyNet Ascendant

Anarchist Science Fiction: Essential Novels

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.

Margaret Atwood

• The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). More speculative social fiction than science fiction,  The Handmaid’s Tale is Atwood’s horrifying vision of what would happen to America, and especially American women, if fundamentalists seized power. Antiauthoritarian, but not specifically anarchist.
• Oryx and Crake (2003). The first book in the Maddaddam trilogy. An all too plausible, very well written look at the possible horrors of genetic engineering warped by profit-at-any-price corporate capitalism in a class-stratified, repressive sociopolitical system. It’s impressive in that it projects how current political, social, and technological trends in the U.S. and Canada (Atwood is Canadian) could develop and interact in coming decades; this is in sharp contrast to most sci-fi novels which will consider at most one such trend, and more often none.
• The Year of the Flood (2009). The second book of the trilogy. Just as entertaining as Oryx and Crake, it deals with the same political, social, and technological issues, but also features an in-depth depiction of life inside a religious/ecological cult.
• Maddaddam (2013). The final book in the trilogy. Just as engrossing as the previous two books, it adds a fair bit of material on the sleaziness and hypocrisy of fundamentalist religion, and much more on the extreme measures necessary to avoiding detection in a nearly all-seeing surveillance society.
• The Testaments (2019). The Handmaid’s Tale sequel — haven’t read it yet.

Paolo Bacigalupi

• The Windup Girl (2009). Beautifully written. Probably the best cautionary tale about corporate-controlled genetic modification and control of food sources. Antiauthoritarian and anti-corporatist, but not specifically anarchist.

(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.

• Consider Phlebas (1987)
• The Player of Games (1988)
• Use of Weapons (1990)
• Excession (1996)
• Inversions (1998)
• Look to Windward (2000)
• Matter (2008)
• Surface Detail (2010)
• The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)

Another of Banks’ sci-fi novels worth your time is

• Transition (2009). It’s a parallel-worlds tale which deals with a wide range of social and political problems, ranging from the character deformation endemic to capitalism, to power-grubbing within hierarchies, to the question of whether the ends ever justify the means. The first half of the book is hard to follow, made up of disparate, apparently unrelated strands from the p.o.v. of different characters, but the tale eventually coalesces and concludes quite satisfactorily.

L.X. Beckett

• Gamechanger (2019). This  pretty much has it all: direct electronic democracy, all-pervasive surveillance, pervasive social media, immersive VR, ecological disaster and recovery from it, alternative family structures, nonbinary characters, sentient AIs, and, yes, aliens.

Christopher Brown

• Tropic of Kansas (2017). A gritty alternative-timeline story, with distinct anarchist overtones, of survival and resistance in an even more brutal and authoritarian present-day USA.

John Brunner

• The Sheep Look Up. (1972) Probably the best early science fiction novel about the environmental crisis; antiauthoritarian, but not anarchist.

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.)

Dennis Danvers

• The Fourth World (2000). An intermediate-future novel set in the southern Mexico of the Zapatistas, and a very good — borderline great — book that deserves to have sold much better than it did.

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

• Walkaway (2017).  An intelligent, in places funny, near-future novel about the emergence of a post-scarcity anarchist society in the shadow of the “default reality” corporatist surveillance state.
• Radicalized (2019). Not a novel, but rather a collection of four novellas (rather three novellas and a longish short story) dealing with the near future and such things as the treatment of refugees, the “Internet of Things,” healthcare, systemic racism through the lens of (yes) a superhero, and a fortified bunker for the super-rich in times of chaos. The tales are uniformly well written and emotionally affecting. This is probably Doctorow’s best book to date.

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.

Greg Egan

• Distress  (1995). A hard sci-fi novel with pointed political and social commentary, largely set on an artificial island called “Stateless.” If you’re looking for a detailed description of how an anarchist society might operate, this isn’t it, but Distress is worth reading nonetheless.
• The Four Thousand, The Eight Hundred (2016). An all too timely cautionary tale about xenophobia, demagoguery, scapegoating, and persecution of minorities. Not explicitly anarchist, but antiauthoritarian.

Omar El Akkad

• American War (2017). Not anarchist, and only implicitly antiauthoritarian, American War is almost certainly the best fictional depiction of the psychological and physical devastation caused by America’s interventionist wars, and the hatred and terrorism they engender.

Mick Farren

• Their Master’s War (1987). Antiauthoritarian but not anarchist. A page-turner concerning militarism, imperialism, and religious manipulation.
• The Armageddon Crazy (1989). An antiauthoritarian, at times very funny, and all-too-relevant novel about a fundamentalist takeover of the U.S. government.

(These are Farren’s two best sci-fi novels, and the only two I’d unreservedly recommend.)

Harry Harrison

• Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965). An astute, acidic, and oft-times amusing takedown of the military and militarism.
• The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted (1987). On the surface, this book seems to be escapist sci-fi, but it’s actually a well thought out political novel that perceptively treats mutualist anarchism and nonviolent resistance. Almost certainly the best book in the Stainless Steel Rat series.

Robert Heinlein

• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). Deals with an anarcho-capitalist society on the moon at odds with an authoritarian Earth. This is likely Heinlein’s most libertarian work (in the laissez-faire capitalist sense of the word), and it’s much at odds with Heinlein’s overall authoritarian tendencies, notably expressed in Starship Troopers, which provoked a much-deserved take-down in Michael Moorcock’s famous essay, “Starship Stormtroopers.”

James P. Hogan

• Voyage from Yesteryear (1982). Features a setting directly derived from  Murray Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Not Hogan’s best book — it pales in comparison with Code of the Lifemaker — but worth reading nonetheless.
• Code of the Lifemaker (1983). Hogan’s very funny tale of science versus religious fanaticism is a nearly forgotten gem; not anarchist, but antiauthoritarian.
• The Immortality Option (1995). The sequel to Code of the Lifemaker; it’s also worth reading, but be sure to read Code of the Lifemaker first.

Ursula Le Guin

• The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Leguin’s classic novel on gender relations.
• The Dispossessed (1974). Considered by many the classic anarchist sci-fi novel, its backdrop, for half of the book, is an anarchist society set on the planet Anarres. That society is well drawn, though dryly and unflatteringly (at least in my opinion; others would disagree).

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.

• The Star Fraction (1995)
• The Stone Canal (1996). The setting is an anarcho-capitalist society.
• The Cassini Division (1998). The setting is an anarcho-communist society.
• The Sky Road (1999)
• Cosmonaut Keep (2000)
• Dark Light (2001)
• Engine City (2002)
• The Night Sessions (2008). A cautionary tale of religious fanaticism
• Intrusion (2012). A frighteningly plausible dystopian novel of an all-pervasive surveillance state. A modern 1984.
• Corporation Wars: Dissidence (2016)
• Corporation Wars: Insurgence (2016)
• Corporation Wars: Emergence (2017)

Paul J. McAuley

• The Quiet War (2008)
• Gardens of the Sun (2009)

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.

Richard K. Morgan

• Altered Carbon (2002). The first of a brutal, noirish trilogy with distinct anarchist undertones. This provides one of the many examples of the book being better than the film or video adaptation.
• Broken Angels (2003). The second in the series.
• Woken Furies (2005). The third book in the series.
• Market Forces (2004). An overtly political projection of the future of corporate capitalism.
• Thirteen (2007). A very dystopian look at a future theofascist USA.

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.

Annalee Newitz

• Autonomous (2017). Deals with the underestimated dangers of the corporate stranglehold on “intellectual property,” the horrors it could lead to, and possible forms of resistance to it.
• The Future of Another Timeline (2019). Newitz’s recent feminist time-travel novel treads more familiar ground (TBGL/reproductive rights), but has very well drawn and diverse settings, well argued political/social points, and Newitz does a decent job of glossing over the paradoxes that are inevitable in any time-travel tale.

Claire North

• 84K (2018). A well written, brutal dystopian tale about capitalism taken to its logical extreme (slavery — maximizing profits by minimizing labor costs). 84K is definitely not anarchist and is very short on solutions, but it does provide a gut-wrenching depiction of the emotional and physical carnage that seems all too possible should authoritarian capitalism continue careening downhill into the neoliberal chasm.

Nicholas P. Oakley

• The Watcher (2014). Explores primitivism, the role of technology in society, and consensus decision making. (Full disclosure: See Sharp Press published this one.)

George Orwell

• Animal Farm (1945). Orwell’s satirical critique of stalinism.
• 1984 (1949). Dreary and depressing – as it’s intended to be – but essential. Orwell’s projection of the logical progression of stalinism.

Eliot Peper

• Bandwidth (2018). A thought-provoking near-future thriller about online manipulation (basically Facebook on steroids), the climate change crisis, and whether the ends, no matter how noble, ever justify the means.

Marge Piercy

• Woman on the Edge of Time  (1976)

Mike Resnick

• A Hunger in the Soul (1998). Set in a barely disguised Africa, this is probably the best sci-fi treatment of the psychology of colonialism. Not anarchist, but well worth a read. If you haven’t read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898) or his perhaps even better short story, “An Outpost of Progress” (1897), reading them would be good preparation before plunging into A Hunger in the Soul.

Alastair Reynolds

• Revelation Space (2000)
• Chasm City (2001).

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.

Kim Stanley Robinson

• Lucky Strike (2009). A fine if short parallel-universes novella on the morality of “just following orders.” This is Robinson at his best.

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).

Rudy Rucker

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.

• Software (1982)
• Wetware (1988)
• Freeware (1997)
• Realware (2000)

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

• Dominion (2015). A quite well written and chilling political alternative-history novel about what might have happened in Britain if  the Conservative Party appeasement faction had reached a peace accord with Hitler in 1940 following the fall of France.

John Shirley

• Bioshock Rapture (2012). This novel is a prequel to the popular Bioshock video game. It’s of interest because it concerns the development of a cloistered Objectivist (Ayn Randist) society. Shirley does a good job of outlining some of the horrors that such a society would produce, but the worst horrors he describes are produced by the cloistering, which undercuts the critique of Objectivism as such.  As well, because he was essentially in a straitjacket when he wrote this, Shirley incorporates fantastical elements from the game that are unnecessary from a fictional standpoint and that detract from the novel’s power. But it’s worth reading anyway.

Norman Spinrad

• The Iron Dream (1972). Alternately chilling and darkly funny, The Iron Dream’s premise is that Hitler emigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s, became a science fiction illustrator, and wrote a single sci-fi novel: The Iron Dream. The bulk of Spinrad’s book is comprised of the “manuscript” of that “novel,” and is an excellent illustration of the ugliness of the authoritarian psyche.

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

• Singularity Sky (2003). A military sci-fi/time-travel tale that features anarchist characters in an authoritarian setting.
• Iron Sunrise (2004). The sequel to Singularity Sky.
• Glass House (2006). A suspenseful, brutal tale about gender roles and conformity.
• The Apocalypse Codex (2012). One of Stross’s genre-bending, amusing Laundry Files series, The Apocalypse Codex deals with a televangelist, his literally brain dead followers, and tentacled Lovecraftian horrors. Its treatment of both the absurdity and deadly menace of Christian fundamentalism is spot on. (A note on the Laundry Files books: While they can be read as stand-alone novels, they’re a lot more fun to read if you read them in order, starting with The Atrocity Archives [2004]).
• Neptune’s Brood (2013). A strange, sometimes funny story about the structure of interstellar finances and financial fraud. Part of the book is set in a sympathetically portrayed deep sea anarchist society of genetically modified humans.
• The Rhesus Chart (2014). Another entertaining Laundry Files novel. The Rhesus Chart deals with the big banks, and has a clear, concise explanation of exactly how they’re screwing us.
• The Delirium Brief (2017). This latest Laundry Files novel has privatization schemes as its backdrop, and contains an admirably concise explanation of how such schemes rob the public to the benefit of the rich and the corporations they control.
• Empire Games (2017). The first book in the new “Merchant Princes” trilogy, Empire Games deals in large part with an even-more-overtly repressive, surveillance-state USA than our current pseudo-democratic nightmare.  Stross provides enough background information that Empire Games works as a stand-alone novel, but for the inconclusive ending.
• Dark State (2018). The same comments apply to Dark State, the second book in the new trilogy. The third and final book, Invisible Sun, was originally scheduled for January 2019, has been delayed several times, and is now scheduled for March 2020.

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.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

• The Doomed City (2016). A bleak, brutal, indirect dissection of the Soviet Union and the ideology that produced its horrors. Written in 1972, the brothers Strugatsky kept this novel under wraps for over 15 years until it was finally published in Russian in 1989 during perestroika; at long last it’s now available in English. Unfortunately, the English-language version reads very poorly, as it’s quite probably an overly literal translation.
• The Snail on the Slope (2018). A new translation of another Strugatsky classic dealing in large part with the insanity and inanity of Soviet-style bureaucracy. Much shorter than The Doomed City, with shallower criticism of the Soviet system, but an easier read. Again, the translation reads quite roughly.

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.)

George Turner

• Drowning Towers (UK title: The Sea and Summer) (1987). Drowning Towers was the first major novel about climate change and is still one of the best, if not the best. It’s not anarchist and barely antiauthoritarian, but it is acutely class conscious and a literary masterpiece.
• Brain Child (1991). A chilling and plausible look at a possible result of the use of genetic engineering to produce a race (actually three races) of ubermenschen. It still holds up.

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

• Sleep State Interrupt (2016). A near-future noirish techno-thriller about combatting the surveillance state, and the first book in the BetterWorld trilogy. (Full disclosure: See Sharp Press published this one.)
• The Wrath of Leviathan (2018). The second book in the trilogy. The concluding volume, Zero-Day Rising, is scheduled for release in March 2020.

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea

• The Illuminatus Trilogy (1975). More fantasy than science fiction, this hallucinogenic, sprawling mess of a trilogy veers wildly from the unreadable to the unparalleled, featuring sex, drugs, multiple first-person narrators, shifting chronology, stream-of-consciousness narrative, conspiracies on steroids, self-mockery, zombie Nazis, one of the funniest parodies of Ayn Rand’s capitalist-fantasy/romance novels ever written (“Telemacchus Sneezed,” featuring “John Guilt”), and occasional insightful comments on anarchism.

For those who’ve read and enjoyed The Illuminatus Trilogy, I’d also recommend Wilson’s Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy (1979).

Yevgeny Zamyatin

• We  (1924). Written by one of the first Soviet dissidents (within the Communist Party), this dreamy, nightmarish, poetic novel of an all-controlling police state is the direct forerunner of 1984.

 

Related Posts

• Positive Science Fiction: Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” Novels
• Notable Atheist Science Fiction Novels
• Mick Farren’s Sci-Fi Novels

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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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