Welcome to anarchySF!

This archive is an open-source repository of anarchist or anarchy-adjacent science fiction. Featured on the site are books, movies, and other media which are either anarchist in their politics or of interest to anarchists.

This archive was first collected and organized by Ben Beck, who gathered and maintained it for the better part of three decades (!) As of 2019, it was redesigned and re-built by Eden Kupermintz and Yanai Sened as a collaborative effort. Eventually, the goal is for a community to help maintain and edit the wealth of knowledge on this site, as well as to add to it (follow us on Twitter where we aim to organize this community).

Let's get started! Use the sidebar on the left to choose an entry, scroll down to start exploring or click here to jump to a random entry!

a

Kathy Acker // Empire of the Senseless

(1988)

Fairly indigestible, cyberpunk-influenced, near-future scenario—questionably worth the effort. Acker's relationship with anarchism is discussed in Diana Fare's 2002 PhD thesis 'The Edges of the Unsaid: Transgressive Practices in the Fiction of Kathy Acker', downloadable from EThOS. According to British anarchist Ian Bone, on his Facebook page, Acker once sent Class War a cheque for £50, which funded an issue of the paper.


Douglas Adams // The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series

(1979–92)

Notably, David Graeber discusses the first two books in the series (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) in his Bullshit Jobs. In particular, he focuses on Adams's satirical representation of telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, advertising executives, and second-hand car salesmen, questioning the degree to which these are indeed bullshit jobs. He says:



"I have no particular bone to pick with Douglas Adams; in fact, I have a fondness for all manifestations of humorous British seventies sci-fi; but nonetheless, I find this particular fantasy alarmingly condescending. First of all, the list is not really a list of useless professions at all. It’s a list of the sort of people a middle-class bohemian living in Islington around that time would find mildly annoying."



Suggested as anarchist reading by a poster to libcom.org.



In its irreverence of authority and its absurdism, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy can certainly hold interest for the anarchist reader. Within its pages, it seems that no hierarchy, no political structure, no matter how big or small, doesn't hold some form of corruption within it. Whether the crass and brutal lack of empathy of the Vogons, the mind-numbing bureaucracy of local, municipal government, or the start-system encompassing absurdism of the galactic governance, all the systems in these books are a mockery of rigid, segmented power-structures and their traps.



In their place, individual empathy, perseverance and ingenuity are often suggested or expanded upon. However, it should be noted that, as part of its satirical voice, there are no firm political alternatives suggested within the series. The fact that it's very good more than makes up for that.


W.D. Richter // The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!

(1984)

Described by Paul Di Filippo at Locus as "High Camp Anarchist SF", it's nothing of the sort, not really even anarchic, as perhaps Di Filippo meant to say.


Yakov Protazanov // Aelita

(1924)

Influential early SF film, but more style than substance. An engineer dreams of travelling to Mars by rocket, falling in love with its queen Aelita, then leading an uprising to establish a Union of Soviet Socialist Martian Republics. 'Quaint' might be the word.



Included in the Red Planets filmography (see under Bould, in bibliography), and in libcom.org's Working class cinema: a video guide.


Peter Chung // Æon Flux

(1991 - 1995)

Three series of short animations, first shown on MTV (the first two series very short indeed, the third series of roughly 22-minute episodes), featuring secret agent Æon Flux, set in two countries in what was once Eastern Europe in the year 7698, after a global environmental disaster. One country is said to be an anarchist society while the other is a police state led by Aeon Flux’s antagonist.



Pretentious twaddle.


Walter R. Booth // Aerial Anarchists

(1911)

15 minute short featuring an airship attack on London. Believed to have been based on Fawcett's Hartmann the Anarchist. No footage is known to survive. For Tony Shaw (see bibliography), the film "can be seen as early evidence of film-makers' ability to marry terrorism with images of mass destruction."



Included in the CIRA filmography (see bibliography).


Katsuhiro Otomo // Akira

(1988)

Classic anime, set in a post-World War III Neo-Tokyo, featuring a teenage biker who develops special psychic powers and eventually liberates the imprisoned Akira, also a psychic, who had been blamed for the war.



In a comment on a blog about Akira, John Wiberg said "Akira, to me at least, has always been about power and oppression (It is in essence a highly political film; something rarely discussed considering the film features anarchist revolutionaries, greedy officials dying clutching money and a riot being suppressed by military police). Alex Fitch at Electric Sheep notes, too, that "it is only the interaction of the super-powered with ordinary, albeit anarchist, humans that stops the (complete) destruction of Tokyo for a third time."


Alba Roja // Darlingtonia

(2017)

Described by Francis Hines, in his 2021 PhD thesis Evading Representation: The Literature of Contemporary U.S. Anarchism,
as "a paranoid and Pynchonian narrative about the development of a government spyware programme and its exposure by San Francisco anarchists," the novel is
itself written by a collective of San Francisco anarchists, and an anarchist is one of the central characters.



Darlingtonia was reviewed by Ruhe for Fifth Estate in Summer 2018. Finding the novel refreshingly optimistic and highly readable, Ruhe draws a fair parallel with Eggers's The Circle, but considers that Darlingtonia "presents a much clearer and more direct critique in its unambiguous stance against the tech economy"; it "succeeds at simply being a good story, avoiding the didactic tendency of much political fiction."



Brian W. Aldiss // Earthworks (1975); Barefoot in the Head (1969); Intangibles, Inc. (1969); 'Down the Up Escalator' (1970)

(1970)

"There is Brian Aldiss with his Barefoot in the Head vision of an LSD 'bombed' Europe almost totally liberated and developing bizarre new customs." (Moorcock 1978) There was an interesting exchange concerning the book in Foundation in 1976, between Peter Nicholls and Brian Aldiss. Nicholls felt that, while it is "not fair to say that the novel preaches anarchy, . . . it certainly accepts it", and that it is "somehow more anarchic than one believes Aldiss to be." (Nicholls 1976: 34, 35). Aldiss's reply, in a letter in the following issue, exclaimed indignantly that " . . . the novel is about anarchy; but why claim that I therefore espouse it? Don't I make it look nasty enough?" (Aldiss 1976: 48).
 
Vittorio Curtoni in 1978 singled out the other three titles, probably for the sole reason that they existed in Italian translation; he described them as "inspired parables", modelled with the tools of psychoanalysis (Curtoni 25). Earthworks is an Aldiss potboiler, of minimal interest; 'Down the Up Escalator' is a minor work in which a publisher's sickness is paralleled with the Vietnam war; and Intangibles, Inc. is a good collection of five stories (Curtoni may only have been referring to the title story; it has no special relevance, however).
 


Brian W. Aldiss & Harry Harrison // The Penguin Omnibus of Science Fiction

(1973; originally published as three separate anthologies, from 1961–1964)

Remarked on favourably by D.P. (see bibliography) in 1986.
 


Brian W. Aldiss, in collaboration with Roger Penrose // White Mars; or, The Mind Set Free. A 21st-Century Utopia (1999)

(1999)

A Mars colony is cut off from contact with Earth, and seeks to create a new utopian society from scratch; meanwhile there are parallel stories regarding the discovery that the Martian mountain Olympus Mons is actually a gigantic sentient being, the quest for the particle we now know to be the Higgs boson, and the nature of consciousness. As a novel it's a disappointing failure through trying to cram so much into too small a space. Nevertheless, the utopian aspects have definite interest.
 
In 2004 the novel was the subject of a half-page review in Freedom, by David Peers. He notes that it "discusses several topics of interest to anarchists: a small community with few formal structures; a society that works without using money; ways of discarding previously learned habits of thought and so on", as well as "How do we deal with crime and punishment?" Peers concludes: "The obvious science fiction comparison is with Ursula Le Guin's novel, The Dispossessed. In that book the anarchy was established and congealing. Here, it's struggling to begin."
 
Fiona Harrington, in a posting to the Anarchy-SF mailing list in 2009, found it "a bit disappointing in that it was overly didactic at the expense of narrative", but "interesting as a novel of ideas and exploration of how an alternative society would or could work. It is more or less anarchistic, no formal government but a few authoritarian personalities wield a degree of influence, also no money!"
 


Matthew Bruce Alexander // Wĭthûr Wē

(2010)

Overlong and not terribly coherent, with a dislikeable lead character and a cast of cardboard cut-outs, this nevertheless has a degree of interest for its discussion of free market anarchism, and some worked examples of how 'criminal justice' might work in this situation.


Ridley Scott // Alien

(1979)

Ferocious scary alien stalks and kills the crew of a spaceship.
 
Categorised as subversive by Glenn in his 2015 essay 'Film as Subversion', in the BASTARD Chronicles. In his view, "The real horror of the film was not the multi-mandibled, slathering lizard, it was discovering that the crew's bosses intentionally sent them to collect the alien and then serve as its meal for the journey home, forcing the viewer to reevaluate his relationship with his own employers."
 
Three contributors to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, in November 2016, listed this film as among the best SF ever committed to film.


James Cameron // Aliens

(1986)

Second instalment in the Alien franchise, the film follows the lead character Ripley as she returns to the planet where her crew first encountered the hostile alien, this time accompanied by a unit of space marines.
 
One of Rich Dana's candidates for best sci-fi ever committed to film, on the Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum.


J. Neil Schulman // Alongside Night

(2014)

Film version of Schulman's novel, directed by the author.
 
Distinctly poor, and really only for the agorist converted.


Jean-Luc Godard // Alphaville

(1965)

French New Wave pulp sf, but shot in black and white in a hard-boiled film noir style, with a surrealist streak. An intergalactic secret agent goes to Alphaville, a city run by a computer busy eradicating emotion from its occupants, defeats the computer's logic, kills its creator, and departs with the latter's daughter. Plenty of thoughtful dialogue along the way.
 
Described in Red Planets (see Bould, in bibliography) as a "Dystopian satire on bureaucracy and commodification, betraying a genuine affection for popular culture.
 
Included in Stuart Christie's filmography.
 


Laeta Kalogridis // Altered Carbon

(2018/2020)

Based on the novel by Richard Morgan. Received about a minute's discussion at the end of one of the anarchySF
podcasts.


Zainab Amadahy // The Moons of Palmares

(1998)

Recommended by Common Action at the panel "Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction" at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009.
 


Jacques Doillon, Alain Resnais and Jean Rouch // L'An 01

(1973)

A joyful spontaneous world-wide rebellion in which everyone decides we got it wrong and need to start again: no bosses, no jails, no private property, free love. Year 01 of the new order.



Porton (see bibliography) describes the film as "essentially a series of neo-situationist black-out sketches … somewhat stymied by a rather nebulous utopianism", though exhibiting a "charming gloss on 1968's spirit of negation." (2nd edn, p98)



Included in the CIRA filmography (see bibliography).
 


Anarchy Comics

(1978–1987)

Just four issues were published, but all are still entertaining. There are comic strips with SF content in three of the four, most notably by Paul Mavrides and Jay Kinney.



In 1981 #3 received a long and enthusiastic review by Cliff Harper, for whom this issue was "the best one so far." He further said:



"'Anarchy Comix', over its 3 years existence has reached a readership that in numbers outstrips that of the US and English anarchist press together, and what's more most of these readers are not already committed to anarchist or radical perspectives. So 'Anarchy Comix' must be seen as a major success in anarchist propaganda and in anarchist art. I believe the main reason for this success is that it is a visual form, relying not on endless words and dry theory, but rather on pictures (and humour)."



Harper had earlier reviewed #2 in 1980.
 


The City in the Middle of the Night

(2019)

Set on a tidally locked planet, with contrasting cultures and misunderstood aliens. The novel was reviewed by Zeke Teflon for the Sharp and Pointed blog, in one of his most negative critiques: despite initial expectations that "Anders would have a lot to say politically and socially, that the story would be well crafted, and that there would be at least some humor in it", "Those expectations crashed and burned. This is one of the most ineptly written novels I’ve ever read. Contrary to expectations, Anders has nothing to say politically or socially. Nothing. And as far as craft? OMG."



His conclusion: "Very much not recommended."



Read without any expectations, it's not quite as bad as Teflon suggests.



The Butterfly Kid

(1967)

Comical sf from the heart of hippiedom, in which alien 6 ft blue lobsters seek to take over the world by spiking the drinking water with a drug that causes collective hallucinations on the grand scale.



According to Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, in their 2021 Dangerous Visions and New Worlds. Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, Anderson used some of the proceeds from this novel to set up Haight-Ashbury's Communications Company, which printed radical manifestos for the Diggers, the street theatre community anarchists in San Francisco.


M.T. Anderson // Feed

(2004)

Recommended by Common Action at the panel "Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction" at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009. Also on Think Galactic's reading list.
 
A fine and timely view of a future in which corporations have direct access to consumers' minds and purchasing behaviours, via an implanted net feed, viewed from the perspective of two young people with different takes on this dystopian vision.
 


Poul Anderson // 'The Star Beast' (1950); 'Security Risk' (1957); 'For the Duration' (1957); 'The Last of the Deliverers' (1958; revised version 1976); 'No Truce with Kings' (1963); Trader to the Stars (1964); The Star Fox (1965); The Winter of the World (1976); The Stars Are Also Fire (1994)

(1994)

In 'The Star Beast' a future earth has a social system resembling a form of anarchy, though not so described; it is presented as typical of decadence.
 
"It was a short story called Security Risk, in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION a monthly American magazine, that had in fact, first interested me in ideas that I later found to be embodied in anarchism." (Pilgrim 1963)
 
In 'For the Duration' an authoritarian future US government is overthrown, but the revolutionary forces quickly proved just as bad. The obvious anarchist moral is only implicitly drawn.
 
'The Last of the Deliverers' is a creaky, cold-war yarn with some attractive post-consumerism and a tinge of green. Dan Clore's summation: 'In a world where the US and USSR have become decentralized, libertarian socialist townships, the last capitalist debates the last Communist, and everyone else is bored by their irrelevance.' 
 
In 'No Truce with Kings', Earth's states have broken into small, feudal realms; alien invaders attempt to reintroduce civilization to the "starveling anarchs" of the planet, who prefer the relative freedom offered by a choice of masters.' (Dan Clore) The story won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 2010.
 
The Winter of the World is set in the far future during a second Ice Age; people of one community, the Rogaviki, are instinctively co-operative, with no government, and no religion; they are not wholly admirable, though, being highly territorial, and sufficiently unhuman that the protagonist finally concludes that they are actually a new human species.



Trader to the Stars tied for the 1985 Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award, which was won by The Star Fox in 1995. The Stars Are Also Fire won the 1995 Prometheus Award.



Johann Valentin Andreae // Christianopolis

(1619; originally published in Latin as Reipublicae Christianopolitanae Descriptio)

Dull Christian utopia, apparently an influence on Bacon's New Atlantis.
 
For Nettlau (see Nettlau's Esbozo, in bibliography) this, with the Bacon and Campanella utopias, "offer the greatest interest and, [ . . . ] for the organization of work, of science, of inventions present remarkable perspectives."



Berneri (see bibliography) says:



"Throughout his utopia one feels that his love of men inclined him to trust them as sensible beings capable of going about their lives in a reliable and honest way, but his religion told him that man is wicked and has to be carefully guided, preached to and, if necessary, threatened, to be kept away from sin. That is why his ideal city is a curious combination of free guilds and religious tyranny, of personal responsibility and of complete submission to religion."


Koji Morimoto, Shinichiro Watanabe, Mahiro Maeda, Peter Chung, Andy Jones, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, and Takeshi Koike // The Animatrix

(2003)

American-Japanese anime anthology loosely based on the Matrix trilogy: a compilation of nine short films, including the back story of the original war between man and machines which led to the creation of the Matrix. Surprisingly successful, and more interesting than the final two of the Matrix trilogy.
 


Alex Garland // Annihilation

(2018)

Superior exemplar of the New Weird, visually very impressive, though the story (based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer) is quite reminiscent of Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker.



Recommended by Facebook's Solarpunk Anarchist, who said of it that "It's not solarpunk, but it is a fascinating case of ecological science-fiction with a distinctly non-anthropocentric take on its material." The film is also touched on in the anarchysf podcast centring on the VanderMeer novel.


anon // 'Visit Port Watson!' (in Rucker, Wilson & Wilson, eds: Semiotext(e) SF)

(1985)

Spoof travel-guide to the utopian island of Sonsorol, combining ideas from various libertarian strands.


Piers Anthony // Viscous Circle

(1982)

Unusual tale featuring an alien species known as the Bands, embodied as colourful spinning rings powered by magnetism. Their society is quintessentially both anarchist and pacifist, with no concept of authority and such horror at violence that even the thought of it is prone to causing spontaneous self-destruction. Noted by a poster to Facebook's Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist, in 2016.


anon. // 'A Letter of Solidarity from the Year 3017'

(2017)

Short story saluting the 2017 anti-fracking rail blockade at Olympia, Washington, from the perspective of our descendants a thousand years hence. The piece is discussed at some length in Francis Hines's 2021 PhD thesis 'Evading representation: the literature of contemporary U.S. anarchism'.



Ale Damiani // Aparato

(2019)

Short (6min) anti-Trump SF spoof from Uruguay, shared on Facebook's Anarchists and Science Fiction page.


Ron Howard // Apollo 13

(1995)

Dramatisation of the near disaster of the Apollo 13 lunar mission. Convincing and suspenseful, even though the ending's so familiar.
 
A comment on reason.com's The libertarian film festival says "Yes, I know that NASA is a tax-funded bureaucracy; nevertheless, A13 is the only movie I've ever seen in which the main protagonist is human intelligence."


Michael Bay // Armageddon

(1998)

Drilling workers are sent by NASA to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, their mission being to bury a nuclear device deep enough to blow the asteroid apart.



Jon Osborne (see bibliography) includes a review of this film, saying:
 
There are several aspects of this story that will appeal to libertarians. First, it has something of the creator-as-hero theme. [. . .] Second, there are numerous small conflicts between his skilled workers and their government handlers, in which the workers are always right. [. . .] And finally, when the team agrees to save the planet, the chief compensation they demand is that they be free of taxation for the rest of their lives!


E. Armand // 'The Nightmare'

(1931)

This short story, published in Freedom in two parts in March and April 1935, recounts a dream of a prisoner at the bar defending his throwing a bomb at an Anarchist Committee in the 1980s. He did it to attack the hypocrisy of those who profess anarchism but fail to live as anarchists. A moral tale, it just scrapes in here as, by its future setting, marginal sf.
 


Claudie Arsenault // Viral Airwaves

(2016)

Solarpunk first novel by a writer from Quebec, who describes it as "a standalone novel sitting firmly between dystopia and solarpunk and centering LGBTQIAP+ characters", and a hopeful story "about overcoming desperate odds, nemesis working together, and larger-than-life characters". It was plugged by Facebook's Solarpunk Anarchist in December 2017.
 


Claudie Arsenault and Brenda J. Pierson, eds // Wings of Renewal. A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology

(2015)

Pretty much what the title says, the anthology is overwhelmingly fantasy, though with a solarpunk cast.
 
T.X. Watson, interviewed for Obsolete, found the mix "really cool".
 


John Ashcroft // 'Stone and Crystal'

(1954)

In this obscure story from Science Fantasy an individual rebels against the destruction of an alien city by earth colonists; he is "stabilized". Pilgrim in 1963 saw it as "a horribly effective warning against a too enthusiastic worship of science."
 


Isaac Asimov // Foundation trilogy (1952–1953); 'The Dead Past' (1956)

(1956)

Anarchist opinions on the Foundation trilogy have been divided: Pilgrim wrote in 1963 that "The theme of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, Violence is the last resort of the incompetent, is indicative of the general science fiction writer's attitude to war." (Pilgrim 1963: 369) It 'rams home repeatedly the argument that "violence is the last resort of the incompetent." In Peace News in 1966 he added: "Readers of this paper may well argue that violence is the first resort of the incompetent too, but the fact remains that Asimov is adopting an anti-war attitude.' (Pilgrim 1966) Eagle, too, was less than impressed: "Isaac Asimov, in his several novels about Galactic civilisation (the Foundation series and others) can think of nothing better than a depressing Galactic Empire." (Eagle 1969: 2) There is some truth in this—the two Foundations, opposed to the Empire, themselves constitute a scientific elite, the nucleus of the next ruling class. The near-mythic Hari Seldon, whose Plan the Foundations act out, had no doubt of his position:
 
"Even if the Empire were admitted to be a bad thing (an admission I do not make), the state of anarchy which would follow its fall would be worse. It is that state of anarchy which my project is pledged to fight." (Foundation: 27, Panther edn)



'The Dead Past' is Asimov's most notable treatment of 'intellectual anarchy'; it involves a discussion of the ethics of suppressing a 'chronoscope', a device for viewing the past, and the political control of research. The reader is initially encouraged to side with Potterley and Foster, both repeatedly described as "intellectual anarchists", against the government; but Asimov finally sides with Araman, for the government—
 
. . . "you all just took it for granted that the government was stupidly bureaucratic, vicious, tyrannical, given to suppressing research for the hell of it. It never occurred to any of you that we were trying to protect mankind as best we could." (The Best of Isaac Asimov: 246)



All in all it is a strong statist, and specifically anti-anarchist, parable.


Paul Johansson // Atlas Shrugged: Part I

(2011)

Adaptation of the 1957 Ayn Rand novel; parts II and III were released in 2012 and 2014 respectively.
 
Brian Doherty, of Reason magazine, noted that while "the early reactions from Randians has been positive, with adulation from Rand’s closest friends and disciples during the years she wrote Atlas", by the same token, "some people who don’t care for Rand have also hated the film." This is entirely to be expected, given the way Rand divides opinion. I suspect that many readers of this page will be in the latter camp.


Joe Cornish // Attack the Block

(2011)

Centres on members of a teenage street gang who have to defend themselves from a Guy Fawkes Night attack by predatory alien invaders on a council estate tower block in south London.
 
Reviewed by Tom Jennings in Freedom in November 2011, who enjoyed this "witty, engaging homage to cult alien invasion films", and appreciated its "intensive local research and an impressive ensemble of street-cast youngsters," but felt that ". . . the chances for deeper meaningful connections to be made between contemporary class stratification and the predicaments which dominate impoverished urban existence are obliterated in Ali G-style comic relief, scoffing at stereotypically clichéd tentative self-criticisms which are never followed up. Strictly segregating which and whose understandings have import and practical significance rather than entertainment value, Attack the Block thus has far more in common with the safe conservatism of Spielbergian spectacle . . . "
 


Margaret Atwood // The Handmaid's Tale (1985); Oryx and Crake (2003); The Year of the Flood (2009); Maddaddam (2013)

(2013)

The Handmaid's Tale is included in Zeke Teflon's Favorite Anarchist Science Fiction Novels, though he describes it as "More speculative social fiction than science fiction." Zakk Flash, on the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, considers it a "Wonderful, wonderful book."



Oryx and Crake is included in the See Sharp Press list of essential anarchist sf, where it's described as "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."



The Year of the Flood is the first of two sequels to Oryx and Crake, and is also included in the See Sharp Press list.



Maddaddam concludes the trilogy. Unusually, this book has received contrasting treatment by two of the See Sharp Press reviewers: Nicholas P. Oakley finds it tends towards the derivative, and its thin plot "turns downright silly by the end." He concludes "In the trilogy’s two previous instalments, Atwood managed to walk the tightrope between mainstream engagement and genre fiction tropes by creating compelling characters in an interesting world, but by Maddaddam the plot spaghetti and flood of Big Ideas combine to make a disappointing end." Zeke Teflon, however, compiler of their list of essential anarchist sf, is enthusiastic about all three volumes, saying that Maddaddam is "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." I side with Oakley on this.


James Cameron // Avatar

(2009)

Set in the mid-22nd century, when humans are colonizing Pandora, a lush habitable moon in the Alpha Centauri system, in order to mine the mineral 'unobtanium', a room-temperature superconductor. The expansion of the mining colony threatens the continued existence of a local tribe of the Na'vi, a humanoid species indigenous to Pandora. Jake Sully is part of a team seeking to establish contact with the Na'vi and, in avatar form, is inducted into a local tribe. But when his corporate handlers use his information in a violent campaign of clearance he leads a successful resistance movement, with the help of a handful of human defectors, and uploads his consciousness to reside permanently in his avatar body.
 
The film has been of particular interest to anarcho-primitivists. Layla AbdelRahim entitled her 2009 review 'Avatar: An Anarcho-Primitivist Picture of the History of the World'. For her "the film’s logic has anarcho-primitivism stamped in every scene", but she sees as a problem "that to relate the story, Cameron uses the same machines, technologies and money that devastate the wilderness he tells us we need to save." John Zerzan recommended AbdelRahim's review in his 2009-12-29 Anarcho Radio TV video, and the film was under discussion again during each of Zerzan's next five weekly broadcasts.
 
For Red River Radical Avatar is "hardly more than a remixed Dances With Wolves; a watered down anti-colonization story in which a white male is still the hero after his remake into the indigenous other. Avatar’s story revolves around a typical teenage American romance; same gender roles, heteronormative and weirdly middle class." The article author sees it as another example of Hollywood dumbing down.
 
In Glenn's 'Film as Subversion', his essay in the 2015 BASTARD Chronicles, he argues that "What makes a film subversive is determined by how well it challenges a narrative; what makes a film propaganda is reinforcing a narrative." For Glenn, Avatar is propaganda, as it "simply celebrates a Green/Indigenous narrative."
 


Joss Whedon // The Avengers

(2012)

Marvel action: corny but successful. Rocha and Rocha's Joss Whedon, Anarchist [see bibliography] gives an anarchist take:



"The Avengers are only able to succeed when they work collaboratively without hierarchy. Thus, through the lens of the Avengers, we see that to save the world we require an anarchist society where each person builds upon and follows their own autonomy and works collaboratively for the common good."


b

Paolo Bacigalupi // Pump Six and Other Stories (2008); The Windup Girl (2009); The Water Knife (2014)

(2014)

At worldbuilding.stackexchange.com, 'recognizer' suggests that, leaving aside his environmental and technological themes, in The Windup Girl and other works, Bacigalupi "often addresses the conflicts between state power and private (corporate or individual) power, and how these power relationships affect his protagonists." Andrew Dana Hudson sees The Windup Girl as a vision of "solarpunk-gone-wrong". Teflon includes it in his Essential Novels, where he describes it as "Antiauthoritarian and anti-corporatist, but not specifically anarchist." It was recommended in a panel discussion between Rudy Rucker, Terry Bisson and John Shirley at the 2012 San Francisco anarchist book fair. It's also included in the Think Galactic reading list, as is Pump Six and Other Stories.
 
The Water Knife is a bleak portrayal of a future of extreme drought, centring on Phoenix, Arizona, summarised by Andrew Dana Hudson as "In the American southwest permanent drought is making refugees out of everyone who can’t afford to buy a place in a verdant, self-sustaining arcology. This world is solarpunk for some. It is what happens if we allow capitalism to dictate the distribution of sustainable technologies." Though recommended by Zeke Teflon in his 2015 Sharp and Pointed review, as "a very well told story with well drawn characters and an unusual and spot-on social and economic subtext," Teflon, as a Phoenix resident, takes issue with the author's apparent ignorance of the actual city, and argues that Bacigalupi's anticipations of the level of future water shortage in the southwest are overstated, although "it does alert readers to the seriousness of the problems".
 


Francis Bacon // New Atlantis: A Work Unfinished

(1626)

Short piece of utopian speculation, described by SFE as "a remarkably accurate assessment of the potential of the scientific renaissance."
 
Citing this work, Bob Black (see bibliography) describes Bacon as "technology's first enthusiast." Berneri devotes eleven pages to the piece.
 


Patrick Bair // The Tribunal

(1970)

The Tribunal is a lightweight near-future political thriller, involving the declaration of independence of Acquitaine and the attempted destruction of the leaning tower of Pisa; the anarchists, who also smuggle arms into Acquitaine, saw the leaning tower as a symbol of government because, although it will eventually fall, its fall can be accelerated by gunpowder.
 


Ian Ballantine

(--)

Founder of the SF publishing company Ballantine Books, Ian Ballantine was the great-nephew of anarchist Emma Goldman.
 


Victor Lavalle and John Joseph Adams, eds // A People's Future of the United States

(2019)

A worthwhile, progressive, and mostly optimistic anthology, this book was enthusiastically reviewed in 2021 by Maia Ramnath for the Anarchist Studies website. She summed it up as "a wondrous collection of speculative fiction from a starry group of writers with an unfailingly high level of language and invention."



J.G. Ballard // The Wind from Nowhere (1962); The Drowned World (1962); The Drought (1965); The Crystal World (1966); The Atrocity Exhibition (1970); Crash (1973); Millennium People (2003)

(2003)

Ballard's first four novels centre on elemental disasters and, with the exception of the first, successfully transcend the run-of-the-mill. For Vittorio Curtoni, Ballard, "inspired by pictorial surrealism, preached the investigation of 'inner space, i.e. of those connections at the unconscious level which revealed the mechanisms of the human psyche, and translated the idea in a series of brilliant novels [ . . . ] and stories" (25); he only named these four. For one poster to Facebook's Anarchists and Science Fiction page, "The Drowned World perfectly matches many contemporary ideas regarding what the world might be like after decades of climate change."
 
Michael Moorcock's 1978 article in the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review singles out The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash for inclusion among books which in his view promote libertarian ideas. He comments that they have "brought criticisms of 'nihilism' against him" (43). Both works are innovatory in sf, and have an impersonal and amoral quality which perhaps gives rise to such criticisms. They are libertarian in the sense of challenging orthodoxy, of iconoclasm. Crash is described as "seminal" in a 2013 editorial in the Occupied Times.
 
For Ricardo Feral, The Drought, and The Atrocity Exhibition provide "a haunting, introspective alternative to the the mainstream media vision of society."
 
Millennium People features a very British rebellion by the jaded middle class. Darkly humorous, it's included in the Swindon Anarchist Group's list of Anarchist/Resistance Novels.


Iain M. Banks // The Wasp Factory (1984—as by Iain Banks), Culture series—Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games (1988), The State of the Art (1989; expanded as a collection 1991), Use of Weapons (1990), Excession (1996), Inversions (1998); Look to Windward (2000), Matter (2008), Surface Detail (2010), The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)

(2012)

Banks's first published novel, The Wasp Factory, isn't science fiction by most people's understanding, though it was written in response to successive rejection slips for his earlier sf productions. In his (later) preface the author describes it as "a first-person narrative set on a remote Scottish nearly-island told by a normality-challenged teenage eccentric with severe violence issues", a form that "allowed me to treat it as something resembling science fiction." He says "it was supposed to be a pro-feminist, anti-militarist work, satirising religion and commenting on the way we're shaped by our surroundings and upbringing and the usually skewed information we're presented with by those in power." Zeke Teflon, with whom I rarely disagree, says of the novel "While it’s very well written, it’s also horrifying and depressing. It’s one of the very few well written books I’ve encountered that I wouldn’t recommend and that I regret reading." For myself, I'm very glad to have read it, and would readily recommend it to anyone. It is authentically disturbing, and one of the reasons for this is surely that Banks introduced enough from his own life experience that the narrative carries genuine conviction.



The popular Culture series showcases an implicitly anarchist post-scarcity society, enabled by nanotechnology. Banks himself said, of the Culture, "Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable." More specifically, he argued that "the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without." Politically, "one of the few rules the Culture adheres to with any exactitude at all is that a person's access to power should be in inverse proportion to their desire for it." ['A Few Notes on the Culture']



According to the 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary "A non-anarchist, he has been one of the few such to approach depicting a real (if imaginary) anarchist society with any conviction or accuracy, although a significant number of anarchists might dispute that statement."



Of Look to Windward, Wikipedia notes "This book deals with the themes of exile, bereavement, religious justification of mass violence against humanity/sentience in war, and the mores associated with life within a technologically and energetically unlimited anarchist utopia."



All these novels are included in Zeke Teflon's Favorite Anarchist Science Fiction Novels, though he particularly recommends The Player of Games and Surface Detail. McKay enjoyed all the Culture books, finding only Matter disappointing, with Surface Detail the most fun. In my own view, Inversions is the most unusual, but perhaps the most subtle.



The title novella forming the greater part of the State of the Art collection is of particular interest, for two reasons: it is in some ways the most accessible of the Culture series, by its explicit contrast with an Earth of the 1970s and, as the SFE puts it, "for the only time, it openly advocates some aspects of the Culture as a model for human behaviour."



For the anonymous author of 'Beyond Perfection',



"The point of this anarchist utopia [i.e. the Culture] is not that there’s some ignored power relation at work that compromises its integrity, or even that you can have too much of a good thing. It’s a more subtle and complex message about inertia and entropy, of the nature of power and privilege, and the need for change and development, personal and societal, even in the face of seeming perfection."



For Martin H., writing in Workers Solidarity in 2000, "Banks clearly knew his anarchism", and the Culture series "flesh out what it might be like to live in an anarchist society."



William Gillis's 2008 A Few Notes on the Culture & Anarchism is particularly perceptive.


John Barnes // The Man who Pulled down the Sky

(1986)

". . . full of crypto-Anarchism', according to a poster to anarchysf. 'The dominant space colony is organized into IWW divisions so to speak. Each group of seven lives together makes communal decisions and lives bisexually with each other as a family unit comprised of seven. The main character is sent back to Earth to start an uprising that is organized along anarcho-communal lines against the Earth Administration."
 
This description is nonsense. The book is barely coherent, and has no bearing on anarchism whatsoever.


Robert Barr // 'The Chemistry of Anarchy' in The Face and the Mask

(1899)

Feeble story of cowardly anarchists.


Max Barry // Jennifer Government

(2003)

A dystopian view of a world entirely run by ruthless global corporations in murderous competition, with government functions privatised and marginalised.



"'This isn't freedom, John. It's anarchy.'



"'Well,' John said, 'if you're going to split hairs—'"



A very entertaining black comedy.
 


John M. Batchelor // A Strange People

(1888)

Lost race utopia of atheists and anarchists.


Tim Burton // Batman

(1989)

Batman is widely believed to be an urban legend until he takes on a rising criminal mastermind known as the Joker.
 
Dan Clore posted Robert Anton Wilson's film review "Have You Ever Danced With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight?" to the anarchy-sf mailing list in 2005; Wilson considered Batman "an anarcho-surrealist attack on the conventions of mass market melodrama".


Michael Rymer, developed by Ronald D. Moore // Battlestar Galactica; TV miniseries and four seasons, totalling 75 episodes

(2003 and 2004/2009)

Acclaimed and successful re-envisioning of a poor 1978 series of the same name.
 
Post-anarchist academic Lewis Call has written two papers on this series: 'Crisis of Authority Aboard the Battlestar Galactica,' in New Perspectives on Anarchism (2010) ed. Nathan J. Jun and Shane Wahl; and 'Death, Sex and the Cylon: Living authentically on Battlestar Galactica,' in Science Fiction Film and Television vol. 5, no. 1 (2012). Neither is readily available.
 


Barrington J. Bayley // Annihilation Factor (1964); The Soul of the Robot (1974)

(1974)

Annihilation Factor includes the character Castor Krakhno, based on Nestor Makhno. (Dan Clore). Included in Killjoy's list of stories (see bibliography) that feature sympathetic anarchist characters. The Krakhno character, however, is largely a caricature 19th century villainous anarchist, about whom even the author seems ambivalent. The anarchism, such as it is, is both nihilist and individualist.
 
"I admire Barrington J. Bayley, whose stories are often extremely abstract. One of the most enjoyable recently published is The Soul of the Robot which discusses the nature of individual identity." (Moorcock 1978) The novel concerns the quest of the robot Jasperodus for his own identity—is his consciousness real or fake, has he a soul? He has, but not a constructed one. Although the reader takes pleasure in Jasperodus's refusal to take orders and insistence that he alone is the initiator of his deeds, he himself is no more to be admired in his ethical behaviour than his would-be masters; and the excess of palace intrigue detracts from the undoubted interest of some of the book's philosophical discussions.


Edward Bellamy // Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888); Equality (1897)

(1897)

In Bellamy's influential utopia Looking Backward the economy of the future United States is highly organized, workers being organized in an industrial army. We learn that 
 
"Almost the sole function of the administration now is that of directing the industries of the country. Most of the purposes for which governments formerly existed no longer remain to be subserved. We have no army or navy, and no military organization. We have no departments of state or treasury, no excise or revenue services, no taxes or tax collectors. The only function proper of government, as known to you, which still remains, is the judiciary and police system." (Signet Classic edn: 143-4)



Bellamy takes this further in Equality:
 
"A government in the sense of a co-ordinating directory of our associated industries we shall always need, but that is practically all the government we have now. It used to be a dream of philosophers that the world would some time enjoy such a reign of reason and justice that men would be able to live together without laws. That condition, so far as concerns punitive and coercive regulations, we have practically attained. As to compulsory laws, we might be said to live almost in a state of anarchy." (1933 Appleton-Century edn: 409)



This sounds well enough; but, as Marie-Louise Berneri put it,
 
"Bellamy's state socialism allows a greater degree of personal freedom than most other utopias based on the same principles. But it is the freedom which might be granted to soldiers once they have been conscripted; no provision is made for 'conscientious objectors' (249).



While Looking Backward and its sequel are not in themselves anarchist, they nevertheless attracted the interest of Peter Kropotkin himself. He reviewed the first at great length (extending over four issues) in Le Révolté at the end of 1889, noting that "Bellamy's ideal is not ours. But he helps to clarify our own ideas; on many points, without intending to, he confirms them." (Pt 1:1). He concluded: "Whatever may be the defects of this little book, it will always have done the immense service of suggesting ideas and giving matter for discussion for those who really wish for the social Revolution." (Pt 4:2). Lest there be any doubt, though, he stated right at the start of his article that "Bellamy n'est pas anarchiste" (Pt 1:1). Kropotkin found Equality certainly not so interesting, but superior in that it analyses "all the vices of the capitalistic system. . . so admirably that I know of no other Socialist work on this subject that equals Bellamy's Equality." These remarks on Equality come from Kropotkin's obituary notice of Bellamy in Freedom, translated from Les Temps Nouveaux. His final considered opinion:
 
"What a pity that Bellamy has not lived longer! He would have produced other excellent books. I am positive that were Bellamy to have met an Anarchist who could have explained to him our ideal, he would have accepted it. The authoritarianism which he introduced into his Utopia was useless there and contradictory to the very system. It was simply a survival, a concession, a tribute to the past."
 


Coline Serreau // La Belle Verte

(1996)

On a tiny Earth-like alien planet, the decision is taken to send a volunteer to Earth. Earth is seen as backward by the seemingly human aliens, and at first no-one wants to volunteer. One woman eventually raises her hand, curious because her mother was from Earth. The visit to Earth portrays the Paris of the present, but she is later joined by her two sons who initially land in Australia and are given a warm reception by aboriginal people whom the sons instantly take to as far more advanced (as in tune with their environment) than the western world encountered by their mother. The middle segment of the film tells the story of the visit to Earth, the first and third acts depicting life on the alien planet, which is quite idyllic and very solarpunk anarchist. The film is a delightful family comedy, with gentle satiric fun at the expense of the unenlightened Earthlings.



Included in the Anarchist Studies Network's Anarchist filmography, and listed as a utopian film at Black Flag Blog's Anarchism and film.


Hilaire Belloc // But Soft—We Are Observed

(1928)

This light political satire hangs on a mistaken identity / pursuit story. By 1979 "The parliaments of the Great Powers had long ago settled down into two sober parties, Communist on the right and Anarchist on the left, who between them maintained the Majestic Rotation of Representative Government . . . " (Arrowsmith edn: 57) Lady Caroline Balcombe, the Foreign Secretary, had said in a famous statement of 1952:
 
"I am as profoundly attached to Anarchy, and to all the principles of Anarchy, as any woman or man here present. But the only Anarchy I know is an Anarchy to be achieved by Constitutional Means." (87)



Clearly this shouldn't be taken too seriously; however it is suggestive of the durability of political institutions and their ability to absorb dissent.
 


Gregory Benford

(--)

In 1980 Benford said, in an interview with Charles Platt, that
 
". . . many social issues could be solved by simple rational planning—I don't mean top-down planning, but by using the adroitness and competitive spirit of the small scale. In that sense, I'm sort of an unvarnished capitalist, not because I believe in the ownership of things, but because I believe small units are useful. You could as easily call me an anarchist." (Platt 1980: 285)


Donald E. Bensen // And Having Writ . . .

(1978)

Alien astronauts crashland on Earth in 1908 causing, in the original universe (ours), the Tungus meteorite phenomenon. They represent themselves as ambassadors from a galactic empire, whilst actually only wishing to speed up technological progress in order to repair their craft, and have various escapades with H.G. Wells, Rasputin, Theodore Roosevelt, etc. And Having Writ . . . is not really in any way anarchist, but it does present a delightful satire of Earthly ways, and it gently mocks a variety of authority figures. All in all, great fun.
 


Marie Louise Berneri // Journey through Utopia

(1950)

Berneri was an Italian-born anarchist, a member of the group centred on the newspaper Freedom and its stable-mates, and one of the four editors of War Commentary tried in 1945 for incitement to disaffection, but acquitted as her husband Vernon Richards was a co-defendant, and legally she couldn't conspire with him. She died in childbirth aged just 31.
 
Her notable survey of utopias was published the year after her death. Although much of the survey reviews the familiar historical utopias, she also looked at more recent utopian (and dystopian) works, including Lytton's The Coming Race, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Morris's News from Nowhere, Wells's A Modern Utopia and Men Like Gods, Zamyatin's We, and Huxley's Brave New World (Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four being published too late for inclusion).
 
A new edition of Journey through Utopia was reviewed by Geoffrey Ostergaard in Freedom in August 1982. The latest edition was published by PM Press in 2019, with a new introduction and afterword, and a postscript by Kim Stanley Robinson.
 


Louky Bersianik // The Euguélionne

(1976)

Part 3 appears to express anarchist sympathies (feministsf.org). Included in Killjoy's list (see bibliography) of stories that feature sympathetic anarchist characters.
 
It's stretching a point to consider this sf, though. It's a feminist manifesto, objectivised as the viewpoint of a visiting alien.


Walter Besant // The Revolt of Man

(1882)

200 years in Britain's future, men finally rebel against their subjection to women, following women's earlier overthrow of patriarchy. Although readers were clearly intended to applaud the return to the mores of 1882, it's difficult to see quite why Besant was so enthusiastic as a monarchist, so uninterested in even what passed for democracy in 1882 that all his principal characters are titled aristocrats, and the House of Commons only merits a brief mention as being in abeyance until constituents had gained sufficient experience. SFE finds the work "unwittingly funny" for modern readers.



Included in Nettlau's Esbozo, among a handful of utopias and anti-utopias focussing on women.


Alfred Bester // The Demolished Man (1953); The Stars My Destination (a.k.a. Tiger! Tiger!) (1956)

(1956)

John Pilgrim wrote:
 
"On a more popular level a libertarian idea is often thrown away casually with no real discussion, nevertheless its presence can alter the slant of the book. Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, for instance. This is a science fiction detective story set at a period when telepathy has become an accepted power for a large part of the population and psychotherapeutic techniques are much further advanced than at present. People like the hero/villain Reich who want a return to the 20th Century system of power politics are regarded as sick people and treated as such. At the end of the book this conversation occurs: "Three or four hundred years ago the cops used to catch people like Reich just to kill them. Capital punishment they called it [. . .] But it doesn't make sense. If a man's got the guts and talent to buck society he's obviously above average . . . You want to turn him into a plus value . . . Why throw him away? Do that enough times and all you have left are the sheep". "I don't know. Maybe in those days they wanted sheep".



"This particular novel, a popular entertainment mind, not a philosophical dissertation, ends in an outburst from one of the protagonists in which the following words occur: ". . . there is nothing in man but love and faith and courage, kindness, generosity and sacrifice. All else is but the barrier of your blindness . . ." Such lines may not be brilliant, or new to the readers of this journal {Freedom}, perhaps, but they are surely a new thing in popular fiction." (Pilgrim 1963)



The Demolished Man isn't quite the libertarian novel that Pilgrim suggests. The future society shown, though it can redeem 'criminals', still has all the trappings of the state and capitalism; and telepathy, for all its potential to spread sympathy and understanding, is principally shown as just a new weapon in the armoury of repression.
 
Of The Stars My Destination Moorcock wrote: "This is one of the very few libertarian SF novels I have ever read. That it was the first and turned me on to reading SF is probably the purest accident. [. . .] I know of no other SF book which so thoroughly combines romance with an idealism almost wholly acceptable to me . . ." (Moorcock 1978: 43). He particularly commends the conclusion in which the hero, Gully Foyle, delivers PyrE, the ultimate weapon, to the outcasts of the Earth, for them to repossess their future. Foyle justifies himself: "'Who are we, any of us, to make a decision for the world? Let the world make its own decisions. Who are we to keep secrets from the world? Let the world know and decide for itself.'" (Penguin edn, p. 242) The book won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1988. For Evan Lampe, the book reminds him "of the need, from time to time, to embrace those systemic shocks that may not promise permanent freedom but do create spaces for autonomy."


Lauren Beukes // Afterland

(2020)

Excellent South African sf, set so close to the present that the parallel with the COVID-19 pandemic is extraordinary, but in this case it's a novel prostate cancer that has wiped out nearly all men, so that an immune teenage boy is a precious commodity, sought by multiple bad actors. At one point he and his mother stay in an anarchist commune in Utah, the anarchists fairly presented.



Eando Binder // 'Giants of Anarchy'

(1939)

Dire pulp story, originally published in Weird Tales, in the June-July issue of 1939. The principal character travels 10,000 years into the future, and finds that the world has become an Anarchy. But in this case all it means is that, following the release of limitless atomic power, evolution tended in the direction of a diminishing population, as "better minds saw no reason for allowing poorer, duller minds to exist, and warred on them". With the demise of government, the survivors spend all their time duelling in giant battle-machines, apparently for want of anything better to do, while at the same time all concepts of love and friendship have been forgotten. The hero, his girlfriend, and her scientist father have no difficulty in convincing everyone to "forget their differences and live with one another peacefully", claiming that they will "found a new co-operative union here in this mad world of Anarchy!"
 


Terry Bisson // Fire on the Mountain (1988); TVA Baby and other stories (2011)

(2011)

Fire on the Mountain is socialist rather than anarchist, but is an astonishingly convincing alternate history predicated on John Brown's success in the raid at Harper's Ferry in 1859. Of very real interest. It has recently been reviewed in the Winter 2019 Fifth Estate by RB, who finds fault with Bisson's understanding of the true history of the raid, and dislikes what he sees as "Bisson's utopia: a technocratic mega-state that valorizes total domination of nature."



TVA Baby was recommended in Zeke Teflon's review: "If you enjoy concise writing and mordant humor, you’ll enjoy TVA Baby."



In 2010 Terry Bisson moderated a workshop, and in 2012 spoke on 'The Left Left Behind', at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. Rudy Rucker, Terry Bisson and John Shirley were on a panel on Anarchism and Science Fiction at the 2012 Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, which is available as a podcast on Rucker's website. When asked directly, in an interview published in his PM Press The Left Left Behind plus, how he felt about anarchism, Bisson's response was: "As an idea I like it. But I am a big government guy. I'm a TVA baby. Still a Democrat."


Charlie Brooker // Black Mirror

(2011/2013, 2014, 2016→)

Superlative near-future anthology series, each episode free-standing, with different casts.
 
One contributor to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum in 2015 said she'd been "overwhelmed with the political and philosophical issues raised on the show." And one answer to a Quora query on "How would an anarchist society deal with crime?" cited Black Mirror as a "quite chilling" example of one solution.


Ryan Coogler // Black Panther

(2018)

Superhero film with a predominantly black cast, and with strong women characters. While it can be seen as Afrofuturism, and as sending strong messages about diversity and empowerment, and while it has drawn positive comments on Facebook's Anarchist Solarpunk and Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist pages, I found it quite disappointing: while supposedly depicting Africa in a progressive way, it spends as much time presenting traditional tribal images and rituals as it does in demonstrating the technological superiority of the Wakandan state; the story line is corny as hell, and is depressingly centred on elite struggles for supremacy in a traditional monarchy; and the tokenistic conclusion in which the king finally agrees to share some of Wakanda's wealth with African Americans in Oakland altogether fails to redeem the film from its desperate conventionality. I'm not familiar with the comic books from which the film is derived, but surely the film betrays its pulpy origin. It comes across as a rehash of SF stories of the 1920s and 1930s (if not earlier). Full marks for casting, but F for failure of imagination. Well, to be charitable, it might be OK for kids.
 
The film was reviewed in Fifth Estate in Summer 2018, by Matthew Lucas, who considers its place in the history of Hollywood's "attempted recuperation of black-produced black images":
 
"When reduced, the film's embrace of an autocratic ruler allied with the CIA willingly funneling resources to the West, does not depict a new future for Majority World nations populated by people of color. It depicts the one already created by imperialist intervention."



But he concludes that "Black Panther nevertheless could expand avenues of portraying blackness on the big screen."


Ridley Scott // Blade Runner

(1982, final cut 2007)

Based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film depicts a dystopian Los Angeles in which genetically engineered android replicants are banned on Earth, but used for dangerous or menial work on off-world colonies. Replicants who defy the ban and come to Earth are hunted down and killed by special police operatives known as 'blade runners'. The plot focuses on a group of recently escaped replicants hiding in LA and a burnt-out expert blade runner who reluctantly agrees to take on one more assignment to hunt them down. Whether or not the blade runner is himself a replicant is uncertain, forcing an evaluation of what it means to be human.
 
The 2014 Anarchism SubReddit thread on films advocating anti-capitalism features an interesting discussion between two contributors: one recommending Blade Runner, the other describing the film as "merely dystopian corporatism". The former rejoins that "the dystopian realm of Blade Runner is something which is overwhelmingly repulsive, and it achieves this style by doing nothing but extrapolating the effects of our current society. Surely then, it is at the very least portraying the negatives of capitalism in a subconscious manner?"
 
Two contributors to the FB Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum in 2016 included this film among their shortlists of the best SF ever committed to film.
 
Matthew Lucas, in his Fifth Estate review of the film's sequel, observed that the 1982 film "had largely written out much of Dick's political and ecological concerns."


Denis Villeneuve // Blade Runner 2049

(2017)

A young blade runner seeks out the elusive former blade runner Rick Deckard, after uncovering a mystery concerning a replicant who had apparently given birth.
 
Reviewed for the Anarcho-Geek Review by Margaret Killjoy, who loved the cinematography, but deplored its misogyny, saying the real story was about women, yet it was the two male blade runners who were the narrative focus: ". . . what got me, what sat under my skin and left me uncomfortable for an entire day, is just how goddammed many interesting themes about women, trans and cis alike, could and should have been explored in Blade Runner 2049." Similarly Matthew Lucas, who reviewed the film for Fifth Estate #400, in Spring 2018, also drew attention to its "repugnant misogyny," finding it "as limited and lacking in vision as its predecessor—especially in respect to the roles of women in its posthuman future'.


Terry Nation // Blake's Seven

(1978/1981)

The exploits of a political dissident who leads a small group of rebels against the forces of the totalitarian Terran Federation that rules Earth and its colonies.
 
The series was much enjoyed by one poster to the old anarchysf mailing list back in 2000, for whom as a teenager it had been their favourite TV series: "It had a very '80s hopeless end-of-the world feel to it, almost gothic."
 
Seen by Sharp and Pointed as "Great political sci-fi", "which despite its awful FX succeeded because of the strength of its plots and dark, complex characters".
 


James Blish // A Case of Conscience (1953); They Shall Have Stars (1955)

(1955)

A Case of Conscience was discussed by John Pilgrim in his 1963 Anarchy article, for its ethical dimension. The society portrayed, though described by the author as Christian, beyond which Pilgrim himself doesn't venture, is in many ways anarchistic—an austere kind of Godwinian anarchism, its ethical system rooted in nature, as Godwin argued. For Evan Lampe, "The main anarchist themes in this work seem to revolve around the potential for a working anarchist utopia. Lithia lacks governments and moral codes. They even sustain a scientific and technological society without the rise of a technocracy."



Pilgrim also looked at They Shall Have Stars: though he found the plot banal, he considered the novel "a powerful attack on authoritarianism, power politics, and the evils of the military mind's concept of security." (p. 365). This is perhaps somewhat overstated.


Mahiro Maeda // Blue Submarine No. 6 (青の6号)

(1998)

On a distant future Earth, in which the oceans have flooded most of the planet, and most of humankind has been destroyed, submarine forces wage war against a demented scientist and his hybrid marine beings, whom he intends as our successors.
 
Seen by Connor Owens at solarpunkanarchists.com as an ecological reflection on the human species's capacity for destruction, and on whether a post-human world might be "for us death, but for you, a utopia".
 


Félix Bodin // The Novel of the Future (first published as Le roman de l'avenir)

(1834)

Important to the history of sf, but otherwise of little interest now.



Included in Nettlau's Esbozo, as one of the more characteristic non-socialist views of the future, while noting that Bodin was a French deputy.


Alexander Bogdanov // Red Star

(1908)

Socialist utopia on Mars, written by an early Bolshevik not long after the 1905 revolution.
 
Suggested by a couple of contributors to Facebook's Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, one of whom perceives points of similarity to Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Of only peripheral interest here.
 
 


Lizzie Borden // Born in Flames

(1983)

Strongly feminist documentary-style film, cheaply filmed on 16 mm and video, set in a near future social-democratic America. Two women's groups running pirate radio stations turn to direct action after their premises are burned out.
 
Richard Porton, in his Film and the Anarchist Imagination, devotes four pages to an analysis of Born in Flames, finding it, "despite its dystopian scenario, a more optimistic evocation of contemporary currents within anarcho-feminism". He further notes that "From a broader historical vantage point, her fantasia on anarchist themes recapitulates debates between anarchism and social-democratic antagonists such as George Bernard Shaw." Porton found that the film "proved most scandalous, both within the feminist movement and outside it, by resisting the temptation to condemn definitively the use of revolutionary violence." This he sees as a "strategic provocation", in the context of the celebration of the Greenham Common pacifist activism of the time by many radical women who "ascribed to women a state of natural non-violence" which Borden found "dubiously essentialist."
 
Shown at the film festival that formed part of the Boston anarchist bookfair in 2011, the programme for which describes it as exploring racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism. Shown as part of the if I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution exhibition at Haverford, Pennsylvania, curated by Natalie Musteata in 2014, who described it as both "The movie that rocked the foundations of the early Indie film world" and "The film that heralded the arrival of Queer Cinema". Also screened by the Toronto Anarchist Reading Group in July 2016. Also shown in 2017 at a 3-day anarchist mini-film festival in Petersham, Sydney, Australia; the blurb says the film "suggests the insufficiency of a radicalism that restricts itself to politics."
 
Brian Bergen-Aurand lists the film as number 3 in his great anarchist movies that are worth your time, saying "The film emphasizes alternative aesthetics, direct (rather than representative) democracy, and women’s roles in what is deemed as 'necessary violence.'"
 
Lizzie Borden, when asked if she was comfortable with being described as an anarcha-feminist, replied:
 
"I’m comfortable with it by process of elimination because I never quite figured out what it is, but I feel closer to it than any other political identification. I’m so critical of any kind of organized left wing just because of bureaucracy really becoming another class, and the relationship of women to whatever organized left there is. So, the idea of anarchism has always appealed to me simply because it’s always calling into question that which is. I somehow see anarchism as that. I see it as not necessarily excluding different political identifications. For example, on one issue it might be possible to side with a socialist stance, on another issue a very Western stance. But the thing about anarchism is that it allows you not to have to be over-programmed. The other thing is about feminists. What gets me now is people saying that they’re not feminist anymore. Feminism is such a mild word for how I consider myself, that I’m absolutely a feminist. Anarcha-feminism to me has always been about stirring things up. You try to constantly ask those questions which will prevent stasis from setting in. Even at the expense of sometimes being seen as contradictory or saying things that go against what you said a year before or a minute before. For me it’s a process. We all know what’s wrong with Western capitalism and we all know what’s wrong with the extreme left, so anarcha-feminism—it just seems to be the only viable identification, if one is to identify at all."
 
Included in the CIRA filmography (see bibliography).
 


Pierre Boulle // La Planète des Singes (Monkey Planet / Planet of the Apes)

(1963)

A Quora user included this in their list of dystopian novels, in response to a request for 'What are some of the best anarchist fiction novels?' It's also given as an instance of the dystopian sub-genre by Alex R. Knight III, writing on 'Libertarian Anarchism and Speculative Fiction.' Briefly referenced in Graeber and Wengrow's 2021 The Dawn of Everything.
 


Karin Boye // Kallocain (English translation from the original Swedish, 1966)

(1940)

First-person dystopia as written by the inventor of a truth serum that will fulfil the totalitarian dream of the rulers of the world state. "Grim and stark" is the verdict of Anders Monsen, for whom it is one of 50 works of fiction libertarians should read. Also included in Oyvin Myhre's handful of examples of "very good and influential utopian novels".
 


Leigh Brackett // The Long Tomorrow

(1955)

Post-holocaust novel in which two boys escape a strict religious community to look for a fabled secret community that still preserves technology, after a fashion. Both communities are found to have their downsides.



The book is sympathetically discussed at Evan Lampe's
blog
. He notes that "The anarchist critique of technological systems (not technology working on a human scale) is not that dissimilar."


Ray Bradbury // The Martian Chronicles (1950); Fahrenheit 451 (1953); Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)

(1962)

Portions of The Martian Chronicles have a theme of liberty, according to Anders Monsen. A superb and classic collection, in any case.
 
Fahrenheit 451 was described by Daniel Johnson in Freedom in 2014 as a "dystopian masterpiece". It tied for the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1984. For Jeff Riggenbach this work is "one of the most influential libertarian novels of the 20th century".
 
Something Wicked This Way Comes is included in Think Galactic's reading list.
 
Although apparently Republican, and a supporter of George W. Bush, in an interview with Time magazine in 2010 Bradbury said:
 
"I don’t believe in government. I hate politics. I’m against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be."


Burt Brinckerhoff // Brave New World

(1980)

Made for TV adaptation of the Huxley novel. Overlong.
 
Included as a dystopia in Black Flag Blog's Anarchism and film.
 
Reviewed by Alex Peak, as a libertarian science fiction movie. Peak rightly regards the character of Helmholtz Watson as "the libertarian hero" of this movie: Bernard G. Marx ultimately conforms, and in any case poses no threat, and John Savage, too, though interesting, is also a conformist. But Helmholtz "most clearly represents the individualist spirit" and is "the most refreshing, inspiring, and interesting character offered in this teleplay."


Leslie Libman and Larry Williams // Brave New World

(1998)

Again, a TV movie adaptation of the Huxley novel, but this time abridged and updated, with a new ending. Watchable, though.
 
Included as a dystopia in Black Flag Blog's Anarchism and film.
 
Reviewed by Alex Peak, who boldly gives his view that "this movie is even better than the book". As a libertarian dystopia, he says, "This is a story primarily about two things: individuality, and the freedom to have one’s own emotions."
 
 


Terry Gilliam // Brazil

(1985)

Dystopian satire, drawing much from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but also from Kafka, with an appealing flavour of steampunk.
 
Recommended by several contributors to the 2014 Anarchism SubReddit discussion on films advocating anti-capitalism, for one of whom—RednBlackSalamander—it is "one of the greatest movies ever made."
 
This is one of the two Gilliam films named by Glenn in his essay 'Film as Subversion', in the 2015 BASTARD Chronicles, as subversive, and dealing with individual alienation in a hive society.
 
In 2015 the film also received an enthusiastic 30th anniversary review by Clint Worthington on TheFreeOnline, Mike Gilliland's blog. Worthington described the film as "certainly one of the most fascinating and compelling depictions of Orwellian-esque sci-fascism ever put to screen," and concluding "However you feel, Brazil makes everyone hope for a world in which people are free to live, dream, and dissent."


Gene Brewer // K-PAX series

(1995–2007)

Included in Killjoy's list (see bibliography) of stories that explore anarchist societies. Of the four books, the first three were republished as K-PAX The Trilogy. The story centres on a patient in a mental hospital who appears to have a multiple personality disorder, with one of the personalities manifesting as an alien called 'prot' from the planet K-PAX. In some incomprehensible way it appears that prot really is an alien. The world he describes is so attractive in most respects, with its peace, its freedom from government and religion, and its love of harmony and a sustainability, that it is hard not to reach the conclusion that humans have got it all badly wrong. It is no coincidence that prot says, of a book he once read called The Travels of Gulliver, that 'The author got it about right.'



K-PAX IV (2007), is a disappointing coda.
 


Raymond Briggs // When the Wind Blows

(1982)

Graphic novel in which an elderly couple experience the dropping of a nuclear bomb in England. Well received at the time by reviewers (two of them children) in two issues of Freedom. In the later review Julie Southwood wrote:
 
"With wit, sympathy and simplicity almost unbearable in its pathos, Briggs illustrates how powerless we all are, once we agree to leave decisions concerning our 'survival' to any self-appointed elite of politicians and 'experts' . . . Whatever one's political views, this book concentrates the mind wonderfully on the real questions: what sort of survival, for whom, at what price?" (Julie Southwood 1982)


David Brin // The Uplift War

(1987)

Intelligent space opera, third of what SFE describes as a 'super-series'. One of Anders Monsen's 50 works of fiction libertarians should read; Monsen says "Uplift War deals with rights and liberties in subtle ways, and remains memorable for very realistic sketches of interactions between species."
 


Brooke Bolander // The Only Harmless Great Thing

(2018)

Unusual novelette engaging with two historical atrocities, the radiation poisoning of the New Jersey radium girls and the 1903 exhibition of the electrocution of Topsy the elephant, entangled with the notion of luminous elephants serving as warders of future toxic waste dumps.



Enthusiastically received by the podcasters at anarchySF.com, who devoted a whole

episode
to this tale.


John Sayles // The Brother from Another Planet

(1984)

Gentle comedy, showing incidents in the experience of an alien slave who has escaped and crash-landed in New York; he appears African-American, and is pursued by two white alien 'men in black'. Seen as a classic of Afrofuturism.
 
Included in the Red Planets filmography (see Bould, bibliography).


adrienne maree brown // Grievers

(2021)

A fine opener to the AK Press anarchist Black Dawn series. A mystery pandemic sweeps Detroit, a lone woman trying to make sense of what's happening.



For Carrie Laben, reviewing the work for The Anarchist Review of Books #3 (Winter/Spring 2022), it is "inseparable from history", and brown "has laid out a possible future for those communities, one founded on love and mutual aid in the face of official indifference and cruelty." She concludes that "it's hard to imagine a more accurate picture of the moment that everything changed, or of the forever that preceded and followed it."



Fredric Brown // 'The Weapon'

(1951)

Described by John Pilgrim as "impressive", a "straightforward little morality tale", and an "instance of sf's capacity for healthy scepticism about the ethics of scientific research." (Pilgrim 1963, 1966)
 


Peter Currell Brown // Smallcreep's Day

(1965)

Colin Ward's Work (1972) concludes with a long quotation from this book (Ward 1972: 64). Smallcreep is a factory assembly worker, who one day roves through the factory hoping to discover once and for all what he has been making all these years. The work as a whole is a very powerful protest against alienation; chapter Eight in particular contains an anguished confession from the managing director of his comprehension of the hypocrisy and unfairness of the system of authority which he represents. The managing director's devastating demolition of authority, and his vision of what a free society would be, may be presumed to represent Brown's own views: Smallcreep himself fails to understand them, which is Brown's pessimism—he, like the managing director, has no faith in his own visions, and can see no way out.
 


John Brunner // Stand on Zanzibar (1968); The Sheep Look Up (1972); The Shockwave Rider (1975)

(1975)

In his 1964 essay on political attitudes in SF Brunner envisaged an automated anarchistic society as a possibility worth exploring in SF (Brunner 1964: 125). Interviewed in 1979, he said that "if you had to classify me, you'd have to put me in some vague area like 'fellow-travelling idealistic anarchist.'" (Platt: 276)
 
Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up are included in Think Galactic's reading list.
 
For Lessa, Takver & Alyx, writing in Open Road in 1978, the "anarchist city Precipice" of The Shockwave Rider "appears like a jewel in a sea of horror". (13) Congenial and professedly anti-authoritarian as Precipice may be, it can't fairly be described as anarchist, given that it supports sheriff, mayor, courts, lawyers, and a judicial code with mandatory sentences. It is included in Zeke Teflon's Favorite Anarchist Science Fiction Novels.


Tobias S. Buckell // 'Necahual'

(2004)

Included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 


Algis Budrys // Who?

(1958)

"Who? asked three major questions. How does technology shape who we are? How does technology (and technocracy) undermine our human relations? And, how—in the modern era—do institutions take the role in defining us, undermining our capacity for self-identification?" [Lampe's blog]
 


Lois McMaster Bujold // Falling Free

(1988)

Won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 2014.
 


Bulwer Lytton // The Coming Race

(1871)

William Godwin exerted a degree of influence on Lytton's writing, and Godwin wrote to Lytton admiring his early work Paul Clifford. Godwin even gave support to Lytton when the latter stood for parliament. But George Woodcock notes that though Lytton "had a real admiration for Godwin as a philosopher" he was "most attracted to him as a novelist" (Woodcock 1946:231). The Coming Race is the work by which Lytton is chiefly remembered in science fiction circles. It is a utopia set underground, in which social relations have been drastically modified since the discovery of 'vril', an almost magical source of unlimited energy available to every individual. Political power is thus rendered inoperable: "Man was so completely at the mercy of man, each whom he encountered being able, if so willing, to slay him on the instant, that all notions of government by force gradually vanished from political systems and forms of law." (Steiner pb edn: 56). Marie-Louise Berneri (242) detected Godwin's influence in Lytton's model of a stateless society. Angel Cappelletti (1966:31) additionally hints at some influence from Proudhon. But without suggesting direct influence perhaps Woodcock's suggestion is closest, namely that Lytton's utopia is similar to the world of Stirnerite egoists.


Katherine Burdekin (writing as Murray Constantine) // Swastika Night

(1937)

For Moorcock, the novel "seems to think that Christianity could conquer Hitler but is otherwise a pretty incisive projection of Nazism several hundred years in the future". (Moorcock 1978)
 


Eugene L. Burdick & Harvey Wheeler // Fail-Safe

(1962)

Tense thriller in which mechanical failure leads to a US nuclear attack on Moscow; to convince the Soviet leader that it was a mistake, the US president is forced to order the tit-for-tat destruction of New York. John Pilgrim in 1966 considered it to be in the tradition of Chesney's The Battle of Dorking, but its motivation is very different, being passionately opposed to nuclear escalation and the arms war.
 


Anthony Burgess // A Clockwork Orange (1962); 1985 (1978)

(1978)

Burgess himself responded in the pages of Freedom to a review by Nicolas Walter of the film of his book. The novel concerns a violent delinquent youth who is forcibly conditioned to non-violent behaviour at the cost of his absorbing pleasure in music; he is eventually reconditioned to his old behaviour patterns. The near-anarchistic moral of the story is made explicit by Burgess in his later work, 1985, which includes comments on A Clockwork Orange:
 
"The unintended destruction of Alex's capacity for enjoying music symbolizes the State's imperfect understanding (or volitional ignorance) of the whole nature of man, and of the consequences of its own decisions. We may not be able to trust man—meaning ourselves—very far, but we must trust the State far less." (Arrow edn: 93).
 
'1984' — the first part of Burgess's 1985 — displays an extensive knowledge of the anarchist movement, its history and philosophy. References to the Spanish Civil War or to Sacco & Vanzetti are unusual but not unique in sf, but Burgess's mention of an anarchist youth movement in China's Yunan province almost certainly is. A chapter entitled 'Bakunin's Children' actually incorporates a three-page biographical portrait of Bakunin, whom he describes as "the rank meat in a more rational anarchical sandwich, tastier than the dry bread of theory that Proudhon offered before him and Kropotkin after." (69). Burgess argues that Bakunin's temperament, which urges him to destroy all that is old, led anarchists to reject the past, and that "Anarchism, in rejecting the past and assuming that the new is, by a kind of Hegelian necessity, better than the old, opens the way to tyranny." (77) Thus, for Burgess, the world of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has its intellectual origins in nineteenth-century anarchism. "Anarchism is not possible. Bakunin is a dead prophet." (81) Nevertheless, Burgess clearly finds it appealing: though he says "you can almost smell the cordite in the word" (69) he finds its overtones "terrible, and attractive" (71). Essentially it is historical anarchism that Burgess rejects, rather than anarchism's roots in anti-statism and individualism. Having rejected Bakunin and Kropotkin, Burgess opts for Thoreau, "the true patron saint" (82) of the individual. "The individual alone can be a true anarch." (82).



A Clockwork Orange won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 2008.


Edgar Rice Burroughs // The Gods of Mars

(1918; serialised 1913)

Included in Anders Monsen's 50 works of fiction libertarians should read. Monsen says:



"Religion might be the opiate of the masses, but when pushed by the state, dissension often means death. This sequel to the more famous A Princess of Mars skewers blind faith. One doesn’t usually think of Burroughs [ . . . ] as someone with political ideas expressed in fiction. Yet the vehemence with which John Carter expresses his hatred for the Therns and the aeon-long deception of the other Barsoomian races, makes this book a clear novel for liberty."


William S. Burroughs // The Naked Lunch (1959); The Soft Machine (1961/6); Nova Express (1966); The Ticket That Exploded (1968); The Wild Boys (1969), Exterminator! (1974); Cities of the Red Night (1981), Ghost of Chance (1991)

(1991)

Burroughs's work is difficult to describe or classify, but most of his books have some SF interest, and among these all the above titles have been referred to in anarchist publications. The most characteristic and recurrent of his themes is stated succinctly in The Naked Lunch:
 
" . . . You see control can never be a means to any practical end . . . . It can never be a means to anything but more control . . . . Like junk . . ." (164, Calder & Boyars edn).



Dave Cunliffe, in his 1968 Freedom review of The Soft Machine, summed up Burroughs as "a technological mystic and creative journalist with liberal and reformist tendencies". But "his inspired solipsistic vision" (Moorcock 1983: 71) represents more than this: his sympathies are libertarian and revolutionary. B.P.D., writing in Freedom in 1972, felt that "To employ the term 'anarchist' to such an individualist thinker as William Burroughs would be to categorise him wrongly and unnecessarily." But that he approached closely to anarchism is shown clearly in his 1969 interview with Daniel Odier, published as The Job. He says he is "very dubious of politics myself" (47), and believes that "all existing governments are control machines" (35); and when asked directly whether he believes in the anarchist solutions for the future he replies
 
"I don't really know what they are, although I would say this, that I don't believe in any solution that proposes halfway measures. Unless we can abolish the whole concept of the nation, and the whole concept of the family, we aren't going to get anywhere at all, just nowhere." (65)



He had no illusions about the (then current) hippie challenge to the system of control: "The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower-pot from a high window." (67)
 
"While Burroughs work is primarily dystopian, a few anarchistic utopian societies do show up. In The Wild Boys, for example, Burroughs portrays an anarchistic society that consists of roving gangs of dope-smoking, homosexual teenage boys who wear nothing but jockstraps and rollerskates. The trilogy that begins with Cities of the Red Night includes material about several attempts to found libertarian societies, including Libertatia . . . and a group of Rimbaud-reading, dope-smoking, homosexual Zen gunslingers in the Wild West. Ghost of Chance stars Captain Mission and his pirate utopia Libertatia." (Dan Clore)
 


Carl Bussjaeger // The Anarchists

(2002)

Libertarian SF collection. Readable, and entertaining in parts.
 


Octavia E. Butler // Patternmaster (1976); Mind of My Mind (1977); Kindred (1979); Wild Seed (1980); Lilith's Brood (1987–1989, aka Xenogenesis; consisting of Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)); Parable of the Sower (1994); Parable of the Talents (1999); Fledgling (2005)

(2005)

Patternmaster—the last of the Patternist series, by internal chronology—is one of the weakest of Butler's novels, but is nevertheless included in Mark Bould's Red Planets reading list (see bibliography), and is in Dukan's bibliography as an early work from the first generation of Black Futurists. Lewis Call devotes half a dozen pages to the series, including a page specifically on this novel, in 'Structures of desire', his chapter in Hecker and Cleminson, eds: Anarchism & Sexuality. He notes that the hierarchical structure of the Pattern makes it "a tempting target for anarchist critique, which Butler deploys without naming it as such."



Mind of My Mind, the second of the Patternist series, is much stronger. Call devotes a page to this novel, in 'Structures of desire', as mentioned above. He disagrees with feminist critics who see in a positive light the community developed by the protagonist, saying that while the regime may be "more nurturing and more organic," nonetheless "it remains a non-consensual slave system".



Kindred is probably Butler's best-known work, and is by now pretty much a standard text, featuring a complex critique of race and power relationships in the ante-bellum South, from the viewpoint of an African-American woman from 1976, who is intermittently pulled back to 1815 whenever her slave-owning white forebear is in danger.



Wild Seed is the first of Butler's Patternist series, in internal sequence. Call devotes half a dozen pages to the series, including a couple of pages specifically on Wild Seed, in his 'Structures of desire'. He sees the novel as "a sadomasochistic love story," in which Butler discovered "a kind of erotic play-slavery," which she presents as "an effective strategic and symbolic challenge to a principal character's "ugly, empire-building slavery." He concludes that "A text would have to be kinky and postanarchist to achieve something like that."



For Anu Bonobo, in Fifth Estate #373,
 
"Dawn's most daring maneuver was not the unattractive aliens on the breathing bio-ship that rescued the xenophobic humans after a human holocaust—nor even the seemingly benevolent freaks' rejection of humanity's apparently inherent hierarchies; rather, Butler busted boundaries with bizarre, kinky, and blissfully psychedelic interspecies sex. Even though the humans cannot help but like it, do they really want it? As one might imagine, the issue of permission is problematic here; do the humans choose to breed with their apparently terrifying and tentacled saviors and captors? Is this patronizing servitude masked as emancipation?"



The Xenogenesis stories have also been recommended on the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum. But Zeke Teflon has added a corrective, stressing that the the view that the trilogy is a flawed utopia is "grotesque".
 
The two Parable books chart the rise of a movement based on mutual aid (or just common human decency) amid the breakdown of society in the United States. Warm and literate, it's unfortunate that the author chose to hang her principles on a new religion.
 
Butler's work, and especially the Parable novels, were featured in articles in her memory, by Anu Bonobo and Benjamin Carson, in Fifth Estate in 2006. While Bonobo focuses on her Afrofuturism, Carson, while relishing the mutual aid depicted, finds Butler's orientation towards a future in space "deeply troubling".



Bonobo, in Fifth Estate #373, speaks of the vampire collectives of Fledgling as "bloodlinked free love communes—of a sort. But since the symbionts need the vampire kiss like a junky needs his needle, it’s difficult to define this as a liberated relationship." Fledgling is included in the Think Galactic reading list as well as the Swindon Anarchist Group's list of anarchist/resistance novels.
 


Samuel Butler // Erewhon (1872); Erewhon Revisited (1901)

(1901)

Erewhon is a satirical utopia with dystopian elements, set in New Zealand. Established Western conventions are overturned—criminals are cured, but sickness punished; churches have become musical banks; machines have been banned because of fears of their possible role as evolutionary successors to Homo sapiens. The satire was familiar reading to a number of anarchists: Marie-Louise Berneri, Angel Cappelletti, Ethel Mannin, Herbert Read, and George Woodcock all refer to it. In this satire, for Cappelletti, "is shown the singular taste of the author for inverting ideas and values commonly accepted, pleasure in turning the world upside down, and a caustic and subversive use of paradox" . . . (Cappelletti 1966: 27)



In Andrew Culp's 'Dark Deleuze', included in The Anarchist Library, the author devotes a paragraph to the discussion of this work by Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy?, in which he says they conclude that "For Butler, Erewhon
summons neither a new people nor a new earth but is instead a field guide to negate everything he finds intolerable in his present. Utopia becomes the map to
transform the now-here into the no-where."
 
Erewhon Revisited was bought and read by Herbert Read in 1915. (Read 1963: 211)
 
 


Monica Byrne // The Girl in the Road

(2014)

A science fiction story dividing its time between Africa and India and heavily inspired by Ursula Le Guin, The Girl in the Road interpolates the issues of religion, climate, gender, and personal sovereignty over our sexuality. It takes place in the near future and introduces many questions which concern our present. Its two stories are split between a coming of age story amidst a society in conflict and upheaval (in Africa) and a rich, relatively stable society undergoing the slow creep of techno-oppression (India).



While anarchy is not explicitly discussed, its emphasis on the inequality of climate change but also its potential to remake the world, the dangerous use of technology in the hands of the state apparatus, gender roles and our resistance to them, and the overall importance of personal resistance to the norm is of much interest to anarchist ideologues or those interested in the ideology.


c

Kevin Willmott // C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America

(2004)

Effective mockumentary, purporting to be a cable-TV-style account—complete with fake archive footage and even commercial breaks—of the alternate history of the establishment of a Confederate empire across most of the Americas, where slavery has remained the norm until the present day, after Confederate victory in the American Civil War.
 
Mark Bould's Red Planets filmography says it "reveals how deeply the tendrils of racism extend into the present." The film was one of those selected by Joe Jordan, of Anarchist People of Color, for inclusion in events for black history month in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2013.
 


Étienne Cabet // Travels in Icaria

(1839; first published in 1840 as Voyage et aventures de Lord William Carisdall en Icarie)

Icaria proves to be a communist utopia of rather an authoritarian stamp.
 
Berneri has sixteen pages on Cabet's utopia, which she finds particularly uncongenial:
 
"Etienne Cabet belonged to that type of social reformer whose love of humanity is as boundless as their faith in their own power to work out its salvation." (219)



"Though there are no rich and no poor in Icaria, no professional politicians and soldiers, no policemen and no prisons, we feel strangely uncomfortable at finding that it has so many features in common with the totalitarian régimes of the twentieth century. [ . . . ] The love of uniformity, centralisation and state-control is to be found in most utopias, but in Voyage to Icaria it is carried to such extremes as to make it resemble, in many parts, the satirical utopias of our century." (235)


Ernest Callenbach // Ecotopia (1975); Ecotopia Emerging (1981)

(1981)

Ecotopia drew mixed responses from anarchists. For Lessa, Takver & Alyx it was "an environmentalist's dream come true", but for Milligan "Ecotopia is a shoddy amalgam of Swedish social democracy, Swiss neutrality, and Yugoslav workers' co-ops cobbled together with the authoritarianism of Blueprint for Survival. [ . . . ] Ecotopia is a flawed vision of a flawed future." For A.B. "This is an important book which should not be taken seriously", but is "unconvincing on the political plane".
 
Ecotopia Emerging is the prequel, setting the scene for the first novel. It is tagged as SF in the CIRA catalogue, as well as being included in the Red Planets reading list (see Bould, in bibliography).
 


Italo Calvino // If on a winter's night a traveller

(1981; originally published in 1979 as Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore)

Not sf, but as SFE puts it this novel "stunningly transfigures the conventions and momentums of narrative into a Bunuelesque labyrinth", and Calvino's "use of SF subjects and their intermixing with a whole array of contemporary literary devices made him a figure of considerable interest for the future of the genre."
 
Calvino wrote, of his father, that he "had been in his youth an anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Socialist Reformist".
 


Tommaso Campanella // Civitas Solis

(1623, but first draft 1602; first English translation 1885, as The City of the Sun)

This classic utopia was seen straightforwardly by Max Nettlau, in his Short History, as authoritarian and statist. Ethel Mannin, too, cut straight to the chase, declaring that it is in the "Platonic Fascist tradition". But Berneri was somewhat more charitable, in the 14 pages she devoted to the work. She noted that it



. . . "is the first utopia which gives a leading role to natural sciences. It is also the first utopia which abolishes slave labour and considers all manual work, however humble it may now appear, as an honourable duty. As in other utopias, however, there is little freedom in the City of the Sun."



However, given Campanella's own experience of years of imprisonment courtesy of the Roman Catholic church, she noted that "not unnaturally, Campanella bans prisons and torture from his ideal city." Nevertheless, given that the utopia was intended as a political blueprint, she found it "arid and uninspiring."



Bob Black has commented approvingly on Campanella's suggested four-hour working week.


John W. Campbell, Jr // 'Constitution for Utopia'

(1961)

This is a typically controversial editorial by Analog's most influential editor. Characteristically, he says the creation of utopia is "an engineering problem, and should be approached as such." (5)
 
Campbell argues that "Since it can be pretty fairly shown that any form of government—from pure anarchy through absolute tyranny, with every possible shading in between—will yield Utopia provided the rulers are wise, benevolent, and competent, the place to start engineering of Utopia is with the method of selecting rulers" (6). This he suggests should be done by restricting the franchise to the top 20% income bracket, irrespective of how such income may have been earned, which in Campbell's view should at least ensure competence, which is really the only criterion which concerns him.
 
Anarchism is pretty summarily dismissed:
 
"Anarchy is government-that-is-no-government. In other words, each individual citizen is his own ruler. Given that all the citizens are wise, benevolent, and competent, anarchy will produce a Utopia. Unfortunately, this requires that each citizen be in fact, not simply in his own perfectly sincere convictions, actually wise, benevolent and competent."



It is therefore clearly impossible. Campbell spells this out in a reply to a letter in a subsequent issue (UK edition, Oct 1961): "the usual trouble is that some individual exercises his right as an Anarchist, to live the way he wants to by enslaving his neighbours." (125)
 


Karel Čapek // R.U.R. (1920); War with the Newts (1936)

(1936)

It has been said that Čapek had to leave school "when it was discovered that he was a member of a secret anarchist society". (Gale) He has also been quoted as saying (but at what date is unknown) "I think I am slowly becoming an anarchist, that this is only another label for my privateness, and I think that you will understand this in the sense of being against collectivity." (Wikiquote)
 
Berneri, Read, and Woodcock were all familiar with R.U.R., in which the word 'robot' first became common parlance. Read felt that maybe the robot "is no longer an appropriate symbol for an age of automation. Capek saw men transformed into a machine; we see machines transformed into men." (Read 1966)
 
Čapek's satiric novel War with the Newts ridicules Nazi-Germany and fascism in general, while conveying the author's ideas that technology can become a threat to mankind and that capitalism unrestrained also poses a serious danger. It's included in the Think Galactic reading list.


Anthony Russo and Joe Russo // Captain America: Civil War

(2016)

Lots of action and some pretty good effects, but basically a silly story of too many superheroes fighting each other.
 
The Anarcho-Geek Review's Sadie the Goat was rather more enthusiastic with a review entitled 'Captain America is a big screen anarchist superhero, how fucking weird is that?', saying "Steve's [Captain America's] perspective [ . . . ] fits nicely with an anarchist outlook; he is fighting to keep his actions his own. He refuses to put himself in a position of taking orders simply to avoid the possibility that he might have to feel guilty for his own mistakes later. That’s anarchist as hell" . . . .
 
Connor Owens, at solarpunkanarchists.com, gives 'A Social Anarchist Take on Captain America: Civil War', which—while still enjoying the film—gives a rather more in-depth analysis of the film from this perspective. And I fully concur with a key point he makes:
 
"Built on a legacy of slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and ecocide, from a social anarchist perspective the best thing superheroes could do, if they’re going to exist at all, would be to use their enhanced abilities to help inspire a planetary popular uprising against capitalist-statism—then use their powers constructively to help build a post-scarcity economy of the commons. This would effectively eliminate about 90% of the things they beat people up for."


Orson Scott Card // Ender's Game (1985); Seventh Son (1987)

(1987)

Ender's Game is included in the Think Galactic reading list.



Of the Tales of Alvin Maker series, beginning with Seventh Son, Toni Bloodworth, in a 2000 posting to the original AnarchySF mailing list, wrote:



"The series seems to me about how spirituality, fully lived, leads us to try to be active in the world and try to create a humane society. Yes, Card is a Mormon, a sect of Christianity I find problematic at best, but he comes across as far more tolerant than most Mormons."


Chris Carlsson // After the Deluge

(2004)

Explores an attractive anarchist society in a post-collapse 22nd century San Francisco. Anu Bonobo, in Fifth Estate, described it as "more an imaginary treasure map than utopia-by-the-numbers blueprint . . .". Carlsson, in the acknowledgments, depicts the novel simply: "a stab at describing the world I'd like to wake up into."
 


John Carnell, ed. // New Writings in SF–1

(1964)

The first of a long series of original anthologies, it was briefly reviewed in Freedom in 1965, where it was described as "a well balanced collection" (anon. 1965). It is actually mediocre sf.
 


Lewis Carroll // Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

(1865)

So much a part of our cultural heritage that for years I didn't include it in this listing. But it has been as familiar to anarchists as to other readers, and was commented on by, for instance, Alex Comfort, Herbert Read, and George Woodcock.
 
The poet W.H. Auden considered Wonderland to be "a place of complete anarchy" (Auden 1962: 35).
 


Angela Carter // Heroes and Villains

(1969)

For Arthur Wardo, writing in Freedom, this was "Yet another fantasy of what things will be like after a nuclear war. Angela Carter's novel is one of the more realistic visions however."
 


Michael Chabon // The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000); The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007)

(2007)

Kavalier & Clay isn't sf, but superhero comic books are centre stage to the novel, set in the so-called Golden Age of the genre. Endorsed by Ursula Le Guin, who in 2007 wrote



". . . if you haven't read Kavalier and Clay yet, go read it at once, what on earth have you been waiting for?"



The Yiddish Policemen's Union is noted by Teflon as a "fine alternate history novel". Recommended by Ursula Le Guin as "Crazy like a genius."


Becky Chambers // The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

(2014)

Warm-hearted space opera, mercifully underplaying 'adventure', but strong on character, humour, gender, and unorthodox sexual relationships. SFE comments on how the starship crew "eschews weapons and deals with its crises using co-operation and diplomacy."
 


A. Bertram Chandler // The Anarch Lords

(1981)

A space opera concerning a planet named Liberia, which had been settled by anarchists. The extent to which the colony had stuck to anarchist principles had varied much over the years. There is now an Original Anarchist Party, which favours a return to basic principles. These, however, are opposed by the entrenched anarchist establishment, "the cream of Liberian society, the black-and-scarlet-clad Anarchist grandees and their ladies" (50, DAW edition). Bakunin has become a demi-god, 'Holy Bakunin' is used as an interjection (139), and the central figure even wonders if anarchists pray to him!
 
Not only does Chandler's knowledge of anarchism tend towards zero, the novel is forgettable third-rate sf.


A.V. Chayanov // The Journey of my Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia

(1920)

Alexei dozes off while reading Herzen, and wakes in a peasants' utopia, which is described with some charm; if it was all a dream remains uncertain, as the work is unfinished.



Geoffrey Ostergaard reviewed this work at length in Freedom in 1978, describing it as ". . . probably the only and only peasant utopian romance ever written . . .". (9) ". . . Chayanov's vision of Russia was not an anarchist one, "the marvellous anarchy of Prince Kropotkin". But it may fairly be described as "libertarian socialist". In its distrust of the State, in its concern for individual freedom, in its hostility to the values typical of industrial urbanised society, and in many other ways, it expresses an ideology that is miles nearer to anarchism than it is to bolshevik Marxism." (13)



See also Russian anarchist utopias of the 1920s. The work is also briefly described by Javier Sethness.



Nikolai Chernyshevsky // What is to be Done?

(Что делать, 1863)

Marginal to science fiction, and of marginal anarchist interest, but a minor utopian socialist work of major historical significance, especially in Russia. The novel was translated by Benjamin Tucker and serialised in Liberty from 1884 to 1886. Both Tolstoy and Lenin borrowed the title for works of their own. Kropotkin himself wrote of this novel that "It became the watchword of Young Russia, and the influence of the ideas it propagated has never ceased to be apparent since." (Kropotkin 1899)
 



Alexander Berkman, in his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, speaks of how he'd consciously modelled himself on this novel's hero, Rakhmetov. He says "I am simply a revolutionist, a terrorist by conviction, an instrument for furthering the cause of humanity; in short, a Rakhmetov. Indeed, I shall assume that name upon my arrival in Pittsburgh." He did indeed sign that name in the hotel register, on his first night there.



In December 1982, this work was reviewed at length (five pages) by Nicolas Walter, in Freedom.. For Walter, "It may not be one of the great classics of Russian fiction, but it deserves its place as a minor classic of political and social utopianism." 


C.J. Cherryh // Cyteen

(1988)

Suggested by a respondent to a Metafilter query looking for left-anarchist SF.
 


George T. Chesney // The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer

(1871)

For John Pilgrim, in 1966, this story "gave a military twist to the popular conception of the survival of the fittest".
 


G.K. Chesterton // The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904); The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

(1908)

George Woodcock, discussing Orwell's view on nationalism in 1966, used The Napoleon of Notting Hill as the extreme example of how local patriotism could be, when ". . . every parish is its own patria" (p203). This work of Conservative romanticism has a degree of charm that may appeal, but is really of only slight interest for anarchists. It may have been more than chance that suggested this comparison to Woodcock, as Napoleon is set in 1984.
 
The Man Who Was Thursday is included here on the strength of Brian Aldiss's comment (in Billion Year Spree, 1973) that it is "Not science fiction, perhaps, yet nearer to science and rationality than the science fantasy which is the hallmark of the period."
 
Jack Robinson, in Freedom in 1977, described this work as "a parable . . . in which the anarchist gang all turn out to be policemen (not so improbable) but this idea evaporated in gaseous Catholic mystic flummery." John Quail, in his 1978 history of British anarchism, The Slow-Burning Fuse, referred to it as a variation of a stereotype developed in the 1890s. Although the novel is entirely about anarchists, not a single character actually is one, so it's particularly unjust that the book has become one of the sources of the stock anarchist slander. Chesterton's only authorial comment on real anarchists comes in chapter IV where, speaking of Syme ('Thursday') he writes that "He did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men, combining ignorance with intellectualism." It is an entertaining novel, but basically rubbish.


Alfonso Cuarón // Children of Men

(2006)

Set in England in 2027, two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse, with illegal migrants corralled in camps. Miraculously, a 'fugee' is found to be pregnant, and is helped to find sanctuary with the 'Human Project'.
 
The film was reviewed by Tom Jennings in Freedom when it came out, in typically acerbic manner. While finding the set design and cinematography "magnificent", and the action sequences "superb", he concludes:
 
"So, opposition to the fascist state from the urban guerrilla 'Fishes' [ . . . ] signposts the messianic underbelly of moral politics. This rainbow coalition of former anti-war, civil rights and green activists is riven with 'broad front' contradictions—only demanding human rights for refugees; yet launching armed insurrection! Utterly lacking the sociopolitical underpinnings to wring interesting speculation from its pandemic/police state scenario, Children of Men's naff nativity parable crumbles into faith in scientific progress—the mythical 'Human Project' run by "the best brains in the world" on the good ship Tomorrow. [ . . . ] The redemptive convergence of rationalist wishful-thinking with pseudo-religious ethical superiority, promising salvation from the jackboot, is instead its shoehorn—with the blind liberal management of capitalism actively fostering disaster. Theo's death delivering (Black refugee) madonna and (female) child to safety then merely finesses the conclusion that middle-class heroism (physical or philosophical)—like this film—can suggest no solutions."



But for David Ehrlich at IndieWire, ten years after its release Children of Men has become not only the "best and bleakest sci-fi movie of the 21st Century", but also the most prescient: "Children of Men may be set in 2027, but when Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States, it suddenly became clear that its time had come."
 


John Christopher // The World in Winter (1962); The Lotus Caves (1969)

(1969)

In The World in Winter Europeans retreat to Africa at the onset of a new ice age. Arthur W. Uloth, writing in Anarchy, suggested that the survival of this novel's leading characters is sufficiently improbable (as whites who deserve a come-uppance), as to verge on racism on the part of the author.
 
The Lotus Caves, a juvenile, concerns the discovery by two boys of an exotic world of alien life beneath the surface of the moon. Colin Ward, in his 1974 educational book on utopias, used the drabness of existence in the moon colony to demonstrate that even escape to other worlds can't ensure the attainment of utopia. Seemingly this example was selected at random, as it doesn't seem particularly pertinent.
 
 


Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet // The City of Lost Children

(1995)

Demented scientist kidnaps children to steal their dreams, but finds inevitably that they only have nightmares. Surreal, oneiric steampunk.
 
Included in Glenn's 'Film as Subversion', in The BASTARD Chronicles, where it is described as "a dadaist steam-punk fantasy [. . .]" which "leaves the viewer wondering, 'What is Normal'?"


Curt Clark (pseud. Donald E. Westlake) // Anarchaos

(1967)

Third-rate western, set on an alien planet, of which the social system had been designed by anarchists, described as followers of Bakunin, "an obscure Russian nihilist". Society, of course, has collapsed, anarchism being "not entirely realistic". The planet appears to harbour a society in a Hobbesian state of nature. The hero describes anarchy as "absurd", and the planet as "the longest-running planet-wide madhouse in the history of the human race." (Ace pb edn: 20).
 
A Freedom contributor in 1976 found the novel "horrendous". Albert Meltzer, in the same year, went further: "It is anarchism as seen through Fascist eyes. Maybe Clark is not a Fascist and has just picked up the arguments [. . . .] But the arguments are a perfect example of the Nazi views on anarchism, and fairly presented."
 
Anarchaos is probably the nastiest representation of anarchism in the genre.


Arthur C. Clarke // Childhood's End

(1953)

Fondly remembered by a couple of posters to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum (and by myself).
 


Ernest Cline // Ready Player One

(2011)

Joint winner of the 2012 Prometheus Award, but for Neil Easterbrook, though antiauthoritarian, it falls short of being libertarian; he found it charming, nevertheless. In anticipation of the forthcoming movie, a new Anarcho-Geek review of the book was published in March 2018; while clearly entertained, the reviewer is sharply critical:
 
"I think this story has something to offer us. I think it wants to have good politics – the mutual aid, the need for a team, the belief in the importance of a future in which access to information and communication be open to everyone.



"But seriously, I’m so tired of narratives about hetcis nerdboys with fucked up gender politics and stalker-like behavior."


Stanley Kubrick // A Clockwork Orange

(1971)

A teenage thug in a a dystopian near-future Britain is cured of his violent ways by aversion therapy, the moral being an inversion of the Frankenstein story, namely that it is as wrong to unmake a monster, by taking away his free will, as to make one. Aurally and visually intense, and challenging to watch.
 
Included in the Libertarian Movies list. Described as a "good anarchist movie" in a comment on Bergen-Aurand's great anarchist movies that are worth your time.


Steven Spielberg // Close Encounters of the Third Kind

(1977)

The life of an ordinary blue-collar work changes forever after an encounter with a UFO, leading eventually to first contact with the aliens.
 
Joe Schembrie's 'Science Fiction and Libertarianism' notes the film's anti-government aspect, in that "the aliens turn from government attempts to contact them and instead embrace a group of private citizens". Tim Cavanaugh, who in general would exclude all Spielberg and Lucas movies from consideration as libertarian, wrote in 2004 that "I'm tempted to give a pass to Close Encounters because it popularized black helicopter culture".


The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer // Cloud Atlas

(2012)

Complex story set at six points in time, from 1849 through 2321, with the same six actors playing different roles in different threads, the stories and characters having tenuous and serendipitous connections across all timelines. Bold and engaging, despite its length.
 
Reviewed at length by Cat Woods, at peaceandfreedom.org, for whom the film "takes on the unlikeliest of themes for a major mainstream film: the politics of justice, including, most importantly, justice for workers." As an independent film, when set against the Hollywood backdrop "the film is completely ground-breaking, a victory of the interests of the people over those of the ruling class, and a source of inspiration and spiritual nourishment for those of us endeavoring to work toward greater social justice." Woods concludes:
 
"I do not know whether Cloud Atlas will move people or whether it will be received and responded to appropriately. I do know that it should change the world. By all rights, it should usher in a whole new genre of socio-political films exploring the nature of justice as well as the various possible avenues for achieving it. May it be so."
 
Recommended by starrychloe on Liberty.me's Good movies for libertarians and anarchists.
 


Robert Collino // Panurge au pays des machines (1940); Essais fantastiques du Dr Rob (1966)

(1940)

Collino, who wrote as 'Ixigrec', was a militant individualist anarchist, who wrote for a number of French anarchist periodicals, and who also wrote these two science fiction works, which appear not to have been translated, and indeed seem to be impossible to find even in French.



Noted in the 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary; and see also the Ephéméride Anarchiste.


Suzanne Collins // The Hunger Games

(2008)

Dystopian action, very readable. Included in the Think Galactic reading list. The only book of the trilogy read by Margaret Killjoy before reviewing the third part of the film series.
 


Suzanne Collins // The Hunger Games

(2008)

Dystopian action, very readable. Included in the Think Galactic reading list. The only book of the trilogy read by Margaret Killjoy before reviewing the third part of the film series.
 


Alex Comfort // Cities of the Plain (1943); Come Out to Play (1961); Tetrarch (1980); The Philosophers (1989)

(1989)

Comfort — renowned sexologist and gerontologist — was at one time better known as an anarchist. Come Out to Play concerns the discovery of a sexually-liberating drug, and the havoc it wreaks on an uptight society. It's not explicitly anarchist, though it tends that way.



Harold Drasdo, discussing Comfort's work in Anarchy in November 1963, wrote:



"Humour is a notoriously erratic weapon but most readers without insuperable sexual barriers ought to enjoy this book thoroughly. [ . . . ] it presents serious and humane ideas about sexual and personal relationships and about modern science and politics." (Drasdo: 352)



The Philosophers tells of a (then) near-future Britain in which a group of intellectuals successfully crash the City financial system. Goodway (see bibliography) has a chapter on Alex Comfort, describing this novel "of cyber-terrorists employing non-violent dirty tricks" as "a return to the advocacy of forming a Maquis to resist the 'Occupying Power', although that was by now Thatcherism," and showing that Comfort's "combativity and subversiveness" was unchanged. (p259)



Comfort's early play Cities of the Plain isn't mentioned by Goodway, but is usefully discussed by Richard Warren. Although described by SFE as "an anti-capitalist dystopian play", it's not really describable as sf, more as allegory, notwithstanding its author's strict advance repudiation of "all the ideological constructions, of whatever complexion . . . placed upon this play."



Tetrarch is a fantasy, of no great interest.



Steve Barron // Coneheads

(1993)

Ludicrous tale of cone-headed aliens stranded on earth. What humour there is is very American.
 
Listed at Libertarian Movies. Osborne's guide considers it "upbeat", "hilarious", and "a terrific pro-immigrant, anti-INS film!"


J. Lee Thompson // Conquest of the Planet of the Apes

(1972)

Apes in revolt against their human masters.
 
Listed in the Red Planets filmography (see bibliography), which notes that "The studio neutered the conclusion of worker/slave revolt, which resonated too strongly with Black Power."
 
One contributor to the anarchysf mailing list, back in 2004, admitted (rather improbably) that "I love that movie. I've probably seen it dozens of times."


James S.A. Corey // The Expanse

(2004)

The Expanse is a series of novels which was written by James S.A. Corey (the pen name of Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham) but also adapted into a TV series by the writers.



The Outer Planets Alliance faction from The Expanse features about as much explicit anarchism as you can get past TV censors or in a Hugo-prize-winning series. The OPA logo in the show is literally the circle-A (or rather the "bisected circle" in the books). The larger backdrop of the series features anti-colonialism and syndicalism in the context of humankind's first steps in settling the outer solar system, alongside stark class warfare, as the richer "inner planets" exploit the "belters", those working in the outer solar system.



For a space-opera, it's also surprisingly far on the "hard" side of the science-fiction hardness scale; with amazing attention to realism and scientific detail in physics and engineering, but also in fields like linguistics, sociology and political theory. While there are plenty of protagonists who aren't anarchists, the good of the commonwealth is often set above and in conflict with the good of individuals or of governments. Earth in particular is a not-too-exaggerated version of our society, where wealth, resource scarcity, and corruption keep a docile population suffocating in opulence.



Winchell Chung explains this series' worth better than we can, check out their site for more info and links.


Murray Constantine (see Katherine Burdekin)

(--)

See entry for Katherine Burdekin.
 


Elizabeth B. Corbett // New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future

(1889)

New Amazonia was reviewed, briefly and scornfully, by an anonymous writer for Commonweal in its anarchist phase, in 1890. It is a feminist utopia, set in Ireland in 2472; domestic service still exists, but servants are state-trained; the museum has on exhibition "an instrument of torture . . . called a corset" (Tower edn: 44); and so on—all rather quaint.
 


Paul Cornell // Timewyrm: Revelation (1991), Love and War (1992), No Future (1994), and Human Nature (1995)

(1995)

Thematic four book quartet. Love and War and No Future portray anarchists in the form of neo-pagan anarchist travellers in an interstellar travel era and a Black Star militant group (described in No Future as "probably remnants of the Angry Brigade") in the background of a possibly alternate version of the 1976 London milieu. These portray anarchists favourably. Part of the DOCTOR WHO New Adventures sequence. (mailing to anarchysf)
 


Roman Coppola // CQ

(2001)

Included in the Red Planets filmography (see bibliography), which says "The spirit of May 1968 lurks somewhere between an aspiring director's Godardian short and the camp Italian SF movie he is hired to complete." It's not in itself sf, though, and rather comes across as filmic navel-gazing.


Michael Crichton // Jurassic Park

(1990)

Classic techno-thriller centred on a theme park stocked with dinosaurs recreated from ancient DNA.



William Gillis, at Infoshop, recounts how his anarchist dad gave him a copy when he was six years old, triggering a long-term fascination with primitivism.


Edmund Crispin // Best SF series

(1955–1970)

"Finally I must make some acknowledgement to Mr Edmund Crispin, whose anthologies of science fiction for Faber and Faber are still the finest of their kind, and whose introductory essays I have shamelessly pillaged." (Pilgrim 1963)
 
Crispin seems to have admired SF for its anti-authoritarianism, or at least its capacity for scepticism of authority, which he saw as healthy, "for only by perennial widespread mistrust can the power of rulers of any kind—politicians, ecclesiastics, scientists, managers, trade unions, bureaucrats, bankers or commissars—be kept restricted within tolerable bounds" (Introduction to Best SF Two, Faber pb edn: 9). Pilgrim quotes this passage approvingly; he does not, however, quote a passage in the introduction to Best SF Four (1961) which perhaps spurred Pilgrim to write his essay, in which Crispin states that "the political leanings of the genre . . . are overwhelmingly democratic, with a strong tendency to anarchism" (Faber pb edn: 7)


Vincenzo Natali // Cube

(1997)

Kafkaesque allegory of a group of people who mysteriously find themselves trapped within industrialized cubic rooms, with hatchways on all six faces leading into similar rooms, some being rigged with lethal traps, and all apparently contained within another vast cube, within which the compartments move about.
 
For Mark Bould, in his Red Planets filmography (see bibliography), the "Eponymous device models the logic of capital for those trapped within it."
 
Facebook's Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist, in August 2016, described this film as "Easily one of the best low-budget sci-fi flicks out there."


Steve Cullen // The Last Capitalist: A Dream of a New Utopia

(1996)

Published by London's anarchist Freedom Press, this short book is essentially an anarchist utopia set in a future Britain. The story involves a quest for the eponymous capitalist, and contributes greatly to the book's readability. England has been renamed 'Atopia', and is explicitly anarchist, but the state and capitalism have pretty much crumbled world-wide. Alternative polities exist, to reflect local conditions and aspirations; among these is a republic on the Isle of Man, based on delegate democracy. In Atopia everything is voluntary, education is through free schools, and the economy is based on barter. Informed by green principles, technology is nevertheless sufficiently sophisticated to include high-altitude remote-controlled airships, to maintain satellite communications. Social life is fuelled by plenty of real ale (with an explicit admiring nod to CAMRA) and an easy attitude to sex. The book is joyful and optimistic.
 
 


Thursday Czolgosz, Margaret Killjoy, and The Catastrophone Orchestra // White is the Color of Death

(2011)

Extremely short collection of three linked stories (40 pages in total) of post-apocalyptic steampunk. The anarchist influence is clearest in The Catastrophone Orchestra's "The Mushers," the longest of the three.
 
 


d

Rick Dakan // Geek Mafia

(2008)

Dakan is described by Killjoy (see bibliography), in one of his featured interviews, as an 'anarchist geek'. This entertaining caper story was taken as 'certainly' science fiction by a contributor to the Anarchysf mailing list, but can't really be seen as SF at all, though it's still likely to be of interest to SF readers.
 


Rich Dana, ed. // AnarchoSF V.1: Science Fiction and the Stateless Society

(2014)

Anthology of original short fiction, poetry, and a couple of essays, as well as two classic tales featured in this reading list, Dick's 'The Last of the Masters' and Forster's 'The Machine Stops'. Rich Dana's introduction is particularly useful: an updated version of his 2013 essay on the Daily Anarchist (as by Ricardo Feral).
 
 


Dennis Danvers // The Fourth World (2000); The Watch: Being the Unauthorized Sequel to Peter A. Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist—as Imparted to Dennis Danvers by Anchee Mahur, Traveler from a Distant Future; or, A Science Fiction Novel (2002)

(2002)

Although it will be The Watch that is of most interest to anarchists, Danvers's previous novel, The Fourth World, is also a refreshing left-libertarian take on a possible future, in which Chiapas and the Zapatistas are centre-stage. For Teflon, the novel "deserves to have sold better than it did."
 
The Watch is supposedly written in the first person by Peter Kropotkin, who has been plucked from his deathbed, rejuvenated, into a future in which he has the opportunity to foster anarchism once more. The plot is on the weak side, but the writing is first rate, and the Kropotkin character thoroughly researched, as is historical anarchism itself (with references to more recent figures such as Bookchin and Chomsky). Anarchism is integral to the book, and is presented with the utmost sympathy. Very readable, and a wonderful introduction to anarchist ideas for anyone not familiar with them.
 
For Magpie Killjoy, whose favourite anarchist fiction novel this is, "The book tells a low-key and beautiful story with compelling characters, yet introduces the reader to some of the most basic of anarchist political and philosophical concepts." (Killjoy, Fall 2011)
 


Alex Proyas // Dark City

(1998)

An amnesiac man who finds himself suspected of murder attempts to discover his true identity and clear his name while on the run from the police and the mysterious 'Strangers'. It transpires that he's really aboard an alien habitat, where the hive-mind of the Strangers is/are seeking to understand the human concepts of individuality and personality. Defeating the Strangers, he remakes the world based on 'his' childhood memories, which were themselves illusions implanted by the Strangers.
 
The Red Planets filmography describes Dark City as "offering a phantasmagorical image of life under capital."
 
Peter Suderman, in his Liberals and Libertarians at the Movies, identifies the essence of the film as "one individual struggles to reclaim his agency and identity". Also recommended on the Anarchism sub-reddit discussion on movies.


Christopher Nolan // The Dark Knight

(2008)

Bruce Wayne/Batman, Lieutenant James Gordon and enthusiastic new District Attorney Harvey Dent seek to eliminate organized crime in Gotham City, but the sociopathic Joker carries out a dastardly scheme to turn Dent into a villain and Batman into a public enemy. According to SFE, this film is "Widely regarded as the finest Superhero film ever made".
 
David Graeber has written interestingly on the Batman trilogy (with a longer version published as 'On Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power', in Graeber 2015). This film, and Batman Begins, he says "had moments of genuine eloquence",
 
"But even that movie begins to fall flat the moment it touches on popular politics. The end, when Bruce and Commissioner Gordon settle on the plan to scapegoat Batman and create a false myth around the martyrdom of Harvey Dent, is nothing short of a confession that politics is identical to the art of fiction. The Joker was right: redemption lies only in the fact that the violence, the deception, can be turned back upon itself."



Further,
 
"When Dark Knight came out in 2008, there was much discussion over whether the whole thing was really a vast metaphor for the war on terror: how far is it okay for the good guys (America, obviously) to adapt the bad guy’s methods? The filmmakers managed to respond to these issues and still produce a good movie. This is because the War on Terror actually was a battle of secret networks and manipulative spectacles. It began with a bomb and ended with an assassination. One can almost think of it as an attempt, on both sides, to actually enact a comic book version of the universe."


Christopher Nolan // The Dark Knight Rises

(2012)

Set eight years after the previous film, Batman comes out of retirement to take on the imposing figure of Bane, and save Gotham City from nuclear destruction; Catwoman is also featured, and Robin introduced.
 
David Graeber opens his New Enquiry essay 'Super Position' (with a longer version published as 'On Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power', in Graeber 2015 by stating that "The Dark Knight Rises really is a piece of anti-Occupy propaganda," whilst acknowledging that Christopher Nolan claims that the script was written before the movement started, and that the scenes of the occupation of Gotham were actually inspired by Dickens's account of the French Revolution. Graeber feels that the film is defeated by its own ambition, and "stuttered into incoherence."
 
Reddit's Anarchy 101 has a page discussing 'Would Bane from the Dark Knight Rises qualify as an Anarchist?':



For AutumnLeavesCascade, "That whole film trilogy contains strong anti-anarchist propaganda, so we ought not trust its depictions of its "anarchists". Nevertheless, Bane had a bit of the rhetoric and actions, but ultimately his character progression was to make the film's point that you can't trust anti-authoritarian resistance to not become tyrannical, it's the typical bullshit that anarchy results in a backswing of warlordism or totalitarianism."



[Deleted] answers the question with:



"Not in the slightest bit. Actually I think the movie itself has a contradiction in it that really says a lot about the ideological climate we exist in."



"Nolan was clearly trying tie Bane to Occupy (even just via symbols/terminology) and criticize revolutionary anti-capitalist sentiment in general. The liberation of the prisons, the comments about the "people's house", the attacks on cops, all of this is a clear attempt to place Bane in an ideological camp. But here's where a problem comes in; just labeling them the bad guys isn't enough for us not to sympathize with them. Its not enough that all the visual indicators of bad (freaky breathing apparatus) are there, there's a legitimate danger that no matter how many heroic shots of valiant cops there are, there's a chance that the audience will still cheer for the orphans that didn't get to grow up with wealth from the arms industry.



"So to ensure we stay with the "right" side, they have to insert a plot about the bomb that otherwise makes no sense at all. Because simply, the defenders of the status quo really can't be the good guys unless the alternative to the status quo is annihilation."



jamieandhisego concludes the Reddit discussion with his own two word answer: "Fuck no."



Another Reddit discussion, entitled 'My Anarchist Perspective of the Dark Knight Rises', begins with an original post from mattkips, which rails against the film for its portrayal of anarchists, but which misfires because the film never actually identifies anyone as anarchists. The lengthy discussion it provoked bears a read, nevertheless. 


John Carpenter // Dark Star

(1974)

Satirical space story. The Dark Star has been roaming space on a mission to destroy 'unstable' planets, but after 20 years systems are breaking down, and the crew are bored witless. Things go completely belly-up. Lots of delicious black humour.
 
Ranked in first place at Goliath's 10 Obscure Sci-Fi Films Worth Seeking Out, a link shared on Facebook's Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum and on Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist.
 


George A. Romero // Dawn of the Dead

(1978)

Gory zombie film. SFE insists it is true sf, as Romero is interested in zombies the way an SF writer might be interested in aliens.
 
Wendy McElroy, at Daily Anarchist.com, says "This is his most explicit assault on mindless, modern consumerism. [. . . ] In short, the walking dead are doing the same thing as they did as the walking living. This glimpse of voracious humanity is all the more horrifying because it contains truth."
 
Included in libcom.org's guide to working class films.


Robert Wise // The Day the Earth Stood Still

(1951)

Klaatu, a human-like alien, with an eight-foot tall robot, comes to Earth to notify humanity that "It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us, and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration."
 
Alex Peak has an essay on the film's Libertarian Themes. He argues that, by his actions, Klaatu is not "in perfect harmony with libertarian ethics", and "Since the anarchist recognises that all true hierarchies are maintained only through aggression, and since the anarchist wishes to eliminate aggression and thus also all true hierarchies, we can conclude objectively that Klaatu is not an anarchist, despite whatever libertarian tendencies swell within his own society. Therefore, if Klaatu is a libertarian at all, he is at most a minarchist." He concludes that, despite this, "The movie may be regarded as libertarian due to its subtle yet persistent rejection of xenophobia, its warnings against substituting fear for reason, its examination of the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear weapons generally, and its insistence that there is something socially problematic about any hypermilitaristic society."
 
Red Planets (see bibliography) lists the film, but is somewhat dismissive: "Anti-nuclear film (or a celebration of the pax Americana)."


Stephen Tolkin // Daybreak

(1993)

Resistance grows in a near-future where people with an HIV-like infection are held in a quarantine more like a concentration camp.
 
For Libertarian Movies the film—described by Osborne (see bibliography) as "inspiring"—"presents a dark vision of what can happen when morality is enforced by the government."



Michael and Peter Spierig // Daybreakers

(2009)

Ten years hence a vampire corporation captures and farms the remaining mortal humans while developing a substitute for human blood. A vampire hematologist's work is interrupted by human survivors led by a former vampire who has discovered a cure for vampirism. The SF context is well developed, so it's not just another vampire movie.
 
Recommended for a fairly obvious political message, by a poster to the Reddit discussion on movie recommendations containing Anarchy. SFE says "the use of vampirism as an allegory of oil dependency stands out from the red tide of other vampire fiction in its era."


Gabriel Range // Death of a President

(2006)

(Then) near-future docudrama about the assassination of US President George W. Bush.
 
Criticised at the time for what was perceived as poor taste, the film's director has said the film was "not a leftist jeremiad", and that "It was very important that the film was not a political rant. It was not just a condemnation or polemic because I think that polemics are easy to dismiss." Sabina Becker's view was that the right didn't like the film because "it strikes a blow against the notion that arbitrary measures which grant inordinate power to the president will ever protect anyone—even himself—against terrorism."
 
Included in the Red Planets filmography (see bibliography).


Daniel Defoe // Robinson Crusoe (1719)

(1719)

The novel, as SFE puts it, "while not sf, provided a fundamental model for many sf stories". Described by Marie-Louise Berneri as "a one-man utopia", the work is also referenced for its influence in Nettlau's Esbozo (see bibliography for Berneri and Nettlau).


Joseph Déjacque // L'Humanisphère: utopie anarchique (The Humanisphere: An Anarchistic Utopia)

(1858–1861; first unexpurgated edition 1971)

"A walk-through description of the world in the year 2858, after the abolition of the state, religion, property, and the family." (Dan Clore) Described by Kropotkin himself as an anarchist-communist utopia, and by Max Nettlau as "L'utopie anarchiste par excellence". Editor of the New York anarchist paper Le Libertaire, he "let his utopian imagination run riot" in L'Humanisphère. "Each is his own representative in a 'parliament of anarchy'. Déjacque's 'humanispheres' resemble Fourier's 'phalansteries' and while based on the principle of complete freedom reflect a similarly rigid planning." (Peter Marshall:435) For George Woodcock Déjacque's vision was "Fourier modified by his opposite, Proudhon." He also felt that it "in some remarkable ways anticipates the vision of the future which H.G. Wells projected in Men Like Gods." (Woodcock [1975]: ch. 10)



L'Humanisphère was first serialised in Le Libertaire, the US's first anarcho-communist journal, of which Déjacque was editor. (Killjoy, 2009) Déjacque is said to have exercised an influence on the anarchist movement in Latin America through the intermediary figure of journalist Sebastian Faure. (Heffes 2009: 129; see bibliography for full sources.)



A working translation is available here.
 


Samuel Delany // Babel-17 (1966); 'Aye, and Gomorrah' (1967);   The Einstein Intersection (1967); Dhalgren (1974); Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia; or, Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus (1976; originally entitled Triton); Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984)

(1984)

Babel-17, 'Aye and Gomorrah', and The Einstein Intersection are included in the Think Galactic reading list. Babel-17 is quoted in The BASTARD Chronicles 2015, and is briefly but warmly reviewed by Kupermintz at the end of one of the anarchySF podcasts.
 
Dhalgren has been described as presenting a world which is 'anarchist in all but name' (Moore 95). Although this is questionable, this is a stimulating and thought-provoking novel that bears inclusion here.
 
Trouble on Triton was recommended by Common Action at the panel "Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction" at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009. Delany has said that the novel was written partly in dialogue with Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, his ambiguous heterotopia a response to her ambiguous utopia. His own perspective is that SF can't really be utopian. More pretentious than Dhalgren, Trouble on Triton hasn't aged as well. The interview with Delany published in 1990 as "On Triton and Other Matters" is actually more interesting than the novel.
 
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is discussed and quoted in The BASTARD Chronicles 2015, and has been recommended by a contributor to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum. Another, on Ask Metafilter, considered that "I don't think that Delany describes the society of Morgre as anarchist, but it definitely has anarchist-style social organization." In fact he almost does: he describes the most common form of government on Velm (the planet) as "an efficient bureaucratic anarchy". Later he says that of the 6000 worlds only 30% have a world government, but in the same paragraph describes Velm's bureaucratic anarchy as a world government. It isn't really an anarchy in anarchist terms: his definition says that "Bureaucratic anarchy means a socialist world government in which small sections are always reverting to some form of feudal capitalism for anywhere from a week to two years standard—the longest we'll allow it to last."


James de Mille // A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

(1888)

A Strange Manuscript is a lost-race story, set in Antarctica. In 1969 George Woodcock discussed the work as a "solitary successful Canadian utopian novel" (97), deciding that it is not so much utopia as Butlerian satire: its moral vision, "perhaps . . . characteristic of Canada", he finds to be "that of the Middle way—moderation in all things." (98) In 1980 he found the novel "an effective satire on the hypocritical Victorian world" de Mille lived in (Woodcock 1980: 24).


Marco Brambilla // Demolition Man

(1993)

A violent criminal and a maverick cop are cryogenically frozen in 1996, being revived in 2032 to find the culture homogenised and risk-free, the cop finding some sympathy with a radical underground. Much action and a limited amount of comic book satire.
 
One comment at the libertarian film festival describes the film as "a parable about the nanny state", with "a nice minarchist bit as the anarchists are told to clean up a bit, the government to dirty up a bit, and then to figure the rest out for themselves."


Irving Pichel // Destination Moon

(1950)

Historically important as the first serious attempt at portraying a mission to the moon, a major difference from what eventually happened in the 1960s being that in the film it was private enterprise that ran the show. Loosely based on Rocketship Galileo, by Robert Heinlein, who acted as technical advisor to the film
 
In 2007 an article copied to the Anarchy-SF mailing list, on the occasion of the centenary of Heinlein's birth, described this as "the first sober space travel movie".
 


Philip K. Dick // The Last of the Masters' (1954); Solar Lottery (1955); Eye in the Sky (1957); Galactic Pot-Healer (1959); Time Out of Joint (1959); The Man in the High Castle (1962); Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964); The Penultimate Truth (1964); The Simulacra (1964); The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965); The Crack in Space (1966); Counter-Clock World (1967); The Zap Gun (1967); Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968); Ubik (1969); Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974); A Scanner Darkly (1977); Valis (1981)

(1981)

In 'The Last of the Masters' Dick took anarchism itself for its explicit theme. Two hundred years after the triumph of the Anarchist League by overthrowing the world's governments, a pocket state is discovered, ruled by a still-surviving government robot. An Anarchist League agent destroys the robot. The League itself is a voluntary club of unorganised individuals whose task it is to patrol the world scotching any attempts to restore government. It is made clear at the end of the story that, while there are disadvantages to global anarchism, they are more than outweighed by the effective abolition of war that has followed from its adoption. The tale is included in Dana's AnarchoSF V.*1. *For Margaret Killjoy "This story, by my reading, is neither libel nor advocacy, just a thought experiment by someone only peripherally versed in anarchism. Which frankly doesn’t make it feel all that valuable to the conversation."



Dick's works constituted for Vittorio Curtoni a "violent fresco of social schizophrenia" (25). All his works show a high degree of humanity and identification with the underdog.



The three novels of the 1950s are referred to by Curtoni as exemplary of his style and concerns. Solar Lottery is Dick's first, in which the top political position is chosen by lot, but subject to popularly condoned assassination; a parallel plot concerns a quasi-religious quest outside the solar system. The novel was described in Marzia Rubega's 1996 article on Dick in A-Rivista Anarchica, and is cited in The BASTARD Chronicles 2015. In Eye in the Sky an accident in a particle accelerator causes a number of individuals to live successively through each other's versions of the normal world, none of which is particularly normal. In Time Out of Joint the central character believes he is living in the 1950s, as a competition expert; in reality he is living in the 1990s, helping plan the bombing of the moon; his fantasy is a withdrawal psychosis, the only way he can continue this work, having been converted to the 'lunatic' cause.



The society of Galactic Pot-Healer has been described as "the ultimate Communist denial of personal consciousness." (Riggenbach)



The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, among Dick's best, are listed in Curtoni's essential bibliography, but not discussed by him. The Man in the High Castle is a complex alternate history of America after losing World War II, set in the Japanese Pacific States of America; it is a superb SF classic, high on compassion and having much to say, indirectly, about power relationships. Ubik recounts the involuted existences of a group of people living in 'half-life' after being killed by a bomb on the moon; in many ways similar to Eye in the Sky, it has perhaps been overrated, though Rubega describes it as both "fascinating" and a "masterpiece". Reality is out of joint for the protagonist of Flow My Tears, who finds himself briefly living in an alternate world created by another character's drug trip; the figure of Police General Buckman, although disagreeable, is presented as human—there are no human baddies, for such antagonist as may be discerned is the abstract one of drugs-as-control. For Evan Lampe "The novel is incredibly powerful and in my view his greatest work." The book was also the topic for discussion in the fourth anarchySF podcast, in April 2020, in which other works, such as A Scanner Darkly, were also referenced.



For Peter Werbe, writing in Fifth Estate #390, Fall 2013, Dick's anarchist view appears in many of his novels. By way of example, he singles out Clans of the Alphane Moon, which features a planet originally established as psychiatric institution, into which people have divided into caste-like diagnostic groups. Werbe sees this as "Dick's critique of the contemporary world." He sees the 'Pares'—the paranoid clan—as representing politicians and statesmen, while the 'Manses'—those afflicted with mania—as the planet's warriors, these two clans being "the ones which create the chaos, all the while posing themselves as guardians of order." Evan Lampe, too, sees this novel as Dick's "attempt to prove to the reader that mental illness is in fact integral to how we organize society."



The Simulacra "portrays a world in which government is evil, duplicitous, and bent on concealing the truth from the public." (Riggenbach) The novel is cited in The BASTARD Chronicles 2015, as is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.



The Crack in Space is one of Dick's weaker works, but for Evan Lampe it is nevertheless "a warning to us that we cannot simply export or forestall the problems of underemployment, inequality, corporate rule,
media-controlled politicians, and racism."



In Counter-Clock World a black religious leader, round whom much of the book revolves, is referred to throughout as the 'Anarch' Peak; but the reason for this is obscure.



The Zap Gun depicts an America divided between those who believe the government is protecting them with ever more elaborate weaponry and those who know that none of the weaponry works, except in simulations; both parties are in on the fraud, which they perpetrate in order to prop up a permanent Cold War economy. (Riggenbach)



Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—famously adapted as the film Blade Runner—was singled out for mention by Walker Lane, of the Fifth Estate collective, for a Summer 2012 anarchist reading list.



In The Penultimate Truth members of the elite program an android politician which/who keeps the underground masses properly stirred up and misinformed. (Riggenbach) For Lampe a clear moral is that "It does not matter if power if justifiable on some level. It is nonetheless, sociopathic."



A proponent of governmental decentralisation and opponent of organised religion, it is perhaps unfortunate that some of Dick's later, delusional, work has had a posthumous influence in the emergence of anarcho-gnostics. Among these later works is Valis, briefly mentioned in a quotation in The BASTARD Chronicles 2015, which also quotes from Radio Free Albemuth.



Lampe has individual blog entries for each of 30 Dick novels, including one not sf.


Denis Diderot // 'A Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage'

(1796; written in 1777)

Short utopian account of society in Tahiti which, according to SFE, "prefigures much Anthropological SF in its debate on Natural Man."
 
Marie Louise Berneri, for whom it was "a description of a free, primitive society which knows neither governments nor laws", yet which described "a primitive society, not perhaps as it was, but as it should be," included a four-page extract in her classic 1950 Journey Through Utopia. Colin Ward, in his 1991 Unesco Courier article 'Ideal Community', found the tale "delightful."
 
 


Paul DiFilippo // 'Any Major Dude'

(1991)

The whole of North Africa has become a political isolate thanks to its controversial use of anti-entropic free energy from nanotechnology. Money is increasingly pointless, and guns won't function, as a consequence of "a local accumulation of anti-entropy". A pre-utopian sidelong glimpse of the state in the very act of withering away.


Thomas M. Disch // Camp Concentration (1968); 'Mutability' (1978)

(1978)

Vittorio Curtoni, writing in 1978, considered Camp Concentration to be "very fine". It concerns the experimental treatment of American concentration-camp inmates with a syphilis-derived drug which enhances intelligence but accelerates death. In 2019 anarchistnews.org published a podcast centred on the novel. In the same year Nev, of the Berkeley Anarchist Study Group, described this novel as "one of the most underrated and unknown novels written by a self identifying anarchist",
continuing:



Thomas Disch’s truly beautiful and thought provoking novel deals with consciousness, war, the self, education, and what it means to be a person. The novel asks questions that we likely don’t have answers to, but the discussion of these questions cuts to the heart of what I imagine an anarchist study group exists for.
 



'Mutability' is set in the free university city of Tübingen at the end of the 21st century. Tübingen is said to have been declared a free city by the UN in 2039, after the faculty and students of the university had spearheaded the pan-Germanic Anarchist movement. It is said to have a uniquely democratic government, but American observers seem to be unimpressed.
 
 


Robert Kurvitz // Disco Elysium

(2019)

Created by Estonian studio Za/um, this is a dialogue-heavy video game set in a fictional world.



The game features a city recovering from a failed communist revolution that was undermined by incompetence but also thwarted by foreign invaders.



It presents a critical and comical depiction of several ideologies, including Communism, Liberalism, Centrism and Fascism.



The city depicted is managed in a rather anarchist way, with government involvement being minor, and most things in the town being run by the union or by individuals.



The main character is a detective, and the game is relatively uncritical of police, although it does present a more anarchist take on police.



The sci-fi elements are rather subdued, with technology working differently in this world than in ours, but not being way more advanced.


Neill Blomkamp // District 9

(2009)

A population of debilitated prawn-like aliens is found aboard an inert alien ship that has appeared over Johannesburg. The South African government confines them to an internment camp shanty town called District 9. Twenty years later, a bureaucrat assisting in the relocation of the aliens to District 10 is accidentally contaminated by contact with an alien fluid, and begins to metamorphose. He teams up with one of the aliens, assisting him to escape with his son to the mothership, which departs, leaving 2½ million of the prawns behind. The human is seen to have completed his transformation.
 
Libcom.org's guide to working class films gives this description: "Alluding to the District Six evictions in apartheid and the more recent Blikkiesdorp settlement, District 9 sees aliens come to Earth. But when they arrive, they are a minority group just like any other, and are hated by both black and white in South Africa."


Neil Burger // Divergent

(2014)

In a post-apocalyptic Chicago everyone is pigeon-holed as one of five factions, based on personality testing; the central character is found 'divergent', as she straddles several factions.
 
Recommended by starrychloe at Good movies for libertarians and anarchists.
 


Sydney Newman, C.E. Webber, and Donald Wilson // Doctor Who

(1963/1989, 1996, 2005→)

The adventures of a time-travelling renegade Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. According to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia "It is the most successful Space Opera in the history of television, not excluding Star Trek."
 
St John Karp, in The Anarchist Doctor Who, while a "massive fan" of the show, identifies two contradictions: "One is the Doctor's xenophilia vs. Doctor Who's xenophobia. The other is the Doctor's status as both a rebel against and a symbol of the status quo. El problemo." But also "it's a show about libertarianism; a love of strange things; a love of exploration; a love of eccentricity; and the defence of the rights of the individual against the establishment."
 
For Kasimir Urbanski the Doctor is a "libertarian superhero":
 
"He hated the stifling bureaucracy of his own people that he ran away in a broken time machine just to be his own person. He has a complete distaste for authority, particularly corrupt government and warmongering military. He’s always ready to fight anyone who wants to force their will on anyone else.



"And he’s pretty much always been that way.



"Most importantly, he's always been about the power of the Individual—not the ideals of some Federation, or even specifically about things like justice, fairness or even good. But more than anything, about the power that any one person has, as themselves, to change the world."



A contributor to libcom.org's forum on Science fiction and fantasy with anarchist themes noted that a 2005 episode called 'The Long Game' included "an undercover Anarchist posing as a journalist from a group called 'Freedom 15' 200,000 years into the future on a space station above Earth." "My impression was that while the episode did not go into any depth into the political philosophy of Anarchism the anarchist was portrayed in a positive anti-straw man like way."
 


Cory Doctorow // Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003); Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005); Little Brother (2008); Makers (2009); For the Win (2010); The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (2011); Pirate Cinema (2013); Homeland (2013); Walkaway (2017); Radicalized (2019)

(2019)

The two earlier novels were both recommended by Common Action at the panel "Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction" at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009.



Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom features a post-scarcity future in which money has been replaced by personal reputation ratings, or 'Whuffie'. It was the subject of a retrospective review by Jason Rodgers in the Summer 2018 Fifth Estate.



Someone Comes to Town is an unusual fantasy novel, which if it wasn't by Doctorow I would probably not include, though it's well worth a read. Killjoy (Fall 2011) includes it among some examples of books in which anarchists appear as "sympathetic (though often misguided or idealized characters)".



Little Brother won the 2009 Prometheus Award. A stirring novel for young adults, it features a hackers' fightback against the paranoid surveillance society of the US Department of Homeland Security. Reviewed and commended by andywelshman of the Glasgow Anarchist Federation, for whom "This book is a must read for everyone and should be required reading for everyone under 25, if you read it you’ll find out why."



The sequel, Homeland, was published in February 2013, and was joint winner of the 2014 Prometheus award.



Makers—described by the author as "a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet"—isn't one of Doctorow's best, but was nominated for the 2010 Prometheus award. It was suggested by one contributor to reddit as a possible example of agorist fiction, and is listed at the GoodReads Anarchist & Radical Book Club. It is described, in Obsolete #3, as "a wonderful story of Feral Technology".



For the Win features an interesting combination of militant international labour activism and the world of online gaming, in which game-workers join the IWWWW (Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web), known as the Webblies, by analogy with the Wobblies (a concept borrowed from Ken Macleod). While some readers have not appreciated the moralising, for me the gaming angle was a bit heavy-going, but it's a YA book, and doubtless this would be fine for its intended readership.



Zeke Teflon's 2014 review of the PM Press edition of The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow plus found the novella disappointingly short, and not quite fulfilling its promising potential.



Pirate Cinema won the 2013 Prometheus Award. Another YA novel, it's a rousing subversive attack on attempts to stifle creativity by controlling Internet downloads. One of the protagonists is explicitly anarchist, and works in an anarchist bookshop off Brick Lane, London—named "Dancing Emma's" after Emma Goldman, but the location more than coincidentally close to the Freedom Bookshop in Whitechapel; Doctorow personally contributed to Freedom Bookshop's repair and rebuilding fund after it was firebombed in January 2013.



For Ricardo Feral Doctorow's YA novels are "particularly important for introducing the ideas of personal freedom and opposition to State control to younger readers." Margaret Killjoy has said "I've never met a Cory Doctorow book I don't love."



Walkaway tells of walking away from work and the dominance of a mega-rich oligarchy, the development of a post-scarcity gift economy, and the near-conquest of death. Described by the author as "a utopian novel", with credit given to David Graeber in the acknowledgments, the novel is recommended in the Sharp and Pointed review by Zeke Teflon as "quite possibly the best fictional description of a post-scarcity society ever written."



Radicalized is a collection of four novellas.
Teflon
describes the stories as "uniformly well written and emotionally affecting", concluding that "This is probably Doctorow’s best book to date."



In an August 2018 interview Doctorow states explicitly that he's not an anarchist, but that he doesn't know what he is.
 


Jane Doe // Anarchist Farm

(1995)

Very entertaining animal fable sequel to Orwell's Animal Farm; not actually sf.


George Donnelly, ed. // Defiant, She Advanced

(2014)

So-so anarcho-capitalist sf anthology. The first story is by Wendy McElroy, described here as an individualist anarchist.



Listed at Libertarian Fiction.



Francis Donovan // 'The Short Life'

(1960)

This rather minor story concerns an alien stranded on earth, living telepathically in a dog but through a mentally-challenged child: it seeks understanding from a sympathetic human. Pilgrim, in 1963, rated the story highly, but rather overstated the case for considering the society of the aliens, as described, as "anarchic" and their reaction to human coercion and competition as "very much that of the anarchist" (Pilgrim 1963: 365).
 


Henry Shipton Drayton // In Oudemon: Reminiscences of an Unknown People by an Occasional Traveller

(1901)

Futuristic utopia set in South America. "It is anarchistic in that there is no authority except an advisory board, and communistic in that the land is communally owned and there is little personal property." [Bleiler: 209]
 
 


Stanley Kubrick // Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

(1964)

As an unhinged USAF general orders a first strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, the US President, with other heads of state and forces top brass, tries to recall the bombers to prevent World War III, while the crew of one B-52 bomber try to deliver their payload. In the words of the SFE, "grotesquely satirical and very funny".



For Libertarian Movies it's "Not only one of the greatest anti-war films ever, but easily the funniest!"



Jakob Larrew at Anarchist Studies wrote in 2020 that "The movie is a seething satirical critique of the mystification of American society: from the blind belief in American propaganda to the point of fanaticism, to the government’s incompetency and its willingness to follow its ideology to the point of fascism and the death of the human race."


Guy du Maurier // An Englishman's Home

(1909)

An invasion from "the Empire of the North" succeeds. This play is referred to by Pilgrim in his 1966 Peace News review, without particular comment.
 
 


L. Timmel Duchamp // The Marq'ssan Cycle —Alanya to Alanya (2005), Renegade (2006), Tsunami (2007), Blood in the Fruit (2007), Stretto (2007)

(2007)

Included in Killjoy's list (see bibliography) of stories that explore anarchist societies. Also recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction' at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009.
 
In the strongly feminist Alanya to Alanya Earth women, including some anarchists, are actively supported by the Marq'ssan aliens, who, with technological superiority on their side, vigorously promote "non-authoritarian self-governance". Blood in the Fruit includes a sequence in which the North West Free Zone celebrates Emma Goldman Day; three Goldman quotations serve as epigraph to the novel, and the front cover features a photograph of Goldman speaking in Union Square, at Duchamp's own suggestion—she has said that "Most of the Free Zone activists are working-class women who embrace a philosophy of life and politics very close to Goldman's . . .".
 
"SM: So anarchism, or negotiation, is possible not only on a small scale but also a large scale?



"LTD: Yes, I believe it is. But it would require major changes in our educational system, in the distribution of information, and in how we live as active, responsible subjects in the world. It would require, in short, that as a species, we mature and leave childhood behind (i.e., that we metaphorically speaking develop the part of our pre-frontal cortex that is able to see past the moment and think beyond impulse, as the medical literature tells us happens when individuals mature into adults)."



[interview by Sean Melican]



The Marq'ssan Cycle as a whole is a significant work, looking at relationships of power at many levels, especially the interpersonal. Duchamp has said:
 
"I wanted this to be a story charting an on-going process of change, not one in which a tabula-rasa utopia is created in the wake of an apocalypse allowing everyone to "start over" without significant institutional baggage. In the course of writing the first novel, I soon realized that getting rid of a repressive regime is the easy part. The characters in these books are as resistant to changing ingrained patterns of political and social behavior as any living person is. Which is why the series spans two decades and comprises five long novels."



[interview by Cheryl Morgan]


e

Steven Spielberg // E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

(1982)

A boy befriends an alien stranded on Earth and helps it to return to its home world, while evading the attention of the authorities.
 
Osborne (see bibliography) takes evident pleasure in the film's depiction of government agents as the bad guys. Joe Schembrie, too, in his Science Fiction and Libertarianism, notes with approval that, in E.T.,  "government agents and scientists prove to be far less competent than children at dealing with an alien encounter."
 


Earthbound

(--)

Montreal’s feminist sci-fi wrestling collective. Irresistible link from Facebook's Solarpunk Anarchists, in July 2017.
 


'J.G. Eccarius' // We Should Have Killed the King

(1990)

Interesting and readable, but mostly non-sf, bracketed by a chapter set during the Peasants' Revolt and a chapter in a future where all but an anarchist community have died through ecological meltdown. Briefly reviewed in July 1990, in the New Anarchist Review #16.


Posthuman Studios // Eclipse Phase

(2009)

Well-received role playing game, described by SFE as being set in "a complexly inhabited solar system after the Fall, a war against rogue AIs which ended only when the enemy escaped to the stars, taking with them millions of forcibly uploaded human minds. Earth is a deadly wasteland, surrendered to roving packs of self improving war machines. The survivors of the Fall exist in colonies scattered throughout the system, where they have created new economies based on nanotechnology and new societies ranging from corporate semi-democracies to anarchist cooperatives and libertarian associations."
 
Reviewed by Margaret Killjoy for the Anarcho-Geek Review, in July 2017, who summed it up as "a damn good game", while wishing that "I could play a strategy game that actually reflected the ways I think tactically, economically, and socially. You’re always stuck being a space tyrant."
 
In October 2017 Freedom published a long and interesting interview with Rob Boyle, co-creator of the game, in anticipation of the launch of its second edition. Boyle explicitly acknowledges his anarchist background and influences:
 
"I first identified as an anarcho-communist back in high school in the 1980s, and through the ’90s and beyond I was heavily involved with anarchist publishing and organising projects. EP co-creator Brian Cross also identifies as an anarchist, and he has a background as a sociology professor. We obviously injected a lot of our outlook.



"If I had to highlight my specific influences I would say Murray Bookchin, for his approaches towards confederalism, technology, and social ecology, and probably the entire German autonomist/antifa movement, for its non-dogmatic approach to synthesising radical ideas. Anarchist science writer Brian Martin probably impacted some of my views on scientific responsibility.



"Overall, politically, I think my ideas have been strongly shaped by the Sojourner Truth Organisation, active in the ’70s-80s, who have had a larger impact than I think most modern anarchists realise."



Asked about the forthcoming second edition, Boyle says that "We have received some criticism that our depiction of autonomist space is sometimes “too utopian,” so in the future we’ll be focusing a bit more on some of the problems that might arise within a transhuman anarchist society, which is I think a good exercise for us as radicals."
 
For a 2013 discussion of the anarchist elements by gamers, see Eclipse Phase and Soft Sci-Fi. There is also a wiki page on the anarchists of Eclipse Phase.
 


Greg Egan // Permutation City (1994); Distress (1995); Diaspora (1997)

(1997)

Permutation City is among books cited by Nick Mamatas in The BASTARD Chronicles 2015 as hard SF overwhelmed by religious allegory.
 
Distress is largely set against the backdrop of the sympathetically presented anarcho-syndicalist society of Stateless, an engineered coral island in the Pacific. The inhabitants mostly disregard anarchist thinkers like Bakunin, Proudhon and Godwin; children are educated in sociobiology.
 
. . . "Stateless seemed to run on the principle of people agreeing to do the same thing for entirely different reasons. It was a sum over mutually contradictory topologies which left the calculus of pre-space for dead; no imposed politics, philosophy, religion, no idiot cheer-squad worship of flags or symbols—but order emerged nevertheless." (ch. 24)



Diaspora is a cerebral far-future novel, which has proved of interest to some anarchists. One comment on Reddit's Interesting Anarchist Fiction? page doubted whether it can be explicitly classified as anarchist, but "it provides an interesting exploration of how an Anarcho-Transhumanist society could function." Eden Kupermintz, too, also found it "a really interesting take on post-humanism and AI." A comment elsewhere pointed to its "anarchist and extremely consensus-based, consent-required governance".


Suzette Haden Elgin // Native Tongue

(1984)

A patriarchal dystopia in which the significant novum is the development by women of a distinct language for their exclusive use.



Enjoyed by posters to the Facebook Anarchists and Science Fiction page in August 2019.


Meg Elison // Big Girl plus

(2020)

Another of the excellent PM Press Outspoken Authors series. Unusually, this little book has been reviewed twice over in Fifth Estate. The first review (#408, Winter 2021), by Stacy Flynn, described the collection as "gorgeously surreal", and focuses most on the title story and the Nebula-nominated 'The Pill'. Flynn says "The verve and inventiveness of Elison's stories temper what could otherwise be a heavy-handed social critique, though it's when she savages the dominant culture, that the work is at its best." Jess Flarity's review (#410, Fall 2021) is also fulsome, highlighting the dystopian 'Such People' as well as 'The Pill', noting of the latter that "I can't remember the last time I laughed and cringed so hard at the same time."


T. Mullett Ellis // Zalma

(1895)

Primarily a romantic fiction centred on an anarchist-hunter and an anarchist, the latter ultimately plotting to destroy society by means of anthrax germs distributed by balloon; she only succeeds in killing herself. Although the author displays considerable knowledge of 1890s anarchism, the image he paints of anarchists is only lurid and melodramatic: one instance will suffice, in which an anarchist, who has been betraying the conspiracy unwittingly via his wife, redeems himself by slitting her throat and writing 'Vive l'Anarchie' on the wall in her blood. (Tower edn: 167)
 


Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson // Transmetropolitan series

(1997–2002)

Comic book series, noted by Evan Lampe on the Facebook Anarchists and Science Fiction page; Lampe has also published an essay on the series, included here. The series is also recommended by two contributors to Reddit's Anarchism strand.
 


Harlan Ellison

(--)

. . . "writes many short stories whose heroes have no truck with authority of any sort, though the conventions of the genre sometimes get in the way of the essential messages of his stories." (Moorcock 1978)
 
Ellison is fond of Thoreau, and quotes him repeatedly—for example in 'Silent in Gehenna' (1971), and '"Repent, Harlequin!", said the Ticktockman' (1965). The latter story is a classic of individual rebellion, near-anarchist in motivation; in 2015 it won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award.
 


Harlan Ellison, ed. // Dangerous Visions

(1967)

Key anthology in American New Wave sf. Recommended on Facebook 'Anarchists and Science Fiction' page.
 


Don Elwell // The Ganymeade Protocol

(2010)

Recommended by Melanie Petrewski, who says:
 
"It's kind of a different take, postulating a "floating republic" kind of syndicalist gathering based on 17th century ships articles.  I found it interesting because it seemed vaguely plausible as well as the fact that it completely avoided the sort of philosophical overthink in most Anarchist depictions."


Neill Blomkamp // Elysium

(2013)

In the 22nd century, Earth is overpopulated and has in effect been written off by the rich, who have decamped to an idyllic orbiting habitat; it becomes clear that by a reboot of the system immigration controls can be overridden, giving citizenship of Elysium to all inhabitants of Earth.
 
Included in the libcom.org Working class cinema: a video guide. Also short-listed by two contributors to the Anarchism subReddit discussion of films advocating anti-capitalism, of whom one says "It's not great, but it is alright and contemporary. [ . . . ] Critiques of wage slavery, class, immigration, healthcare, etc are great."
 
SFE cautions that "descriptions of the film as a socialist manifesto are highly exaggerated".
 


Carol Emshwiller // Carmen Dog

(1988)

Dogs are metamorphosing into women, and women into sundry animals. The central character, Pooch, aspires to being an opera singer.
 
Seen by Mark Bould in Red Planets (see bibliography) as "challenging masculinist reason and rationality." Included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 


Kurt Wimmer // Equilibrium

(2002)

Multiply-derivative and pointless dystopian yarn, so corny it's boring.
 
Recommended by starrychloe at liberty.me's Good movies for libertarians and anarchists. One comment, on Reason.com's The Libertarian Film Festival, describes it as "The fight against total state control. A great terrible movie." Sorry, but it's just terrible.


John Carpenter // Escape from L.A.

(1996)

A near future Los Angeles has been separated from the mainland by an earthquake, and is now being used as an internment camp and general people dump for anyone in the US deemed morally unfit. A criminal is tasked with a race against time, to retrieve a superweapon and the President's runaway daughter. Vaguely comedic, but mostly just silly.
 
Libertarian co-producer and co-writer Kurt Russell "manages to get some libertarian points across," according to Libertarian Movies, which notes that "Snake, the cynical antihero, rejects both the right-wing government that enforces 'moral crimes' and the left-wing resistance which aims to use force to achieve its anti-technology goals." Osborne's guide (see bibliography) says "It's not a bad flick on its own merits and it has an underlying message libertarians will appreciate."
 
Included in libcom.org's Working class cinema: a video guide.


John Carpenter // Escape from New York

(1981)

Similar to, and better than, Escape from L.A., with the penal colony being the whole island of Manhattan, and the hostage the President himself.
 
For liberty4eva, Snake "would definitely be considered a libertarian anarchist if one had to guess his political leanings upon watching Escape From New York as well as the inferior 90's sequel Escape From L.A."
 


John Adolphus Etzler // The Paradise within the Reach of all Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to all intelligent men, in two parts

(1833)

Etzler's remarkable work — noted in Nettlau's Esbozo (see bibliography) — is, though not fictional, a forward-looking utopian prospectus quite astonishingly prescient in its championing of sustainable energy in the form of wind, tidal, wave, and solar power generation, as the key to future prosperity.


Robert Evans // After the Revolution

(2022)
Readable but militaristic view of North America in 2070, after a civil war has led to the disunion of the States. Occasional hints of anarchist influence come across as tokenistic.

Unusually, it is the subject of a long review by Dan Baker, a serving political prisoner, at ABCF, the Anarchist Black Cross Federation website. Baker considers it the best novel he's read since going to prison. He comments that "Being a combat veteran I am deeply moved by this book. More importantly than the realistic descriptions of humanity's violence is the prophetic prediction of the life cycle of the United States government."

Dr Evermore (pseudonym of Tom Every) //

(pseudonym of Tom Every: 'The Forevertron')

This steampunk sculptural whimsy, built in the 1980s, is the only piece of plastic art included here, for its obvious inherent merit, but also for Don LaCoss's enthusiastic account of it in Fifth Estate in 2008. See also Minter, and the Wikipedia entry.


Alex Garland // Ex Machina

(2015)

The CEO of an Internet giant calls one of his programmers to his isolated home and research base, where he is asked to appraise the level of consciousness of his most recent android construct, whom its creator already believes to have passed the Turing test. The experiment proves all too successful, the android outwitting both of them, and escaping her confinement. An intelligent and beautifully made film, clearly echoing the Frankenstein motif.
 
Seen as strongly feminist by J.A. Micheline, a view endorsed by Eoin O'Connor on the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum. Also noted on the FB Solarpunk Anarchists and Anarchists & Science Fiction pages. Two contributors to the FB Forum include this film among their shortlists of the best SF ever committed to film.


David Cronenberg // eXistenZ

(1999)

Unconvincing take on the theme of where simulation stops and reality begins, using videogaming in place of Chuang Tzu's famous butterfly dream.
 
One of three Cronenberg films categorised as subversive by Glenn in his essay 'Film as Subversion', in the 2015 BASTARD Chronicles.


Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby // The Expanse

(2015→)

A police detective in the asteroid belt, the executive officer of an interplanetary ice hauler, and an earth-bound UN executive slowly uncover a conspiracy that threatens the Earth's rebellious colony on the asteroid belt. Superior series with high production values.
 
Contributors to Reddit Anarchism's Who do you think is an anarchist without explicitly making it known and why? have described the series as "a fucking dope show" and "the shit."
 
 


Dave Eggers // The Circle

(2013)

Very readable and relevant dystopian extrapolation of the totalitarian tendencies of contemporary social media.



Ruhe, writing in Fifth Estate #401 (Summer 2018), noted that although this novel had "received mainstream buzz, it "didn't spark any kind of broad anti-social networking questioning."


f

S.F. // 'Through the 'A' in Anarchism'

(1956)

This short tale was published in Freedom in 1956. The narrator day-dreams, at Speakers' Corner, that he sails through the 'A' on an anarchist banner into the future anarchist world, which is fully described. Britain is now basically running on anarchist-communist lines. Curiously, though, there is still a need for a police force, though this is all right because they are all qualified in sociology, psychology, local history and orgone therapy.
 
The story's gently satiric humour has considerable charm; and the notion that the British only got round to having a revolution after their supply of tea ran out is perhaps as plausible as many another scenario for revolution here.


François Truffaut // Fahrenheit 451

(1966)

Based on the Bradbury novel of the same name, the film takes place in a dystopian future in which a fireman, whose duty it is not to extinguish fires but to burn books, takes to reading and rebels against the regime.
 
Included in the Libertarian Movies filmography. For Osborne (see bibliography) "its antiauthoritarian content will make it of very strong interest to libertarians," but "one is left with the disturbing impression that such a society could actually be brought about." (58–9)


Sidney Lumet // Fail-Safe

(1964)

Cold War tension between the USSR and the USA leads to an accidental nuclear attack on Moscow, with devastating consequences for both countries. A similar story line to Dr Strangelove (q.v.), but with deadly earnest.
 
Included in Mark Bould's Red Planets filmography (see bibliography).
 


Philip José Farmer // The Lovers (1951/1961/1979); Strange Relations (1960)

(1960)

Vittorio Curtoni refers the reader to these "stories of sensual liberation" by Farmer. The Lovers, with its story of forbidden love between a future human and a humanoid alien insect parasite, broke new ground in SF when it first appeared. Strange Relations is a collection of five stories all named for family relationships; most of them feature bizarre alien sexuality. The best is 'Mother' (1953) (Curtoni: 25).


Mick Farren // Armageddon Crazy

(1989)

Tells of a coup in a theocratic USA led by a fundamentalist president.



Recommended by Zeke Teflon at See Sharp Press, particularly in his article on
Farren's sf novels
, but also in his lists of both anarchist and
atheist sf.



Claude Farrère // Useless Hands

(1926; first published as Les condamnés à mort, 1920)

Dark tale of workers rebelling against a monopolistic plutocrat, first through sabotage, then through strike action; but their efforts are defeated by the rapid introduction of automation, and their revolt is brutally put down by their bosses with a disintegrator ray which kills them in their hundreds of thousands. The failed uprising is led by the charismatic head of the Council of the Order of Anarchy, but as so often anarchism is just a boo word. The anarchists and the bosses are both unsympathetic, and the proletarian 'useless hands' are no more than ciphers.
 
Included in Miéville's Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read (as copied to the Anarchy-SF mailing list), where it is seen as "Bleak Social Darwinism" and "A cold, reactionary, interesting book."
 


Sébastien Faure // Mon Communisme (Le Bonheur Universel; not yet translated)

(1921)

Faure was a notable French free-thinker, secularist, and proponent of anarchist communism. Prior to his co-founding, with Voline, of a 'synthesis anarchism' — a development of 'anarchism without adjectives' — he published Mon Communisme, his own fully-realised anarchist utopia. It's set in a near-future (as seen from 1921) France fifteen years after a revolution which in turn had not long succeeded the Great War. Travellers from Brazil are shown anarchism in action, as seen from the perspectives of a town, the country, and Paris itself, inevitably reacting with much enthusiasm.



Cohn (see bibliography) describes this work as more correctly a uchronia, because the displacement is of time rather than of place. He links it with the work of Pataud and Pouget (q.v.), as does Nettlau in his Esbozo (see bibliography). Berneri rather more pertinently notes that the work "had a limited appeal as a piece of sentimental propaganda."


E. Douglas Fawcett // Hartmann the Anarchist

(1893)

In 1920 Hartmann, having invented a tough, light metal, launches his aeronef the Attila and mounts a raid on London. His object, he says, is "to wreck civilization . . . We are Rousseaus who advocate a return to a simpler life . . . We want no more 'systems,' or 'constitutions'—we shall have anarchy." (Tangent edn: 83-4) Parliament, the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange and St Paul's are destroyed, and the crew of the Attila use flamethrowers on the crowds in Farringdon St. However, less than a fifth of London is destroyed, Hartmann hears no news of similar risings overseas, and on learning that he has killed his own mother he blows up the Attila, with himself and all on board. Order is restored, and the Empire recovers.
 
Although not the first story of this kind, Hartmann the Anarchist is the first to identify the terrorists as anarchists. Superior to most of its successors, it is still fresh, and probably the only one still worth reading.
 
Weir (2011) describes it as "frankly anti-anarchist". Pedelty (2011) considers it a "very silly story", but "Not silly-funny [ . . . ] but silly-toxic." (Pedelty: 73)
 
Ian Bone, in his introduction to the 2009 reprint, is kind enough to mention (the predecessor to) this website.


Thanos Kermitsis // Felony

(2014)

Five-minute short, summarised on IMDb as "In a dystopian future nothing is taken for granted", available on YouTube, but only in Greek, without subtitles.
 
Shown during the 2017 festival for anarchy and libertarian communism at Patras.


Ricardo Feral // Grid Interactive on the longest day of the year

(2019)

Short short depicting a post-human North America in which surviving power-generation technology is coming to the end of its life. Rather reminiscent of Bradbury's 'There Will Come Soft Rains'.



Published in Fifth Estate #403.


Robert Fuest // The Final Programme; aka The Last Days of Man on Earth

(1973)

Based on the novel of the same name by the prolific anarchist SF writer Michael Moorcock (book one of The Cornelius Chronicles), the film is OTT in the way to be expected from the director of The Abominable Dr Phibes and many episodes of The Avengers.
 


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

(2014)

Bright and optimistic anthology, which has been seen as one of the founding anthologies of solarpunk.
 
First drawn to the attention of the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum in 2014, with the comment "Not sure how much in here is in the anarchist spirit, but looks promising that there could be ….." In fact there isn't, really, but it's still worth reading.
 
Reviewed by Zeke Teflon, for whom it was only partially successful: "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." But for him the last but one story, Charlie Jane Anders's 'The Day It All Ended,' tipped the scales, so that the anthology as a whole was recommended.
 


Joss Whedon // Firefly

(2002/3; single TV series of 14 episodes)

Space western set in 2517, featuring the activities—licit and illicit—of the motley crew of a 'Firefly-class' spaceship, in a star system controlled by the Alliance, apparently a fusion of the two surviving superpowers, the USA and China.
 
According to Ilya Somin, of the Libertarian Futurist Society, Whedon "deliberately incorporated libertarian themes in his 2002 science fiction series Firefly." Roderick Long, too, says "The show also has a strong, albeit implicit, libertarian edge to it."
 
Most usefully, though, a recent Revolutionary Left Radio podcast features a long interview with Dr James Rocha, on 'Interpreting Firefly: Libertarianism vs Anarchism'. Rocha had authored a paper entitled 'The Black Reaching Out: An Anarchist Analysis of Firefly' in which he argues for an anarchist interpretation of the show over the more prevalent right-libertarian interpretation. Though Rocha's paper doesn't seem to be accessible on the Internet, in the interview Rocha argues that Firefly should actually be seen as an anarchist critique of right-libertarianism, in which the initial fairly pronounced libertarian sentiments of the spaceship's captain are progressively rejected as the series goes on in favour of a more anarchist perspective. This theme is developed further in another interview podcast for NJ Revolution Radio. In 2019 James and Mona Rocha published Joss Whedon, Anarchist? (see bibliography), a book length interpretation of all Whedon's TV and film work, in which they argue that Firefly depicts both anarcho-capitalism and what they refer to as anarcho-socialism (i.e. the principal strands of anti-capitalist anarchism), with the trajectory within the series veering progressively towards anarcho-socialism.


Nathan Juran // First Men in the Moon

(1964)

Adaptation of the Wells novel, brought up to date by framing the story with a 1960s moon landing and the unexpected discovery there of the British flag, with a note claiming the moon for Queen Victoria.
 
Mark Bould, in his 2005 Socialist Review article, as copied to the Anarchy-SF mailing list, described this "laboured comedy" as evoking "a nervousness about the passing of empires."
 


Leslie Fish // The Weight

(serialised 1976/1979, standalone 1988)

Fan-published anarchist and feminist Star Trek novel, now virtually unobtainable. There's much on this at fanlore.org.



In the standalone publication, the book is introduced by the story that prompted it, Ed Zdrojevski's 'The Sixth Year,' which sets the scene and first introduces the anarchists.



A forking timeline has resulted in alternate versions in which the regular Enterprise crew encounter their equivalents in the other timeline, who are a smart bunch of stroppy anarchists with a strongly hippie culture of their own. The regular crew find them a complete nightmare, and for much of the book they have to conceal from the anarchists the very existence of the Federation and the fact that the Enterprise is a military vessel. As they get to know them, however, the anarchist influence inexorably attracts the crew. However, when the anarchists discover the truth, they feel betrayed by Kirk and the others, and eventually depart for good, although only with the tacit connivance of the crew, conspiring against their own Federation.



Fish is described as an "IWW member and anarchist activist" in the 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary. The novel demonstrates Fish's beliefs very effectively, and there are occasional nods to anarchist history, for example with two minor characters named as 'Alex Goldman' and 'Emma Bergman', and Kirk's alternate having a copy of Bakunin's God and the State.



 


Homer Eon Flint // The Queen of Life

(1919)

In The Queen of Life the humanoid inhabitants of Venus have encased the planet in an alarmingly sterile glass sphere, and vanquished scarcity many generations in the past, entirely eliminating conflict and with it any concepts of nationhood, the state, and government itself. This curiosity has the flavour of the true utopia about it, yet as SF it withholds the utopian possibility. Flint seems unusually ambivalent about his authorial intent, presumably the consequence of editorial intervention.



Michael Flynn // In the Country of the Blind

(1990/2001)

Prometheus Award winner.
 


Gabriel de Foigny // The Southern Land, Known

(1676, La Terre Australe Connu; first English translation 1693)

Proto-sf fantastic voyage, in which a traveller arrives in Australia, to find a utopia of hermaphrodites made possible in part because there can be no issues based on sexual dimorphism; the traveller fits in immediately, as he too is a hermaphrodite.
 
Colin Ward described Foigny as "the first Utopian to conceive of a society without government." The work is included among Nettlau's 'Utopies libertaires'. Berneri (see bibliography for Nettlau and Berneri) has 17 pages on this tale, which she describes as "an original and entertaining utopia."


Fred M. Wilcox // Forbidden Planet

(1956)

One of the best 50s SF films, indeed described by the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as "one of the few masterpieces of SF cinema". A re-imagining of Shakespeare's The Tempest.
 
Listed as utopian at Anarchism and film.
 


E.M. Forster // 'The Machine Stops'

(1909)

An early dystopia, in which Earth's future population, now living underground, has become slave to, and is beginning to worship, the Machine; a rebel discovers freedom above ground, but although those already living free survive, he is not spared when society collapses on the breakdown of the Machine.
 
George Woodcock found this the most interesting early anti-Utopia, with its "strong element of neo-Luddism". He felt it lacked immediacy, though, saying it "pays scanty attention to its social and political implications". (Woodcock 1956) For Ursula K. Le Guin this was "the first and finest" of the satirical utopias in which robots do the work and humans sit back and play (Le Guin 1982). Some short extracts were published in Fifth Estate #373 in 2006, where the full story was "highly recommended".
 
Since the advent of the Internet this story has gained in value from what may now be perceived as prescience. It won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 2012. The tale is included in Dana's AnarchoSF V.1 (see bibliography).


Stuart Gordon // Fortress

(1992)

Escape story set in a future semi-automated private-enterprise underground prison and an authoritarian United States operating a draconian one child policy.
 
Jon Osborne (see bibliography) finds that "the film makes the ultrapowerful state toward which we are gradually slouching seem a dangerous and unhappy prospect."
 


Charles Fourier // The Theory of the Four Movements (1808); The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. Selected texts on work, love and passionate attraction (1971), ed. Jonathan Beecher & Richard Bienvenu

(1971)

The Theory of the Four Movements is an extraordinary work of early libertarian socialism, a mix of a penetrating critique of developing capitalism and a fanciful quasi-prophetic visionary cosmogony. The fullest anarchist discussion is probably that by Don LaCoss, originally published in Fifth Estate in 2003, and now available at The Anarchist Library. LaCoss gives an accurate summary of this work:
 
"This scheme for a revolutionary reorganization of life on all planes of existence was the subject of his wonderfully weird first book, Theory of the Four Movements (1808), which might be best characterized as a combination of philosophy, cosmogony, industrial psychology, science fiction, and prophecy. In the pages of this great utopian text, Fourier vigorously condemned capitalist markets, bureaucratic excrescence, the oppression of women, and suffocation of desire by the leviathans of industrial civilization.



"To address these wrongs, he proposed a complex system of worker self-management, locally autonomous voluntary associations, and the restoration of existential meaning to daily chores. The goal of this system was “universal harmony,” a near-hallucinatory level of sensual creation and gratification that would emerge from intentional communities. The paths toward Harmony would inevitably lead to the evolutionary overcoming of industrial capitalism: animals would learn to play musical instruments, stars will copulate and spray us all with their sexual fluids, weather patterns will shift, new moons will revolve around the earth, the chemical composition of the oceans would change, and human bodies begin to mutate.



"I suspect that Fourier may not have intended that people read his Theory of the Four Movements as literal, instrumental prescriptions for social change. What his book did offer, however, was a glimpse of what unleashed passion and imagination could produce if you refused to let your mind be limited by the existing orders of knowledge and institutions of power."



To be honest, parts of the book come across as pretty demented, but the strength of the rest sustains the reader's interest.
 
The Utopian Vision anthology is definitely of interest. Fourier's vision is really rather remarkable, and though by no means conventionally utopian the future tense in which much of it is written, and the occasional vignettes of life in his ideal society, mark it as in a sense science fictional. Though in many ways rigidly regimented on pseudo-scientific lines, the utopian society is depicted as joyously socialistic, antipathetic to the work ethic, and glorying in free-range sexuality.
 
Max Nettlau (see bibliography) was clear on Fourier's importance: "In short, we can say that many roads led from Fourierism to libertarian socialism" . . . .
 


Karen Joy Fowler // We Are all Completely Beside Ourselves (2013); The Science of Herself plus (2013)

(2013)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves concerns the parallel experiences of two sisters, one human, the other a chimpanzee, brought up together experimentally as a psychological experiment; inevitably, it goes tragically wrong. A central character is the brother, who becomes an ALF activist. The message is strongly pro non-human animal rights. In Susan Samatar's 2020 podcast interview with Margaret Killjoy, Samatar uses this novel as an example of how a novelist can't predict how her work will impact on the world, but that it can unquestionably impact on herself.



The Science of Herself plus is another little book in the outstanding PM Press Outspoken Authors series. Reviewed by Luther Blissett for Freedom, where it's described as a "rich meal with distinct tastes."


George Foy // The Memory of Fire

(2000)

"Governments and corporations wage war against anarchist enclaves." (Dan Clore)
 
The dense text and opacity of the storyline tend to dilute such interest as the reader might have in the self-contained enclaves, which are more outlaw than anarchist, notwithstanding a passing nod in the direction of Kropotkin.


John Foyster

(--)

Australian SF critic John Foyster was an anarchist, and wrote 'Why are they always badmouthing the anarchists?' for the fanzine Oh Bloody Hell! in 1976, reproduced in Scratch Pad 55, April 2004.
 
 


Anatole France // The White Stone (1905); Penguin Island (1908)

(1908)

The last quarter of The White Stone recounts a dream of a 23rd century collectivist utopia in a federal Europe; there remains a strong anarchist opposition, which is generally tolerated. For Marie-Louise Berneri "Anatole France's utopian sketch in La Pierre Blanche has been rightly ignored, as it is one of his dullest pieces of writing" . . . (Berneri 1949: 293)
 
Penguin Island is a satire involving evolution among penguins. Book Two presents an essentially anarchist view of the origin of property and government:



"Do you see, my son," he exclaimed, "that madman who with his teeth is biting the nose of the adversary he has overthrown and that other one who is pounding a woman's head with a huge stone?"



"I see them," said Bulloch. "They are creating law; they are founding property; they are establishing the principles of civilization, the basis of society, and the foundations of the State."
(Bantam Classic edn: 37)



The last book concerns the future destruction of civilization, initiated by anarchist bombers; although the author seems to have some sympathy for this, the book concludes with the cyclical return of the triumphant State. Unusually, we have a record of the views of Bartolomeo Vanzetti on this work: for him "France masterly slaps, in this book, the pretentions, proudness, hypocracy, stupidity and ferocity of the humane, and shows the uselessness of religions, and the venom of the clergies." (Frankfurter & Jackson, eds: 144)
 


Matt Groening // Futurama

(999/2003, 2008/2013)

The episode 'I Dated a Robot' (S03 E15), in which "humanity almost goes extinct because teenagers start fucking robots instead of each other," is referenced in Jess Flarity's Summer 2021 Fifth Estate article 'She Exists Only to Please.' (The episode is actually more about internet piracy.)


g

Bert Garskof // The Canbe Collective Builds a Be-Hive

(1977)

A book for older children, describing an anarchist community of the future (though the word itself isn't used). It has apparently grown out of the sixties commune movement, and seems to be a sort of hippie utopia for kids. Though stateless, Canbe has a system of local, regional, continental and general planning groups, "the closest things the New Era had to what in the olden times were called governments" (Dandelion edn: 58); their function is to co-ordinate the work of all the various communal associations and collectives.
 
Tess Derbyfield, reviewing the book for Open Road, found the reader "taken on a fascinating tour of an anarchistic society in full and healthy operation." "This book is a serious yet delightful exploration of anarchist possibilities." (Derbyfield 1978)


Roger Corman // Gas-s-s-s, or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It

(1970)

Feeble countercultural light comedy, set in a world where everyone over the age of 25 has been killed by a leak of poison gas.
 
Included in the Red Planets filmography (see Bould, in bibliography).


Andrew Niccol // Gattaca

(1997)

Wannabe astronaut swaps identities to secure a place on a mission to Saturn, the only way he can pass the biometric screening.
 
Included as politically ambiguous, but interesting from a leftist perspective, in a comment on the Anarchism subreddit discussion on movie recommendations containing Anarchy. Another, on 20 Great Anarchist Movies That Are Worth Your Time, gave a succinct description: "future anarch praxis user's manual".
 


Sally Miller Gearhart // The Wanderground

(1979)

A future of sexual apartheid, with men in the cities and women in the hills, seen exclusively from the women's point of view; the women have developed nebulous psi powers and communicate freely with animals and birds as well as each other.
 
Widely noted as among the feminist utopias of the second wave of the feminist movement (see Piercy, for example). Described by Mark Bould as a "Lesbian feminist utopia."
 


Hugo Gernsback // Ralph 124C 41+

(1911/12; fixup 1925; rev. 1950)

Although "it didn't have much of a story", Gernsback's well-known novel was still seen as "phenomenal" by Justin A. Winston in 1967 (see bibliography), and the best example of a technocracy he could think of.


Basma Ghalayini, ed. // Palestine +100

(2019)

Subtitled 'stories from a century after the Nakba', this is a collection of sf by Palestinian authors, imagining a Palestine of 2048, a hundred years after the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.



Javier Saithness has a paragraph on this work in part 3 of his 2021 Science Fiction as Protest Art.



Chris McCawley, Jim Morrison, Jim Munroe, and Tate Young // Ghosts with Shit Jobs

(2012)

Set in 2040 Toronto, after the economic collapse of the West and the ascendancy of China, this is a mock documentary about ridiculous jobs held by Americans, supposedly made for the amusement of a Chinese audience. Each storyline has a different director. The jobs featured are a digital janitor, who has to manually cover up logos for copyright reasons in a future version of StreetView; a couple who assemble robot baby dolls for the children of the wealthy; two collectors of spider silk; and a human spammer who makes a living by mentioning brands and products in casual conversation.
 
The film was shown at the 2013 Chicago Anarchist Film Festival, with one of the directors present for a Q & A.
 


Lewis Grassic Gibbon

(--)

William F. Gibson // Neuromancer (1984); Idoru (1997); All Tomorrow's Parties (1999); Pattern Recognition (2003)

(2003)

Neuromancer is of course a cyberpunk classic. It is among the works of Gibson and Bruce Sterling that are discussed in Call (1999 - see bibliography), for whom this novel, in a way, "represents a crucial transition point between the modern and the postmodern."



Idoru's Walled City "presents us with a new model of anarchist politics, for it insists that truly radical activities cannot be carried out within the epistemological framework of modern spatial relations" (Call (1999): 105). For Seán Sheehan (2003), however, "Cyberpunk is partly characterized by neat, throw-away concepts like the Walled City, but such ideas hardly constitute an attempt to dismantle the bourgeois forms of reality, especially when they occur within novels like Idoru that are utterly conventional in their narrative form."



Rich Dana (Ricardo Feral) quoted from All Tomorrow's Parties in his 'Feral Technology' piece for Fifth Estate #405, Winter 2020.



A rather questionable link here, but Jeff Riggenbach has traced a perceived influence on Pattern Recognition from the neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek.



William Gibson & Bruce Sterling // The Difference Engine

(1990)

Included in Killjoy's list (see bibliography) of stories that feature sympathetic anarchist characters.
 
 


Mike Gilliland // The Free

(1st edn 1986; 5th edition 2014)

Described by its publisher as "A novel of love, hope and revolution, set in the very near future, on an island off the coast of Britain. From the underground to revolution, repression and resistance! Essential. The first great contemporary anarchist novel." Frank Jackson, in a 1986 review in the New Anarchist Review, found it "A raw visionary book that touches a hopeful chord."
 
There is an online essay entitled "What can M. Gilliland's The Free contribute to an understanding of the conceptual structure of modern British class struggle anarchism?" here. See also Cohn: 201-2, 223.
 
The author says the later editions are "3 times as long and 10 times better, with lots more humour, sex and triumphing alternatives". In his list of the novel's themes (at the end of the text) he says "The Free are inspired by the anarchist fiesta, trying out Pete Kropotkin's cut on Darwin. Cooperation in tooth and claw."
 
The Free gives an exceptionally vivid account of the exhilaration of the revolutionary process, with strongly imagined characters and very believable dialogue. Potentially inspirational.


Charlotte Perkins Gilman // 'The Yellow Wallpaper' (1892); Moving the Mountain (1911); Herland (1915)

(1915)

'The Yellow Wallpaper' is a powerful feminist story: a first-person account of a woman's mental health fragmenting in the face of the 'rest cure' prescribed by her patriarchal physician husband. Described by China Miéville, in his 'Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read' (copied to the anarchysf mailing list in 2005) as "terrifying," and a "Towering work by this radical thinker."



Moving the Mountain depicts a short near-future (1940) socialist feminist utopian USA. Although superficially attractive, it's notable that the utopia is predicated on having first eliminated mentally ill and disabled people, and unredeemable criminals.



Herland is an interesting and surprisingly readable lost-race story of an all-woman utopia, but for Jesse Cohn, writing 99 years after its original publication, it is "decidedly non-anarchist" (221).



Alain Bourret // The Glass Fortress

(2016)

Disappointing French short, rather freely adapted from Zamyatin's We, and stylistically derivative of La Jetée.
 
Noted on Facebook Anarchists and Science Fiction in January 2017.
 


George Glendon // The Emperor of the Air

(1910)

Confused and derivative story of Esperanto-speaking anarchists waging war on society from a marvellous new airship. Their leader proclaims himself Emperor of the Air and rapidly forgets any anarchist principles he may ever have had, whereupon ground-based anarchists collaborate with police forces in opposing him. The novel concludes when the airship impales itself on the summit of Mt Everest. Exceptionally silly.
 


Molly Gloss // The Dazzle of Day

(1997)

Quakerism and Esperanto (again) in space, but disappointingly cool as sf, no matter how well written. Included in the Think Galactic reading list.


Tom Godwin // 'The Cold Equations'

(1954)

This much-anthologised tale is discussed in a long paragraph of Jesse Cohn's
Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation,
where he notes that "contextually speaking, Godwin’s vision of the future is really a reflection of its own present, a distorted representation of
Eisenhower-era gender codes that projects these onto the universe itself, rewriting social conventions as natural law."


Ishirō Honda // Godzilla (ゴジラ Gojira)

(1954)

A giant fire-breathing amphibious dinosaur is aroused from the deep by undersea nuclear testing, and wreaks havoc on land, before being despatched with a secret weapon.
 
Described by Mark Bould in his Red Planets filmography (see bibliography) as a "Mournful, pacifistic, anti-nuclear monster movie."


William Golding // Lord of the Flies (1954); The Inheritors (1955)

(1955)

Anarchist critics took a dislike to Lord of the Flies, and those with a particular interest in SF were also at pains to exclude it from the genre, as they understood it (Uloth 1961, Pilgrim 1963, A.M. 1976, A.F. 1983). For A.F. "The book is indeed a deliberately anti-humanist tract, following Golding's frequently expressed hatred of science and progress, and also an equally anti-anarchist tract, insisting that humanity without law and authority must relapse into savagery." In 2020
Zeke Teflon described the book as "disgusting, [and] discredited."
 
A.F. considered Golding's second novel, The Inheritors, to be his best.


Lisa Goldstein // The Dream Years

(1985)

Included in the science fiction reading list on the R.A. Forum website, where the contributor Ronald Creagh describes it as "A subtle evocation of anarchism in the uncanny universe of a surrealist crossing the avenues of time in Paris." Also included in Mark Bould's Red Planets reading list (see bibliography). 


Abba Gordin and Wolf Gordin // Анархия в мечте. Страна-Анархия (Anarchy in a Dream: The Land of Anarchy)

(1919)

The Gordin brothers were very actively involved in the Russian anarchist movement in the period of the revolution, and subsequent years. Victor Serge wrote the following of them in 1921:



"[t]he two Gordin brothers have played a key role in the Russian anarchist movement of these past few years. Tireless orators and propagandists, prolific writers, journalists, pamphleteers, and initiators of multiple enterprises, combatants at the barricades of July and October 1917, thanks to their ever-working imaginations they have greatly contributed to creating and sustaining both the life and the waste of this movement."



In the late 1920s both departed for the United States; Abba became a co-editor of the New York Yiddish-language anarchist journal Freie Arbeiter Stimme.



Anarchy in a Dream is evidently an anarchist utopia. Life there is apparently "based primarily on the rejection of the rationalistic scientific consciousness of the world" [Russian Anarchist Utopias of the 1920s], and



"The world of Anarchy is based on the principle of Bakunin: "We presume that we first destroy and then we create, because the destruction is the spirit of creation". The Gordins consolidate the ideological basis. In other works, they develop so-argued their refusal to contemporary science and develop a non-Aristotelian logic – like non-Euclidean geometry – by eliminating one of its axioms, the law of 'excluded middle'. Considering that two proposals that contradict each other can be simultaneously false and can therefore be denied, they deduce a 'logic of pure negation'." [Leonid Heller]



See also Eugene Kuchinov.



Not translated into English, so not read.


Rex Gordon // Utopia 239

(1955)

One of the few explicitly anarchist SF novels. The plot is stock utopian: the protagonists escape via time machine into the future, encounter utopia, and decide to stay.
 
The future society is anarchist to a pattern apparently of Gordon's own devising. The only rules the community abide by are inscribed on a memorial stone to the instigator of the revolution:



THE GOSPEL OF THIS COMMUNITY . . .



THAT NO ONE SHALL HAVE THE POWER TO ISSUE ORDERS . . .



THAT A STATE OF ANARCHY SHALL PREVAIL . . .



THAT FREEDOM SHALL BE UNLIMITED . . . UNCIRCUMSCRIBED BY LAW . . . UNFETTERED BY TAXATION . . .



(Consul pb edn: 194–5)



Within the anarchy, people are free to organise on non-anarchist lines if they so choose. The society has a form of scientific priesthood, which strenuously denies that it is a quasi-government.
 
For John Pilgrim, who devoted a full page of his 1963 Anarchy article to Utopia 239, "Basically the theme of this book is that government is slavery, and unnecessary slavery at that, and it is this view of the doubtful benefits that governments confer that makes science fiction so important at a time when centralised authoritarianism is becoming epidemic."


Stuart Gordon // Fire in the Abyss

(1983)

Sir Humfrey Gylberte and other figures from the past are plunged into 1990 by a US Navy experiment. 'Humf', as he becomes, eventually throws in his lot with the lorry people, who are a sort of hippie-anarchic travelling community. This is apparently in fulfilment of the Egyptian priestess Tari's sense of their destiny. An earlier exchange with Humf had outlined this:
 
"I told you," she said patiently. "We work towards self-responsibility so that the need of hidden elite groups is reduced!"



"Spiritual socialism?" I asked bitterly.



"More precisely, it is an-archy, meaning 'without a ruler,' or perhaps I should say, 'without earthly ruler,' for it's impossible to gain such a state without some common sense of things within and beyond, through which we are, in fact and always, united." (1984 Arrow pb edn: 262)



The novel, though entertaining, is poorly unified, and it's doubtful what lessons, if any, can be drawn.
 


Alan Grant // Batman: Anarky

(1999)

Lightweight comic-book, but strong on anarchist propaganda, with a teenage protagonist.
 
Logan Marie Glitterbomb has a paragraph on Anarky as "used to spread Grant’s anarchist philosophy".
 
Included in the CIRA collection.
 


Louis Pope Gratacap // The Mayor of New York: A Romance of the Days to Come

(1910)

Set in 2000, with New York an independent city state, as SF it's otherwise not of great interest, and such anarchism as it includes conforms to contemporary negative stereotypes. In the words of the Mayor,
 
"They are frankly anarchists, they assert the solidarity of chaos, the unity of discord, the prosperity of idleness, the stability of disorder. Their philosophy is a jumble of contradictions. But worse, they are self-elected criminals, or else they are hopelessly mad."
(Dillingham edn: 98)



Long and tedious.



Jean Grave // Les Aventures de Nono

(1901)

Grave was a notable activist in the French anarchist and international anarchist communism movements, and the editor of three major anarchist periodicals, Le Révolté, La Révolte and Les Temps Nouveaux. Among his books was this short fantasy, described in the 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary as a "libertarian utopia for children". Nettlau, in his Esbozo, notes that this was used as a second reading book in Ferrer's Modern School in Barcelona, which opened in the year of its publication.



The text itself is no longer of any great interest, however.


Martin Harry Greenberg and Mark Tier, eds // Freedom!

(2006)

Incorporates two volumes previously published separately: Give Me Liberty (2003) and Visions of Liberty (2004). The anthologies won a Special Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 2005.
 
Exceptionally disappointing anthology on the theme of societies without government, or with very little. Most stories are pedestrian and uninspiring, though a couple of genre classics are included: Russell's 'And Then There Were None', and van Vogt's 'The Weapon Shop'. Linaweaver's 'A Reception at the Anarchist Embassy' is irritating and juvenile.



Nicola Griffith // Ammonite

(1993)

Included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 


Eileen Gunn // Stable Strategies and Others

(2004)

Recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction' at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009.
 
 


h

John Hackett // The Third World War: August 1985: A Future History

(1978)

This well-known future-war story, by a team of top-rank militarists, involves a limited nuclear engagement in which Birmingham and Minsk are destroyed; the war concludes with Communism wiped off the face of the earth.
 
A.B., reviewing this novel in the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review, found it "one of the crudest, crassest, and most boring bits of propaganda that have ever been written."
 


Joe Haldeman // The Forever War (1974); Buying Time (1989; aka The Long Habit of Living)

(1989)

In Haldeman's best-known work, the war is not quite forever, but lasts over a thousand years, and is entirely witnessed, thanks to relativistic effects, by one trooper; the war (against the Taurans) is unsurprisingly shown to have been entirely pointless.



The Forever War was compared by P.S., in the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review in 1978, with Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero, both books being condemned—unfairly, although Haldeman's experience as a Vietnam combat veteran means that his descriptions of warfare sometimes obscure his anti-militarist message. Reviewed and recommended by Margaret Killjoy in 2014.



Buying Time is centred on the monetisation of immortality. The libertarian Eric S. Raymond, in his A Political History of SF, considers that what he describes as the "explicitly anarcho-libertarian future societies" of the Conch Republic and Novysibirsk, which are background features of parts of this novel, "were all the more convincing for not being subjects of polemic."



Sandy Hall // The Godmothers

(1982)

The Godmothers has two interwoven plots. In one, a contemporary feminist circle takes on Toronto capitalism; in the other, a future where women run the world communication network is threatened by reactionary forces. The two are uneasily linked telepathically with past witchcraft and a zone outside of space-time. Though strongly feminist, it's not even libertarian.
 
It was reviewed by Annamarie Allan in Peace News in 1982, who felt that ". . . the intensity of her desire to persuade has prevented a full realization" of the novel's potential. In the way she characterizes women, but caricatures men, "Ms Hall unfortunately lays herself open to the charge of demonstrating the same intolerance which she criticises so fiercely."
 


Edmund Hamilton // 'The Island of Unreason'

(1933)

"Those who commit 'breach of reason'—as, for example, by refusing the mate assigned to them by the Eugenic Board—are sentenced to spend time on the Island of Unreason, where there is "no form of government"." (Dan Clore)
 
In practice, the island is dominated by the most successful male fighter, the inhabitants living in a Hobbesian state of nature rather than an anarchy in any positive sense.


Clement Milton Hammond // 'Then and Now: Anarchy in the Year 2085'

(1884/1885)

'Then and Now' was serialised in Benjamin Tucker's Liberty, but has never subsequently been published in print form, although it is now available online. Although explicitly anarchist, it barely scrapes in as sf. It's framed as a series of letters from a visitor to a future 200 years from the date of its writing, in which America has become a thriving anarchist society. However, little is really said about this, as the device is mainly used as a vantage point from which to survey the less wholesome world of the 1880s.


Volker Schlöndorff // The Handmaid's Tale

(1990)

Margaret Atwood's dystopia, adapted for the screen. In a patriarchal theocracy, the tiny minority of fertile women are in effect enslaved as breeders. After a failed escape, the story follows one woman up to the point of her next escape, the degree of success of which is left uncertain.
 
Recommended in Osborne's Guide (see bibliography). For Libertarian Movies, "This film will especially speak to feminist libertarians, but this nightmare of an ultimate church-state is one that all libertarians can appreciate!" Also recommended by two posters on the page looking for movie recommendations on Reddit.com/r/Anarchism, though both preferred the original novel.
 


Bruce Miller // The Handmaid's Tale (TV series)

(2015→)

Based on the dystopian Atwood novel, the series has been well received, though inevitably the first series was the most successful. In a 2019 Freedom News article (translated from prior publication in Revista Torpedo) Teresa Cabrera Sánchez and Hugo Cuevas Soria describe the depicted society of Gilead as "presented as an eco-fascist alternative society of the most frightening kind."


Charles L. Harness // The Paradox Men (1953); 'The Rose' (1953)

(1953)

For Moorcock, "The Paradox Men with its sense of the nature of Time, its thief hero, its ironic references to America Imperial, is highly entertaining." He also singled out 'The Rose' as a particular favourite. (Moorcock 1978)


James Harrington // The Commonwealth of Oceana

(1656)

Sometimes described as a utopia, but Marie-Louise Berneri correctly described it as belonging to the category of ideal constitutions rather than ideal commonwealths. She noted—as did Max Nettlau (see Nettlau's Esbozo in bibliography)—its significant influence on the constitutions of the United States and particularly of Pennsylvania.
 


Bruce Pittman // Harrison Bergeron

(1995)

Made for TV, and based on the Vonnegut short story, but considerably reworked. Good, but the 2009 version (entitled 2081, q.v.), which reverted to the original, is appreciably better.
 
Osborne (see bibliography) reviewed the film enthusiastically (but before 2081 came out): "For a cinematic attack on enforced equality, you could hardly do better than this wonderful film. [. . .] This is a moving and stimulating experience, and one of the most dead-on libertarian films ever made."
 


Harry Harrison // 'The Streets of Ashkelon' (1962; aka 'An Alien Agony'); Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965); The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted (1987)

(1987)

For John Pilgrim the 1962 story ("this horrific little tale") "poses the question of the amount of harm that the introduction of religion would do to a race who had managed to develop without any concept of the supernatural, or of God. The author's standpoint here is that the harm would be enormous and irreparable" . . . (Pilgrim 1963)



Moorcock found Bill, the Galactic Hero "very funny", as a send-up of Heinlein. P.S. didn't get the joke: "The drawback with repeating this parody, chapter after chapter, is that the resulting book is no longer a parody of the martial spirit, but just another plug for the military." (Moorcock 1978, P.S. 1978) For
Zeke Teflon, however, it's "An astute, acidic, and oft-times amusing takedown of the military and militarism."



Bill himself, a hard-pressed trooper, surely owes something to Švejk.



Of the 1987 novel "Harrison says: 'the evil guys invade the plant [sic] which had their own system of Government which is right out of the text book! It's anarchy. It has a bad name. But no one knows a thing about anarchism these days. That world is a world of hard working anarchy. Every single character there is right out of the Encyclopaedia Britannia. And not one person ever noticed. So much for saying you hate anarchy! This was just pure text book anarchism. So now you know more about anarchy.'" (Dan Clore)



The word itself, though, is never used. The prevailing political theory—developed by an artificial intelligence—is described as 'Individual Mutualism'. There is no state, no law, no army and no police force. One of the lead characters is called Stirner. The invaders are on the point of defeat by the means of passive resistance, when the League Navy turns up and takes the credit.



A lightweight potboiler—though Teflon considers it a "well thought out book about mutualist anarchism and nonviolent resistance disguised as escapist sci-fi."


M. John Harrison // 'The Ash Circus' (1971); The Centauri Device (1975); Light (2002)

(2002)

'The Ash Circus' is a short story featuring Moorcock's character Jerry Cornelius; there is brief reference to William Godwin.
 
The Centauri Device is, unusually, an explicitly anarchist space opera. Captain John Truck is the only human with the Centauran genes capable of arming and triggering the ultimate weapon, the Centauri device. Pursued by the powers that be, he finally explodes the device, concluding that none of them should have it. Anarchists play central roles—two chapters are devoted to Swinburne Sinclair-Peter, the Interstellar Anarchist, who "prowled the galaxy like a brilliant tiger" (Panther edn: 74), and the anarchist world of Howell, a 2-mile diameter asteroid midway between Sol and Centauri; in the final chapter Truck himself becomes "The Last Anarchist" (187).
 
Light is a striking—in some respects surrealist—21st century space opera. The novel is referenced by Eden Kupermintz on the anarchySF podcast, where he describes Harrison as "the science fiction writer's writer", his work "amazing, experimental, and weird".



According to Moorcock "M. John Harrison is an anarchist and his books are full of anarchists—some of them very bizarre like the anarchist-aesthetes of The Centauri Device. Typical of the New Worlds school he could be described as an existential anarchist." (Moorcock 1978)
 


Jacquetta Hawkes // Providence Island

(1959)

North of New Guinea an island is discovered and visited, on which survives the Magdalenian culture of the old stone age. Attempts by an American expeditionary force to take over are thwarted by a British archaeological group and the islanders' telepathic powers.
 
This well-meaning book was treated kindly by ADF in Freedom, who considered it "worth reading purely as an emotional record", noting that "Miss Hawkes is obviously wrung by the inhuman aspects of our culture . . .". (ADF, 1959)
 


Nathaniel Hawthorne // 'The Artist of the Beautiful'

(1844)

A watchmaker spends years creating an artificial butterfly but is relatively unmoved when it is destroyed by a child.
 
Herbert Read, writing in 1945, said:
 
"I believe that this particular tale of Hawthorne's is the author's deepest comment on his own work. He realised that he was only creating symbols inconsistent with his sceptical outlook on life. He realized that his works of art would not bear the test of reality. But nevertheless they did reveal, if only through the reactions they provoked, the reality of men's souls, the truth of the human heart."


Robert A. Heinlein // 'Requiem' (1940); The Day After Tomorrow (1941), Methuselah's Children (1941/1958); 'Waldo' (1942); Red Planet (1949); The Puppet Masters (1951); Revolt in 2100 (1953); Double Star (1956); Starship Troopers (1959); Stranger in a Strange Land (1961); Farnham's Freehold (1964); The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966); Time Enough for Love (1973); Friday (1982); For Us, the Living (2004; written 1939)

(2004)

Heinlein was of the libertarian right, and has been treated harshly by anarchist critics. For John Pilgrim "the appearance of Heinlein's Day After Tomorrow proved beyond all doubt that Heinlein is that virtually unique creature, a fascist science fiction writer" (1963). Michael Moorcock, similarly, said that if someone sitting opposite him on a tube train were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval, it probably wouldn't disturb him much more than if it were Heinlein they were reading. Heinlein's later stories, especially, he described as paternalistic, xenophobic, misanthropic, and anti-libertarian. Moorcock expressed horror at the way radicals were taken in by Heinlein—"even supporters of the Angry Brigade" being among them; this was perhaps, he suggested, because Heinlein's vague prose allowed readers to interpret him in the way closest to their own sympathies.
 
'Waldo' is briefly mentioned in Moorcock 1978.
 
Red Planet won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1996, as did Methuselah's Children in 1997, Time Enough for Love in 1998, and Requiem in 2003.
 
Alex Comfort was thinking specifically of The Puppet Masters when he mused, in 1961, that "it is hard to tell whether some of the fantasies of science fiction are paranoiac or merely satirical".
 
For M. Eagle, writing in Freedom in 1969, Heinlein's Revolt in 2100 "describes the overthrow of a theocratic dictatorship in the USA and its replacement by the Covenant, by which all citizens can do anything they wish providing no harm is done to others. A social contract indeed!"
 
Double Star is included in Evan Lampe's blog. Easterbrook describes it as "Heinlein's first foray into explicitly libertarian thought" (p555).
 
Starship Troopers was attacked by both John Pilgrim and Michael Moorcock, in their seminal articles on anarchism and science fiction. For Pilgrim it is "one of the very few examples of retrogressive, one might even say fascist thought, in the entire range of science fiction writing." He goes on to say that "it could well be argued that part of the libertarian nature of science fiction is a built-in effect, for the setting of Heinlein's ideas in a science fiction medium show up, in sharper relief than mainstream fiction could ever do, the repulsive nature of his philosophy." (Pilgrim 1963). In 1966 he summed up this novel as "brilliant but obnoxious". It is of course absolutely central to Moorcock's 1978 'Starship Stormtroopers', which brackets Heinlein with John Wayne, John Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George Wallace. He says "To be an anarchist, surely, is to reject authority but to accept self-discipline and community responsibility. To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some benign, omniscient father" . . . .
 
In 2014 Margaret Killjoy presented a more ambivalent view. On the one hand he argued that "Starship Troopers is one of the more brilliant and influential arguments for hierarchy ever put to print. For that reason alone, it’s worth reading. Know your enemy." But on the other he found himself irresistibly drawn to the novel's romanticism, as he saw it, and was compelled to acknowledge that anarchism occupies an awkward liminal space with elements of both extreme leftwing and extreme rightwing values, which is shared, among others, with Heinlein.
 
Eagle, in 1969, found that "Stranger in a Strange Land contains a beautiful religion or philosophy." The book tied for the 1987 Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award.



In Farnham's Freehold a nuclear attack propels a US family into a future society where blacks rule and whites are kept as slaves and bred for food. Highly offensive and reactionary, it is if anything worse than Starship Troopers. For Moorcock, "It's not such a big step, for instance, from Farnham's Freehold to Hitler's Lebensraum." (Moorcock 1978)
 
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of Heinlein's more acceptable books, and one to which a version of anarchism is central—a blend of individualist anarchism and Jeffersonian democracy that Heinlein calls 'rational anarchism'. The story concerns the successful lunar war of independence, and owes much to the historical precedent of the American revolution. For Robert Shea,
 
 ". . . the picture of an anarchist society on the moon in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is . . . believable. This is one sort of anarchism, at any rate . . . This Wild West Anarchism wouldn't appeal to all anarchists, but it does give us a chance to experience one way that a society without a government might work. Many anarchists like it so much they suggest it to non-anarchists as introductory reading." (Shea 1980:0)



Like most revolutions, though, the lunar one only results in a substitution at the top.
 
A key character in Moon, Professor Bernardo de la Paz, is said to have been based on the real-life libertarian Robert LeFevre, who had been a neighbour of Heinlein's. Ken MacLeod says this work had an influence on David Friedman and other theorists of anarcho-capitalism, "a significant minority strand in modern libertarianism" (see MacLeod 2003, in bibliography); but Jeff Riggenbach of the Mises Institute has suggested that, influential on libertarianism as Heinlein clearly was, he was probably not a libertarian himself, and that at the time he was writing works of this period he may well have been under the influence of his third wife, Virginia. (Riggenbach)
 
The book tied for the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1983.
 
Time Enough for Love is a long-winded and tiresome novel, chronicling the 2360-year life of Lazarus Long, a Heinlein mouthpiece. There is an objectionable passage, in one of the extracts from Long's notebooks, which should be committed to memory by anyone inclined to describe Heinlein as an anarchist:
 
"Those who refuse to support and defend a state have no claim to protection by that state. Killing an anarchist or a pacifist should not be defined as "murder" in a legalistic sense. The offence against the state, if any, would be "Using deadly weapons inside city limits," or "Creating a traffic hazard," or "Endangering bystanders," or other misdemeanour." [Second Intermission]



Friday is better, and certainly readable. Killjoy comments that "one of the important life lessons he imparts in Friday is that "everyone is bisexual."
 
For Us, the Living was Heinlein's first novel, but remained unpublished until 2004, after his death. Curiosity value only, really, but interesting for anyone steeped in Heinlein who wants to see the genesis of his later work. This is the only Heinlein work included in Bould's Red Planets reading list. Bould refers to it as "this long-unpublished anti-racist, anti-clerical, nudist utopian novel, advocating a Social Credit system with which to moderate capitalism", but also notes its "already problematic feminism." Also referenced in Reddit Anarchy 101's Science Fiction and Anarchy.


Spike Jonze // Her

(2013)

Thoughtful near-future story of a human/AI romance.
 
Recommended by Brett at Revolutionary Left Radio. The film is also referenced in Lucas's Blade Runner 2049 review in Fifth Estate #400, and Flarity's 'She Exists Only to Please' in the same publication's #409.
 


Frank Herbert // Dune novels

(1965–1985)

Herbert was "immensely and constantly critical of government", lived on a sustainable land project, and "developed the idea of technopeasantry, a precursor to post-civilized theory and the appropriate technology movements" (Killjoy, 2009). The Dune novels were among the first to explore ecological sf.
 
Herbert once said "I have a standard axiom: all governments lie. Don't believe anything they say." (Platt, 1980: 212)



Theodor Hertzka // Freeland: A Social Anticipation (1890); A Visit to Freeland (1893)

(1893)

Non-statist libertarian utopia. Berneri comments that Freeland was received with great enthusiasm in the UK, and Nettlau, in 1897, included these works among "les utopies [ . . . ] non étatistes et où se retrouvent des tendances libertaires" . . . . According to Nettlau the anarchist Gustav Landauer was a Freelander when young. (Nettlau 1897, 1964)


Ben Wheatley // High-Rise

(2015)

Based on the novel by J.G. Ballard, the film is set in a luxury tower block in the 1970s. With all facilities located on-site, residents gradually detach their lives from the outside world, the infrastructure begins to fail, tensions become apparent, and the building soon descends entropically into class war between upper and lower floors.
 
Reviewed in Obsolete! #10, with enthusiastic declarations that "High-Rise captures Ballard on film perfectly, at last", portraying the essence of the book "in all of its cool, disturbing, sexy and perverse glory."
 
Highly recommended by Facebook's Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist in July 2016.
 


James Hilton // Lost Horizon

(1933)

Ethel Mannin wrote that "In modern times there has been the glimpse of a free Utopia in James Hilton's novel, Lost Horizon, but it is a glimpse only, making no claim to being a detailed picture of an ideal commonwealth" . . . (Mannin 1944: 40)
 
Lost Horizon is a story of longevity in a Tibetan Christian/Buddhist lamasery, an idyllic community. Mannin rather overstates the freedom of the Utopia: the political system is flexible, but not anarchist. It is defined by one of the visitors to Shangri La as ". . . a rather loose and elastic autocracy, operated from the lamasery with a benevolence that was almost casual", and the lama Chang comments that "we believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much" (c. VI). The idea of straightforwardly not governing doesn't arise.
 


Russell Hoban // Riddley Walker

(1980)

This wonderful post-apocalyptic novel was one of three SF novels selected for mention by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, of the Fifth Estate collective, for a Summer 2012 anarchist reading list (the others being Delany's Dhalgren and Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time).
 


T. Shirby Hodge (pseudonym of Roger Sherman Tracy) // The White Man's Burden. A Satirical Forecast

(1915)

. . . "set in 5000 CE, by which period the warlike and primitive white races have been restricted to North America while, in black-dominated Africa, anarchism and scientific genius have generated a utopian world." (SFE)
 
An unusual and surprisingly interesting work, it's as much scientific romance as utopia, but the anarchism is quite explicit, and explicitly endorsed, with a whole chapter entitled 'Anarchy'. Perhaps improbably, government had simply been 'abolished', as the future society came to realise it would be better off without it. The 'White Man's Burden' of the title is revealed on the final page (no surprise by then, so it's scarcely a spoiler) as Himself.
 
Discussed by Mark Bould in 2010 (see bibliography), who concluded that "The equality Tracy hints at is that of the oppressed, regardless of color or sex."
 


James P. Hogan // Voyage from Yesteryear (1982); The Multiplex Man (1992)

(1992)

Voyage from Yesteryear describes an attempt by Terrans to recolonise a planet settled by humans some years before, in which the authoritarianism of the new colonists is thwarted by the libertarianism of the old. The planet's social system is essentially anarchy, but details are not dwelt upon. For Zeke Teflon, though, it features "a setting directly derived from  Murray Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism." The plot is largely derivative of Russell's '. . . And Then There Were None', and the book doesn't improve on that story in any respect.
 
This and The Multiplex Man were both Prometheus Award winners.


Ludwig Holberg // Niels Klim's Journey Under the Ground

(1741, expanded 1745; originally published in Latin as Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum Novam Telluris . . . ; English translation 1828)

Satirical utopian Hollow Earth story. The best part is the extract from the writings of a traveller from the inner world to the world of Europe on the outside, which successfully holds a mirror to the absurdities of 'civilisation'.
 
Noted in Nettlau's Esbozo as an influence on Bulwer Lytton. Tagged as SF in the CIRA catalogue.
 


Cecelia Holland // Floating Worlds

(1976)

A complex story of conflict between the inner and outer planets of the solar system, featuring a post-revolution anarchist Earth. The book presents an interesting contrast between libertarian and authoritarian society. Most of the book is set in the empire of the Styths on the outer planets, rather than on anarchist Earth. Neither side is presented as an ideal, and authorial judgment is not explicit. Earth's anarchy, in particular, is perhaps—like Le Guin's Anarres—an ambiguous utopia, in which the Committee for the Revolution has become just a vestigial government (Sphere edn: 13). Unlike Anarres, though, Earth's society is closer to anarcho-capitalism than anarchist communism. The anarchy is in any case essentially no more than the backdrop. Robert Shea considered this novel "not anarchist propaganda", but nevertheless felt it "presents a persuasive picture of an anarchist society". "The testing to which Holland subjects her anarchist community is so severe that it is finally destroyed by invaders. But not before we have learned to love it and to mourn its passing—4000 years in the future." (19)


Ninni Holmqvist // The Unit (2006, first published in Swedish as Enhet; first English translation 2008)

(2006)

Dystopian novel set in an institution in which 'dispensable' people—meaning all childless women aged over 50 and men aged over 60—are confined for their organs to be progressively harvested for use outside. Bleak but very moving, and all the more powerful for the apparently sincere compassion shown by the staff of the Unit.
 
Included in Quora's What are some of the best anarchist fiction novels, and in reading recommendations on several sites linked to from Facebook's Anarchists and Science Fiction.


E. Holt-White // The Woman who Saved the World

(1914)

Anarchist conspiracy story. Various British institutions are destroyed; the Houses of Parliament are blown up by rocket, but no MPs are killed. The chief culprit, Salvator, the unknown King of the Anarchists, turns out to be Chief of the Russian Secret Police, and a puppet of the Russian reactionary party, his purpose being to destroy England as a haven for anarchists. Olga, the eponymous Woman, is his sister; she finally shoots her brother to prevent his assassination of the prime minister, then kills herself. Poor and derivative.


Nalo Hopkinson // Brown Girl in the Ring (1998); Midnight Robber (2000); The Salt Roads (2003)

(2003)

Brown Girl in the Ring is described as Caribbean magical realism. Fine writing, very readable, but for my taste the magic is at the expense of the sf.
 
Midnight Robber was recommended by Common Action at the panel "Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction" at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009.
 
The Salt Roads is transgeneric magical realism and historical fiction, not SF at all. Very good, for all that. Included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 


Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan (eds) // So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy

(2004)

Recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction' at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009. Included in the Think Galactic reading list, one story, Carole McDonnell's 'Lingua Franca', also being included in its own right.
 


William Dean Howells // A Traveler from Altruria

(1894)

The eponymous traveller gently mocks American society, while refraining from describing his own Christian socialist utopian land until the final chapter.
 
Noted by Bob Black (see bibliography) for its three-hour obligatory working day. Included in Nettlau's Esbozo and in the Red Planets list of recommended reading (see Bould, in bibliography).



Howells was also notable for having written publicly to express his outrage at the prosecution of the Haymarket martyrs in 1887. See Garlin's William Dean Howells and the Haymarket Era.
 


Sarah A. Hoyt // Darkship Thieves

(2010)

Very readable space opera, and appreciably more so than some Prometheus Award winners, as this was in 2011. Also included in the Art for Liberty list of best libertarian novels.


W.H. Hudson // A Crystal Age

(1887)

A Crystal Age is a far-future matriarchal utopia, pervaded with a cloying sweetness-and-light.
 
Herbert Read read all of Hudson's books at the end of World War I, and according to George Woodcock Hudson was a significant influence on Read's The Green Child. Marie-Louise Berneri was also familiar with this utopian romance, though she found Hudson's "sexless society" unattractive. (Berneri 1949, Woodcock 1972b)


Gary Ross // The Hunger Games

(2012)

Set in a dystopian post-apocalyptic future where boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 18 must take part in the Hunger Games, a televised annual event in which the 'tributes' are required to fight to the death until there is only one survivor; based on the novel by Suzanne Collins.
 
Included in Starrychloe's list on Liberty.me's Good movies for libertarians and anarchists. A contributor to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum in 2016 described the film as "very politically relevant." Described on Reddit as showing "political implications/subversiveness".


Francis Lawrence // The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

(2013)

A special reprise of the Hunger Games, with the same lead player (Catniss), is used as a set-up for the start of a rebellion, in which Catniss will be the figurehead Mockingjay.
 
Sadie the Goat, reviewing the film for The Anarcho-Geek Review, enjoyed the film's anti-authoritarianism, and felt that, especially for the intended YA audience, "It’s hard to imagine a kid not walking out of Hunger Games able to see where the anarchists are coming from, if they’re able to make the connections between the movie and the real world." However, "For people who are already radicals, revolutionaries, and anarchists, I think this movie may be a frustrating experience", with the "resolution too perfect, and too unattainable."


Francis Lawrence // The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

(2014)

Second sequel to The Hunger Games, and the first half of the final part of the trilogy. Katniss reluctantly becomes the symbol of a mass rebellion against the Capitol, fighting to save the man she loves as well as the districts in rebellion.
 
Reviewed by Margaret Killjoy, who liked the movie, but found it "decidedly less fun" than its predecessors:



 
"[. . .] the worst thing about the third part of the Hunger Games is that there aren’t any hunger games. It’s just a movie about revolution instead. Considering that the hunger games are an awful thing and revolutions are something us anarchists are known for encouraging, this is a strange statement. But frankly, the battle royale under the omniscient gaze of an evil dictator made for good fiction.



"Revolution can too, it turns out."


Aldous Huxley // Brave New World (1932); After Many a Summer (1939); Ape and Essence (1948); Island (1962)

(1962)

Huxley has a significant place at the periphery of anarchism. Influenced to some extent by anarchist thought and experiment, he came in his turn to influence a later generation, the libertarian counter-culture of the 1960s. Already familiar with Godwin, Tolstoy, Proudhon, and Kropotkin, for Huxley it was the Spanish Civil War which prompted a specific reappraisal of anarchism. In a response to a questionnaire circulated to British writers by the Left Review in summer 1937, in which authors were asked to take sides, he responded: "My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially with the Anarchists; for Anarchism seems to me much more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism." (Huxley 1969:423). In December Huxley's response was reprinted on the front page of the British anarchist paper Spain and the World (Huxley 1937-12-10). Emma Goldman responded enthusiastically to Huxley's statement, writing to the latter in early 1938 to thank him: "Without wishing to be pushing, I cannot refrain from assuring you that this statement of yours is an event in my life of first-rate importance: indeed, I feel that it was worth fighting for fifty years to be able to call one a comrade who is so outstanding as a creative artist and who comes from a family of libertarians." (Porter:309) Albert Meltzer records, however, that when she tried "to rope him into activity for the Spanish Anarchists", "he ran off like a startled fawn" (Meltzer 1976: 24)



Subsequent non-fiction works Ends and Means (1937), Science, Liberty and Peace (1947), Brave New World Revisited (1949), though never directly anarchist, explored collateral issues such as pacifism, decentralisation, the role of science and technology, property distribution, and ecology.



In the seminal dystopia Brave New World the Savage, who has taught himself classic Western culture, encounters the new world of babies in bottles, soma and sex, is revolted, and is finally driven to suicide. In his 1946 introduction to the work Huxley said that if he were to rewrite it he would include a third option for the Savage: a community of exiles and refugees, in which "economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and cooperative." (Huxley 1946: 8)



Among anarchists, the most enthusiastic discussion of this work came from George Woodcock, for whom it was "the first warning vision of the kind of mindless, materialistic existence a society dominated by technological centralization might produce" (Woodcock 1975: 458). Of the big three dystopias (with Zamyatin's We and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four) it is the weakest and most overrated, although for David Goodway, in his 2005 piece on 'Aldous Huxley and Alex Comfort: A Comparison,' "the brilliant dystopian Brave New World continues to impress" (Klaus & Knight: 111).



George Woodcock linked After Many a Summer with Ends and Means and Brave New World Revisited as writings in which "Huxley explicitly accepted the validity of the anarchist critique of the existing society" (Woodcock 1975: 458); and felt that it was through this novel especially that Huxley transmitted the libertarian attitude to the 1960s (Woodcock 1977: 52). David Goodway sees Huxley (with Lewis Mumford) as one of the forerunners of the 'new anarchism' of the late 20th century, with its emphasis on biology, ecology, anthropology and alternative technology, in a line through Paul Goodman and Alex Comfort to Colin Ward and, especially, Murray Bookchin (Goodway: 232). Goodway also has half a page on this novel in his essay comparing Huxley and Alex Comfort, in Klaus and Knight, eds (see bibliography).



Ape and Essence is a post-holocaust dystopia, presented in the form of a film script. For Woodcock it was "a book which cannot be ignored by the libertarian, for it is one of the most bitter and sincere satirical attacks on the modern state and its centralising tendencies that has been produced in recent years" (Woodcock 1949).



Island is Huxley's utopia, ostensibly an anti-Brave New World, founded on tantric yoga, Buddhist behaviourism, and psychedelic drugs. The economy is cooperative, the political system a federation of self-governing geographical, professional and economic units, and religion centred on individual experience. For Woodcock Island "was the nearest any writer approached to an anarchist Utopia since William Morris wrote News from Nowhere" (Woodcock 1975: 458). For Goodway, too, it was "the first fully realized libertarian utopia" since Morris's work; for him the society Huxley presented "is a society in which I personally would be delighted to live." Very much a novel of the 60s, it is in a broad sense anarchistic, but the formula presented—sex, drugs and religion—is far from liberating, and objectively it is not that distant from Brave New World.



Edward Hyams // The Final Agenda (1973); Morrow's Ants (1975)

(1975)

Hyams was well-versed in the history of anarchism. His non-fiction publications include Killing No Murder. A Study of Assassination as a Political Means (1969), A Dictionary of Modern Revolution (1973), The Millennium Postponed (1974), Terrorists and Terrorism (1975), and his final work, unfinished at his death, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His Revolutionary Life, Mind and Works (1979).



It's worth looking a bit more closely at The Millennium Postponed, which is a history of socialism in its wider interpretation. Hyams exhibits a rather low opinion of some anarchists: Godwin is "a mere theorist" (Hyams 1974:11), Bakunin an imbecile, "a comic figure, the clown of socialism" (93), and a "bit of a fraud" (93). Proudhon, however, is "very great" (33), and "the most brilliant of the anarchists" (88). And Kropotkin's work "is of the first importance today, in the New Left context" (102). Hyams here clearly finds anarchism seductive. He considers that "re-examination of anarchist theory as a possible means of ridding ourselves of the foul parasite on human life (is) a matter of urgency" (80); and in particular "it may be that anarcho-syndicalism, as a possible way to egalitarian social justice combined with the optimum measure of personal liberty, should be one of the roads to re-explore". (153) But in his conclusion he draws back: "Now although the anarchist philosophers are, without question, morally correct in condemning and wishing to be rid of the State as unavoidable evil because more or less oppressive, . . . it is a fact that since society has to be administered, some kind of State apparatus seems essential." (228)



In The Final Agenda an international terrorist group blackmails the world's governments by means of tactically-placed H-bombs into surrendering part of Brazil and $32 billion, the land to set up a free country, the money as reparations for the wretched of the earth. It was aptly described by A.B. in the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review as "profoundly disappointing because it is nothing more than a misleading fantasy despite its supposedly realist hypothesis, and is most un-Anarchist at core even with all the quotes and references to great Anarchist thinkers." A.B. concluded that "It is very sad that such a sympathetic writer who makes telling points against the State's hypocrisy of violence and against the parliamentary fraud should in the end present such an elitist and distorted version of Anarchism."



In Morrow's Ants a billionaire industrialist fascinated with ant-colonies constructs a human formicarium-city, with a view to a millennial subjugation of the individual in the mass. The novel's reflections on motivations for tyrannicide, on the nature of freedom, and on the relationship of the individual to society, are of considerable interest for anarchists. Much superior to The Final Agenda. If there is any doubt about the metaphor of the formicarium, a sentence from Hyams's The Millennium Postponed, published the year before Morrow's Ants, points the moral. The anarchist path must be explored again, he says, "For we are confronted by a choice: either the capitalist-communist hive, anthill, termitory; or a society which is free, if relatively poor, because it denies authority to any power but the individual conscience implanted in men by the beautiful fiction of immanent justice." (143)



Hyams was also an influence on Colin Ward, and Sophie Scott-Brown devotes two pages to this in her 2022 Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy.



Edward Hyams // The Recipe for Diamonds

(1893)

Primarily adventure and chase rather than SF, the novel is premised on the discovery of the eponymous recipe by the mediæval philosopher and supposed alchemist Ramon Llull ('Lully', in this work). One of those engaged in the chase is indeed an anarchist who is perhaps slightly less of a caricature than some in novels of this period. Rather than bombs, his interest is in manufacturing diamonds in such quantity that they would be wholly devalued, undermining the world economy and eliminating governments.



i

Alex Proyas // I, Robot

(2004)

Taken at face value, this is a reasonably thoughtful film about robot consciousness and will, only claiming to be "suggested by" the classic short story collection by Isaac Asimov, though it uses the names of some of Asimov's characters, and the famous three laws of robotics are strongly featured.
 
Libertarian Movies says the film has "a very libertarian message", and "libertarians will find the underlying ideas especially satisfying."


Mike Judge // Idiocracy

(2006)

Satire in which two people take part in an experiment in suspended animation, only to wake up 500 years later in a vacuous dystopia where commercialism and anti-intellectualism have run rampant, and society is devoid of any sense of justice or human rights.
 
Ilana Mercer describes this film as "my all-time favorite social commentary", and a "stroke of genius. She, like a good number of commentators, has seen the parallel with America in 2016/17. Mike Judge himself is on record as saying "I'm no prophet. I was off by 490 years." [Stein]
 
Recommended on two of Reddit's anarchism threads (1, 2).
 


Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, eds // Octavia's Brood

(2015)

Anthology of short stories exploring the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change, inspired by the writings of Octavia E. Butler, and published by AK Press, in collaboration with the Institute for Anarchist Studies. [IAS, AK Press, Imarisha, Hudson]
 
The book was the subject of a session at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair on 25 April 2015. The Summer 2015 issue of Fifth Estate (vol. 50 No.2, #394) includes an interview with adrienne maree brown, entitled 'All Organizing is Science Fiction.' In 2016 the anthology was
reviewed by Kim Smith in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory #29.


Gottfried Kolditz // In the Dust of the Stars

(1976)

A spaceship responds to a mayday call from a distant planet, and on arrival finds an apparently contented hedonistic society, then discovers that in fact the mayday was sent by the enslaved indigenous population. The slaves revolt.
 
Listed as utopia/dystopia at Anarchism and film.


Andrew Niccol // In Time

(2011)

Dystopian Bonnie and Clyde story, set in a future where ageing is engineered to stop at 25, with longer life only available by the purchase of time, as the only meaningful currency.
 
The Anarchism sub-Reddit discussions on top films advocating anti-capitalism, and movies containing anarchism, both have recommendations for this film: in the former, one poster says it is "surprisingly one of the most anti-capitalist films I've ever seen!", while in the latter one says "I got a socialist vibe from it not even halfway through", another commenting on its obvious political message.


Roland Emmerich // Independence Day

(1996)

Invasion by hostile aliens is successfully defeated.
 
In a Guardian article forwarded to the Anarchy-SF mailing list in 2004, J.G. Ballard suggested that films such as this might be a warning to non-Americans, that "the greatest danger is that Americans will believe their own myths." Mark Bould's 2005 Socialist Review article, also forwarded to the Anarchy-SF list, rightly identified the film as another reworking of The War of the Worlds, but "In Wells's novel the Martians are killed by bacteria. In Independence Day Will Smith gets to 'kick ET's butt'. The gulf could not be wider."


Don Siegel // Invasion of the Body Snatchers

(1956)

Alien plant spores have fallen to earth and grown into large seed pods, each one capable of duplicating a human. As each pod reaches full development, it assimilates the appearance and persona of each sleeping person placed near it, but the replicas are without emotion.
 
Red Planets (see Bould, in bibliography) calls the film "A satire on mechanical reproduction, commodification, alienation and McCarthyism", which about wraps up the allegorical interpretations—according to SFE, this is possibly the most discussed B-movie in the history of US film—but there is evidence that its creators had no allegorical intent.
 
Recommended, though regarded as "politically ambiguous", on Reddit's thread on movie recommendations containing Anarchy.
 


Ishikawa Sanshiro // Japan Fifty Years From Now (Go-jū Nen ato no Nihon)

(1946)

An anarchist vision of utopia, in which "The Japan of the year 1996 embodies qualities of Ishikawa's anarchist philosophy he developed all his life. Ishikawa casts himself as the character of an old man (120 years-old!) discussing how anarchist revolution had been achieved in Japan so many years ago." (Schnick)
 
"He imagined Japanese society organized on a co-operative basis (with Proudhonist mutual exchange banks) to enable each individual to live a life of artistic creation. His celebration of nudity reflected Carpenter's influence, but the idea of retaining the Japanese emperor as the symbol of communal affection was his very own." (Peter Marshall: 527)
 
Described by Cohn (228) as an anarchist utopia.
 
The 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary describes Ishikawa as an anarcho-syndicalist theorist, but Schnick suggests he was rather more than that:
 
"Ishikawa believed in a much better world and hoped that in telling and living his ideal lifestyle, society could move towards this better world. In this we find Ishikawa's most significant accomplishment: his practice and ideology were consonant—he lived as he wished others to live." (p47)


Erle C. Kenton // Island of Lost Souls

(1932)

Vintage horror, based on H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau, but disliked by him. Mad scientist carries out vivisection trying to transform animals into human form. They turn on him, after he breaks the law he'd imposed on them.
 
One of the Wells adaptations regarded as "pretty good", in Mark Bould's 2005 Socialist Review article 'Science Fiction: The Shape of Things to Come', which was copied to the Anarchy-SF mailing list. In Bould's Red Planets filmography he lists this as the best film adaptation of Moreau, commenting that it "draws out colonialism's hysterical sadism."
 


Gary Ives // 'This is BioMorph'

(2017)

Short short about cyborgs, published in Fifth Estate #398, Summer 2017.
 


j

Shelley Jackson // Half Life

(2006)

Atomic bomb testing has resulted in a significant sub-population of conjoined twins, mostly sharing a body but with two heads; the first-person narrative is by one/two such twins. Imaginative and surreal.
 
For Joan Haran this "brilliant" novel makes imaginative use of the unreliable narrator, and "teaches you to read critically" about both fiction and non-fiction.
 
Included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 


Malcolm Jameson // 'The Anarch'

(1944)

Published in Astounding in 1944, this concerns a rebel against a future totalitarian autarchy, who strikes a deal with the Autarch under which his own role is formalised as the Anarch, acting as antithesis. Out of their engagement a new democracy is born, based on representative democracy. The Autarch decides to run for President. The only real ideological base is classical liberalism, with Mill's On Liberty cited explicitly.
 


Richard Jefferies // After London

(1885)

For Arthur Uloth, "This strange book has not the compulsive power of 1984. Yet it wears better than many other prophecies, and could still come true." A post-holocaust novel, for Uloth ". . . the sub-medieval society Jefferies describes could still come into being, indeed it is the most likely sort of society to do so after an atomic war, unless all life were obliterated." (Uloth 1963: 380)
 


N.K. Jemisin // The Fifth Season (2015); The Obelisk Gate (2016); The Stone Sky (2017); How Long 'Til Black Future Month? (2018)

(2018)

The three novels—collectively The Broken Earth trilogy—concern lead characters who can mentally control geological forces, on a planet afflicted with periodic catastrophic climate change.



Included on a number of lists linked to by posters on Facebook's Solarpunk Anarchists, Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist, Anarcho-Transhumanism, and Anarchism and
Science Fiction Forum pages, as significant feminist writing with a message of social justice and diversity. At the Facebook Anarchist Studies Network page
Melanie Rose called Jemisin the "Best scifi writer on the market right now and I love her books. So refreshing and brilliantly written." Jesse Cohn, replying,
said "It's amazingly good. A landmark."



How Long 'Til Black Future Month? is a collection of short stories given the same title as a 2013
essay of the author's. The work was

reviewed
in 2021, with evident pleasure, by Maia Ramnath for the Institute for Anarchist Studies.


Chris Marker // La Jetée

(1962)

Influential black and white 28 minute short almost entirely composed of photographic stills, telling an enigmatic tale of time travel.
 
Marker is quoted as saying "I practice, without ostentation, a tranquil anarchism which allows me to traverse this society’s booby-trapped byways without too many mishaps". [Traon]
 


Michel Jeury // Chronolysis (1980; first published in 1973 as Le temps incertain)

(1980)

Complex Dick-influenced novel of conflict in a zone outside time, where not only sequentiality but personal identities are fluid; leftist and anti-authoritarian, but not as obviously "anarcho-socialist" as is claimed by Mark Bould in the Red Planets bibliography.



Robert Longo // Johnny Mnemonic

(1995)

Based on the story by William Gibson, who wrote the screenplay. Listed by Dave Downes, admin of the Facebook Anarchist Film Group, in June 2021, who noted in particular "Ice-T and his band of anarchists, repeatedly referred to as anti-technology while having a secret base made entirely of computer monitors; also, a hacker dolphin."


Alaya Dawn Johnson // The Summer Prince

(2013)

Richly-imagined YA novel set in a future matriarchal state in Brazil.
 
Included in the Think Galactic reading list, and in GoodReads' Solarpunk list. Nisi Shawl commends it for "the author’s involving characters and the intensely believable predicaments they face." Recommended in a comment on Reddit's Any good anarchist novels directed towards teens, but mainly for its "cool art-as-protest imagery".
 


Mór Jókai // A jövö század regénye - 'The Novel of the Next Century' (not yet translated into English)

(1872)

Included in Nettlau's Esbozo de Historia de las Utopías.



According to SFE the novel tells of airplanes made of a marvellous new material, 'ichor', which serve the heroes, who dominate global communications and trade; "declaring war on anarchistic Russia, they fight the last war of mankind and create eternal peace."


David Glyn Jones // The Machine

(2010)

Blurb: There is only THE MACHINE and those who live within it. Told through the unconventional, simple language of blue 7, one of the millions of workers who scurry through its metallic entrails, THE MACHINE tells of a brutal regime and the beginnings of rebellion within . . . Working without purpose and without end, humanity lives and slaves to maintain the huge mechanical leviathan, beyond which there is nothing. Blue 7 has spent his lifetime working and wondering the function of THE MACHINE, but someone has noticed him, and slowly his world begins to unravel in a bloodsoaked violent struggle that threatens not only him, but THE MACHINE itself. A sharp anarchist critique of the modern world devoid of imagination and freedom, THE MACHINE pierces through the thin surface of western capitalism, and asks difficult questions of modernity.



This blurb describes The Machine pretty well, but doesn't capture its relentlessly dark and Kafkaesque desperation.
 


Gwyneth Jones // White Queen (1991); '2020: I AM AN ANARCHIST' (2006)

(2006)

White Queen is the first book in a trilogy, an intelligent and complex account of first contact. Mark Bould's Red Planets bibliography describes it as an "Ironic green-socialist-feminist-postcolonial revision of the alien invasion narrative." Included in the Think Galactic reading list, and on Red Pepper's list of "sci-fi novels that punch holes in capitalist reality."
 
'2020' is a rather gross (unless you're a coprophile) near-future story, so far only ever published in Farah Mendlesohn, ed.: Glorifying Terrorism, an anthology written in deliberate defiance of the UK government's Terrorism Act 2006 banning all "glorification of terrorism". The title is a reference to the Sex Pistols.
 
Included in Killjoy's list (see bibliography) of stories that feature sympathetic anarchist characters.
 
(My thanks to Gwyneth for a reading copy of the story.)
 


Langdon Jones // The Eye of the Lens

(1972)

Jones's collection of late sixties stories, mostly from New Worlds, presents some interesting examples of the sort of speculative fiction associated with the magazine. Moorcock described the book as "superb", in the Appendix to his 1983 Retreat from Liberty (90).


Derek Jarman // Jubilee

(1978)

More or less coincident with the silver jubilee of the UK's Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Elizabeth I is transported forward in time by John Dee, to experience a punk view of an anarchic London.
 
Included in the Red Planets filmography (see Bould, in bibliography).
 


(Lyman) (Spicer) Vincent Judson // Solution PNC and PNCland

(1973)

This obscure and unjustly neglected work is the most comprehensively thought-out utopia I can recall reading. 'PNC' stands for 'Pseudo-Nation Corporation', Judson's premise being that the nation-state is obsolete and, in his words, "A corporation can do anything a government can do—and better". There is no government as such, but all aspects of life are nevertheless subject to comprehensive regulation. PNC is a benign meritocratic technocracy, with real SF elements (futuristic technology, and even alien contact). The book itself is presented as if it were the Corporation's official Report, as presented by its Chairman and CEO. Though on the face of it unattractive, there are real freedoms within PNC, and the idealistic author is at pains to point out that PNC favours intangible profits ("serving the good of mankind and the betterment of the individual") over tangible profits such as hard cash or barter commodities. Anarchists are unlikely to be won over, but this is definitely worth reading, and the prevailing optimism is surprisingly beguiling.
 


Ernst Jünger // Eumeswil (1977, in German; trans. 1993)

(1977)

Jünger himself seems a rather remarkable author, with a career spanning the whole period of German history from the era of the Kaiser right through to post-reunification in the 1990s; the author died aged 102. Morgan gives a useful account of his life.



Eumeswil dates from his later life. It's undeniably sf, but is pretty demanding on the reader, and far indeed from the pulpier end of the market. The novel is written in the first person by a historian, living in a city state in a future after a "world civil war"; the state, Eumeswil, is essentially a dystopian dictatorship, where the narrator is himself part of the dictator's inner circle. The narrative is of explicit anarchist interest, and it's clear that the author was very familiar with many aspects of the anarchist history of the last two centuries. In particular the influence of Max Stirner's individualist anarchism is marked. But the narrator, and presumably the author, is keen to draw a distinction between what he sees as the 'anarchist', and his self-characterisation as an 'anarch'; this he sees as going with the territory: "Every born historian is more or less an anarch. . . ." But to me Jünger's anarch seems closer to Nietzsche than to Stirner: more Übermensch than Einzige.


Colin Trevorrow // Jurassic World

(2015)

Fourth in the Jurassic Park franchise. The dinosaur theme park descends into chaos when a genetically engineered ahistorical dinosaur (the 'Indominus rex') breaks loose and goes on a rampage across the island.
 
The film is subject to a flippant review by Gutter Punk Josh at the Anarcho-Geek Review, which concludes "God I fucking love dinosaurs. 5/5 would watch again." Contrariwise it is also held up by Mark Tovey of the Mises Institute (with perhaps po-faced satiric intent—but perhaps not) as an allegory of how even market forces can get things wrong, in comparison with a hypothetical government-run dinosaur park, concluding that:



 
"Jurassic World’s operators made an 'entrepreneurial error,' an attempt at profit-making gone awry. The balance between safety and wow-factor was ill-struck, and by no means profit-maximizing — Jurassic World will lose many, many prospective guests as a result of the Indominus Rex debacle.



"Importantly, the Indominus Rex must not be held against the market per se; we should assess the market not on the basis of individual case studies but rather by the equilibria it inspires. Non-optimal outcomes do occur on the market’s watch, but in spite of (and not because of) its carrot-and-stick regime. The market institutionalizes optimal outcomes; without profit and loss, optimal outcomes could come about only by a fluke."
 


k

Iain Softley // K-PAX

(2001)

A good film treatment of Gene Brewer's Swiftian novel (q.v.) of the same name. Not as well-received generally as it might have been, perhaps because of a perceived naivety, which I would prefer to see as intentional innocence, as counterweight to worldly cynicism. The society of the (real or delusional) planet K-PAX is clearly both anarchist and pacifist.
 


Franz Kafka // -In the Penal Colony' ('In der Strafkolonie', 1919; 1st English translation 1941); The Trial (Der Process / Der Prozeß, 1925; 1st English translation) 1937; The Castle (Das Schloß, 1926; 1st English translation 1930)

(1926)

'In the Penal Colony' features a macabre execution machine which incises the nature of the crime into the victim's body. Michael Löwy, in his 'Franz Kafka and Libertarian Socialism', finds that "There are few texts in universal literature which present authority with such an unjust and murderous face."



The Trial—Kafka's best-known novel—isn't obviously science fiction, but Kafka's influence is sufficiently pervasive that John Clute has a long entry on him at SFE, concluding that "His work is a Baedeker to where we live now."
 
Current anarchist writers are clearly familiar with The Trial: David Graeber, for instance, sees it as paradigmatic of all great literature on bureaucracy, in taking the form of horror-comedy (p53, where The Castle is seen in the same light); while for Saul Newman "Kafka's The Trial might be understood in part as a meditation on voluntary servitude: rather than escaping the clasp of the law, which does not forcibly entrap him—on the contrary, it tries to repel and elude him—Joseph K persistently seeks his place within it, and in doing so constitutes the law's domination over him." (p145). (See bibliography for Graeber and Newman; see also Tulley.)



For Costas Despiniadis, in his The Anatomist of Power. Franz Kafka and the Critique of Authority (2019), "In The Castle, that symbol of absolute totalitarian authority, [Kafka] singularly describes power existing on its own, as an end in itself for its enforcers."



Kafka himself was evidently familiar with anarchism and anarchists, though the extent of his interest and degree of his activity have been contested. A decent account is given by Löwy, concluding that "With his libertarian sensibility, Kafka has succeeded marvellously in capturing the oppressive and absurd nature of the bureaucratic nightmare, the opacity, the impenetrable and incomprehensible character of the rules of the state hierarchy as they are seen from below and the outside."



The fullest treatment is now that of Costas Despiniadis, in the work cited above. This short book is an explicitly anarchist interpretation of Kafka and his work, and in particular leaves no doubt about Kafka's personal involvement in anarchist circles in Prague, from 1909 to 1912. Although not prominent as an activist, he participated in the Prague anarchist group the 'Young People's Club', and was once arrested and fined for his participation in a protest against the execution of an anarchist in France. He was also well-grounded in anarchist literature, having read Godwin, Proudhon, Stirner, Goldman, Élisée Reclus, and others. The anti-authoritarianism is clear, in all his writings.


Apollon Karelin // Россия в 1930 году (Russia in 1930)

(1921)

Described at Russian anarchist utopias of the 1920s as "a classic utopia, despite a rather complex composition: the hero listens to the story of his friend, who dreams of the future, but this is not a story, but a retelling of an article from a magazine in which two English travellers talk about their visit to the country of anarchists."



Published (legally) by the All-Russian Federation of Anarchists.



Not translated into English, so not read.


David Karp // One

(1953)

Dystopian novel in which dissidents are not punished but "adjusted". The protagonist has such doubts, even about the value of the state itself ("What if there is a collective madness of a State?"—Penguin edn: 158), that he is ultimately given a whole new personality—but even then his individuality starts to show through. John Pilgrim found it "really brilliant". "Since this book was written," he says, "we have perceptibly advanced towards the type of society portrayed in it and therefore its message, that only death can destroy the personality completely, is a little more cheering than appears at first sight." (Pilgrim 1963)
 


James Keilty // 'The People of Prashad'

(1971)

This is simply an old-fashioned utopia, with much emphasis on an entire language constructed by the author. In Prashad there is no institutionalised government or religion, no police or criminal law, no formal authority of any kind; there is, however, much emphasis on the family as the base element of their society, 'family' being interpreted loosely. The only accepted rule of behaviour is that if you see something that needs doing, you do it. The utopia of Prashad, in other words, is essentially anarchic.
 
Although it has twice been published in an SF context, this story is itself not really sf.
 


Ken // 'Fable for the Future'

(1985)

Short tale published in The Green Anarchist in 1985. In a future anarchist community a visitor is spurned for his authoritarianism. The tale is Morris-derivative and very naïve—government had been weakened by proportional representation, allowing in five anarchist MPs!
 


Daniel Keyes // 'Flowers for Algernon'

(1959)

This famous story is written as the diary of Charlie Gordon, the subject of an experiment in which his IQ of 68 is trebled, but subsequently declines again. It was praised by John Pilgrim for its concern for the human condition. (Pilgrim 1963)



Novelised under the same title in 1966, Eden Kupermintz, on one of the anarchySF podcasts, finds it "phenomenal", but also "one of the most depressing books you will ever read."
 


Margaret Killjoy // A Country of Ghosts (2014); The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion (2017); We Won't Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories (2022)

(2022)

A Country of Ghosts isn't sf, but Killjoy's contemporary take on an anarchist utopia has to be welcomed here. For Nick Mamatas, in The BASTARD Chronicles 2015, the book is "pretty interesting", but gets "really good" in the final third, when war comes to the stateless utopia. The book was filmed in 2019 as Hron: A Country of Ghosts, but apart from a few screenings doesn't seem to have been more widely released, although a short trailer is online.



The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion is also more a gothic fantasy novella, but anarchists and anarchism are central to the story.



We Won't Be Here Tomorrow is Killjoy's first short story collection, mostly gothic/horror, but some sf, and some anarchist interest.



Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack // King Kong

(1933)

Included in Bould's Red Planets filmography as a "Powerful—if accidental—fantasy of colonial revolt."
 


Donald Kingsbury // Courtship Rite (1982); Psychohistorical Crisis (2001)

(2001)

The latter novel won the 2002 Prometheus Award; the former the 2016 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award.
 


Rudyard Kipling // 'With the Night Mail' (1905); 'As Easy as A.B.C.' (1912)

(1912)

"Effective but reactionary" . . . (Moorcock 1978)
 
The first story introduced the Aerial Board of Control, and is an air drama followed by long magazine extracts; it is highly realistic, and first-rate early sf. It's also superior to its sequel, in which the ABC are called in to suppress mob-making in Chicago.
 


Damon Knight // 'Rule Golden' (1954); The Futurians (1977)

(1977)

In 'Rule Golden' an envoy from the galactic community converts Earth to nonviolence by means of a chemical agent that causes pain to be felt by the perpetrator as much as by the victim of a violent act. The alien spells out how governments exist for war, and how nothing they do could not be done without them. "Government," it says, "builds nothing but more government." (1975 Pan edn of Natural State and other Stories: 70) Since "all governments were based on violence, as currency was based on metal," (68-9) all the world's governments in due course collapse.



The Futurians is Knight's non-fiction memoir on the early and influential fan/writer/editor grouping that adopted that name. While they're seen as largely left-wing, Rich Dana, writing in Fifth Estate in 2019, noted that their number also included a James Blish who flirted with a theoretical technocracy the Futurians regarded as 'paper fascism'. Dana calls Knight's memoir "definitive."
 


Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin // The Unincorporated Man

(2009)

Depicts a 24th century world in which everyone is literally an individual corporation, in which they themselves may be just one shareholder among many. A 21st century character is revived from cryonic storage, and as the only unincorporated human is able to inspire a global revolution, to overthrow this system.



Winner of the 2010 Prometheus Award. Easterbrook (see bibliography) devotes a page to this novel and its sequels, seeing the style as quite Randian, and the economy as of the libertarian school that argues that 'pure' or 'true' capitalism has not yet been tried.


Victor Koman // The Jehovah Contract (1987); Soloman's Knife (1989); Kings of the High Frontier (1996)

(1996)

All were Prometheus Award winners. The Jehovah Contract is a bold (but ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to tackle religion head-on, the storyline concerning an assassin's mission to kill God. Though God and the Devil both end up dead, the magickal Goddess survives, apparently with the author's approval.
 


Cyril M. Kornbluth // Not This August (1955; aka Christmas Eve); The Syndic (1963)

(1963)

Arthur Maglin contrasted Not This August with The Syndic, finding the former "reactionary" and tainted by "race prejudice and fear of communism", while the latter "outlines a working, socialistic society".
 
Moorcock has a soft spot for Kornbluth, who "to my mind had a stronger political conscience than he allowed himself, so that his stories are sometimes confused as he tried to mesh middle-American ideas with his own radicalism. One of my favourites (though structurally it is a bit weak) is The Syndic . . ." (Moorcock 1978)
 
The novel is set in a future USA now ruled jointly by the Mob and the Syndic (i.e. the Mafia), and the Government of North America, so-called, is now no more than a pirate band making sporadic raids from western Ireland. Government is attacked in scathing terms: one of the Syndic chiefs says:
 
"Let me point out what the so-called Government stands for: brutal 'taxation,' extirpation of gambling, denial of life's simple pleasures to the poor and severe limitation of them to all but the wealthy, sexual prudery viciously enforced by penal laws of appalling barbarity, endless regulation and coercion governing every waking minute of the day. That was its record during the days of its power and that would be its record if it is returned to power" (Sphere edn: 39).



The Syndic insists that it is not itself a government, but it's hard to see what else it is—this is the weakness of the book: the attack on government is serious, but only a comic Mafia is put in its place.
 
Tied for the 1986 Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award.


Nancy Kress // Beggars in Spain (1993);  'Migration' (2013)

(2013)

Beggars in Spain is included included in the Art for Liberty list of 'Libertarian
Sci-Fi and Fantasy
', and in Think Galactic's reading list.
 
In 'Migration', a libertarian planet, imaginatively called Freedom, is the only place where gene modification is allowed; the story features animal liberation. Thanks to Lise Andreasen for suggesting this one.
 


l

R.A. Lafferty // Past Master

(1968)

Nick Mamatas, in The BASTARD Chronicles 2015, notes of this curious novel that "The horrifying irony is that probably the best science fictional investigation of utopia is explicitly religious" . . . .


George A. Romero // Land of the Dead

(2005)

Effective zombie gore-fest, featuring a zombie attack on Pittsburgh.
 
Wendy McElroy (and others) see this film as "Romero's analysis of class conflict", in which "In several scenes, Romero openly sympathizes with the dead who eventually occupy the city."
 
Included in libcom.org's Working class cinema: a video guide.


Hayao Miyazaki // Laputa: Castle in the Sky (天空の城ラピュタ)

(1986)

Steampunk-inflected children's anime fantasy adventure, in which a young boy and girl try to keep a magic crystal from a group of military agents, while searching for a legendary floating castle, which for the military and for a pirate band is seen as a near-extinct hi-tech El Dorado. The name Laputa and the concept of the floating island are about all that remain of Swift's Laputa.
 
Reviewed by Connor Owens at Solarpunk Anarchists, who concludes: "Ultimately, while the film’s ecological message is covert, rather than overt, it is coded to the audience in a remarkably mature fashion for a nominally child-centric movie, making links between statism, war, militarism, and inevitable ecocide."
 
 
 


Ernest C. Large // Dawn in Andromeda

(1956)

A new society without priest or politician is built from scratch on an uninhabited planet. The book is a rationalist delight, suffused with anarchist spirit, though never by name.
 


Philip Latham (pseud. of Robert S. Richardson) // 'The Xi Effect'

(1950)

For John Pilgrim this is "a nice example" of SF cutting the scientist down to size. (Pilgrim 1963)
 


David Loxton and Fred Barzyk // The Lathe of Heaven

(1980)

Adaptation of Ursula Le Guin's novel of the same name. Le Guin herself worked on the movie as creative consultant, and it's said to be the only adaptation of one of her works with which she was happy.



Highlighted by Dave Downes in February 2021, on the Facebook Anarchist Film Group.


Ursula K. Le Guin // Rocannon's World (1966); The Left Hand of Darkness (1969); The Lathe of Heaven (1971); 'Vaster than Empires and More Slow' (1971); 'The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas' (1973); The Dispossessed. An Ambiguous Utopia (1974); 'The Day before the Revolution' (1974); 'The New Atlantis' (1975); The Word for World is Forest (1972/1976); The Eye of the Heron (1978); The Compass Rose (1982); Always Coming Home (1985); Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987); A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994); 'Solitude' (1994); Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995); The Telling (2000); The Birthday of the World, and Other Stories (2002); 'Notes from the Inner City' (2006); The Wild Girls plus (2011)

(2011)

In a 2008 interview Ursula Le Guin stated that she didn't consider herself an anarchist, because "I entirely lack the activist element". But when asked if she minded that a lot of anarchists claimed her, in approximately the same way they claimed Tolstoy, her response was "Of course I don't mind! I am touched and feel unworthy." (strangers, 2008; and republished in Killjoy's Mythmakers & Lawbreakers. Anarchist writers on fiction) Asked, in 2011, if she would describe herself as an anarchist (politically), her reply was "Politically, no; I vote, I'm a Democrat. But I find pacificist anarchist thought fascinating, stimulating, endlessly fruitful." ('A Lovely Art', p91) Jamie Heckert, writing in Fifth Estate in 2010, reflected:



"In recent interviews, you suggested that perhaps you don't qualify for the label anarchist because you are middle-class or because what you do isn't activism. I invite you to reconsider. Who needs activism when you have wu wei? And why not be a middle-class anarchist? This is no contradiction in my book—and your own books have never shied away from life's apparent contradictions. They are embraced, queered.



. . . "Whether or not you call yourself an anarchist, you've helped me to deepen my own understanding of what an anarchist can be, can do. Of what I can do. Of who I can become." [online]



Reviewing Le Guin's science fictional oeuvre as a whole, Max Haiven's exceptionally perceptive 2015 essay (see bibliography) on Le Guin concludes that it exemplifies prefigurative fiction, which "invites us to both imagine, cultivate and critique the dynamic tension between authority and responsibility as it exists in our own hearts, our communities, our struggles and our movements."



Rocannon's World is among the works discussed by Haiven; he find that it "demonstrates many anarchistic themes", among which he includes critical anthropology and a humanism of possibility.



For George Woodcock The Left Hand of Darkness was Le Guin's "strangest and most successful novel". (Woodcock 1976) Jeff Shantz, in his 2011 Against All Authority. Anarchism and the Literary Imagination, devotes four pages to this work in his chapter on 'Novel utopias.'



For Oshee Eagleheart in 2010 'Vaster than Empires and More Slow' "accurately and hilariously portrays the interactions within groups of 'crazy' characters who dare to explore the far reaches of the social universe in search of workable ways of living."



The Dispossessed concerns two worlds, one moon to the other, with vastly differing political systems. One of these is 'Odonianism', a form of Taoist anarchist communism. For Le Guin, anarchism "is the most idealist, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories." (Le Guin, 'Introduction' to The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975)). She was well-versed in the historical anarchist tradition (especially Kropotkin, the Goodman brothers, and Bookchin), and this shows. The utopia itself is 'ambiguous' because flawed and mutable. The novel succeeds in presenting the most believable, and perhaps the best, exploration of anarchism in a science fiction context, of any yet written. For John P. Clark, "what is most notable about the work is the protagonist's ruthlessly anarchistic critique of Annares itself. It is, in effect, an anarchist critique of anarchism and a utopian critique of the dangers of utopia." (Clark 2009: 22) Uri Gordon describes it as "perhaps the most honest attempt at portraying a functioning anarchist society". (Gordon 2009: 267) The novel won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1993. For Paul J. Comeau, in 2010, "The novel is one of the best, if not the best, fictional realization of an anarchist society as it might be practiced, and remains one of the most influential modern utopian novels written." In the 2010 online Anarchist Survey, when asked "What is your favourite anarchist book?", of single books The Dispossessed received the third highest number of hits, only surpassed by two works by Peter Kropotkin.



The anonymous reviewer in Organise! magazine in 2013 concluded that



"Like the anarchist ideals the book so deftly explores, the story itself does not leave us with an ending so much as a staging point for our own journey. To use the ideas of the books, it comes to you like a beggar man, relying on you for all that it requires and leaving you enriched by realising you would be better with nothing but what you carry as long as all needs are met. By the end of reading it I was stood at the wall between two worlds with the choice over whether I help to dismantle it, and by choosing to do so build a greater whole."



Jeff Shantz, in his chapter on 'Novel utopias,' cited above, devotes a further two pages to The Dispossessed, which for him is Le Guin's "most appreciated and influential work," in which she "brings to life key aspects of recent anarchist thought. These include bioregionalism, horizontalism, and federation." James Gifford, in 'Literature and Anarchism,' his 2019 contribution to The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, describes The Dispossessed as the "most recognised anarchist popular fiction."



The influence of this novel hasn't always been welcomed: Ken Macleod said of it, in his 2002 article on 'Anarchism and Science Fiction', that it "has probably put more people off Anarchism than any other." Bob Black concurs with Michael Moorcock's view that the book is "dull and journalistic" (Black 2015). He continues: "There is little indication that Le Guin is very familiar with anarchist or utopian literature. Contrary to legend, Le Guin is no anarchist. If she is, then where has she been, politically [. . .] for the last forty years? Writing stories and making money." Noting that in 2015 she wrote an introduction to a collection of some of Bookchin's old essays (The Next Revolution), he finds further cause in this for attacking her:



"Le Guin now claims that Bookchin's "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" inspired The Dispossessed. That's ridiculous, since her "ambiguous utopia" Anarres is scarcity anarchism, not post-scarcity anarchism, and even its anarchism is compromised. If Bookchin inspired Le Guin, her inspiration was based on a misunderstanding. Taking her at her own word, she concealed her debt to Bookchin (and undoubtedly concealed it from Bookchin himself) until long after she had collected her Hugo and Nebula awards [. . .]." (Black 2015: 227–228)



According to Neil Easterbrook (p588) both The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness were frequently cited by Occupy Wall Street organizers and websites and, with Le Guin's approval, some marchers at Occupy Oakland carried placards depicting the cover of The Dispossessed. (The Millions) David Graeber wrote, in his 2009 Direct Action (p219), that:



"One of the main forms for the dissemination of anarchist ideas in America have been feminist science fiction novels: from Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed (1974) to Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993). They operate in a similar way. They are crystallizations of certain tendencies of thought, extrapolations from certain forms of practice, experiments in utopian imagining. The main difference is that since the visions developed in novels are not claiming to be anything but fiction, those who enjoy reading (or writing) them do not tend to claim alternative visions are wrong."



(A study guide to The Dispossessed is available online; see also The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed.)



'The Day before the Revolution' tells of Laia Odo herself, the founder of Odonianism. Odo is also one of 'The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas', refusing to benefit from a system in which some gain at the expense of another. Andy Sunfrog, in 2010, concluded: "Thinking of Laia Odo and Ursula K. Le Guin in our day, at the dawn of yet another decade, the day after many past revolutions and the day before many future ones, let's be like the anarchists of these stories, always seeking and questioning, never owning much more than our ideals and practicing them the day before, the day after, and most of all, today." For Margaret Killjoy it is "exactly the kind of story that can change the world." Carissa Honeywell, in her 2021 Anarchism, borrows the name of Le Guin's story for her first chapter, and indeed discussed the story directly. Noting that it isn't really "a metaphor for anarchism as such," so much as a thought experiment, which "expresses something of the anarchist agenda to reveal what they see as the dark roots, the secrets, and the hidden dominations of unequal social and political structures that appear democratic and just." Graeber and Wengrow's 2021 The Dawn of Everything has a paragraph on the story.



Josh Gosicak, writing in Fifth Estate in 2010, reflected on The Lathe of Heaven as a prescient "post-neoliberal parable", a "potent and unforgiving critique" of both liberalism and neoliberalism. Lewis Call, in 2007, saw the novel as "creating the possibility of an ontological anarchy" and "a major contribution to postmodern anarchism", creating "the possibility of an anarchism that will be highly spiritual, deeply personal and yet also intimately engaged with the world." For Jesse Cohn this "technocratic nightmare" is "an authentically anarchist anti-utopia" (p. 158). This work had also been sympathetically treated by George Woodcock in 1976.



For Eagleheart, in the same issue of Fifth Estate, "The Word for World is Forest articulated the indigenous worldview of the interdependence of humans and "nature" in a way that I could immediately grok." Fifth Estate #382 was a special issue, "a Tribute to the Radical Imagination of Ursula K. Le Guin", in honour of her 80th birthday.



The Eye of the Heron concerns "a society of pacifists inspired by the life and writings of Gandhi." (Comeau) Jeff Shantz, in his 2011 Against All Authority, sees this novel as a development of The Dispossessed, focussing on "non-violence and thees of exile or escape within the context of libertarian politics." His paragraph concludes that "It is something of a petit bourgeois utopia."



The Compass Rose was favourably reviewed in Freedom (Murtagh 183). Of the included story 'The New Atlantis' the Open Road writers wrote that Le Guin's character "knows his Bookchin". (Lessa, Takver & Alyx. 1978)



In Always Coming Home the Kesh, a far-flung future people, are, in their absence of formal hierarchy, "fundamentally anarchistic"; "LeGuin offers a significant challenge to the outrageous (yet all too common) claim that capitalism represents the unalterable destiny of humanity" (Call, 2002). Contrasted with the aggressive Condor people who live in the mountains, the two peoples "present vividly aspects of how the world is and how it could be." (Peter Marshall, 1992/2008). Admirable as Le Guin generally was, this work—heavily influenced by romantic views of Native American culture—comes across as earnest but perhaps a little self-indulgent. She herself described it in 2010 as "more deeply anarchist than The Dispossessed. [. . .] it's more subversive than the other one." [Le Guin] Eagleheart found Always Coming Home "still the most complete and believable vision I've found of a practical, possible, sustainable culture." For John P. Clark this work is Le Guin's "masterpiece and, indeed, what is perhaps the masterpiece of utopian literature to date"; he had earlier (2006) gone even further, calling it "the greatest work of utopian fiction ever written." Clark expanded on his love for this novel in an article in the Fall 2021 Fifth Estate. Javier Sethness, in a 2021 online essay, concludes that "Ursula Le Guin’s 'ambiguously' utopian anarchist masterpiece, Always Coming Home, is not only a classic of visionary fiction, but also an allegorical exploration of how we might salvage the future, within the context of catastrophic global warming."



Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences was noted by a contributor to the old anarchysf mailing as including some stories that "deal with the spiritual matter of re-connecting to the earth." In 2010 Eagleheart wrote in Fifth Estate that "Buffalo Gals has been another of my favorite places to go for reminders of my Deep Ecological awareness, my ecological identity."



For the anonymous author of 'Beyond Perfection', 'Solitude' is "a strange, sad, beautiful story that consistently challenges gut responses and judgements on the nature of power and community. I highly recommend giving it a read, not as a model for an anarchist society but as a challenge to some of our ideas on interpersonal relationships and social duty."



The Telling is Le Guin's first Hainish novel after The Dispossessed. It is a further presentation of her anti-authoritarian and anti-fundamentalist views, not explicitly anarchist, but more credible than Always Coming Home, perhaps not least by drawing on her lead character's Terran upbringing. Christian Mattheis, at the Anarres Project is prompted by short extracts from this novel to muse on binaries and dichotomies for the liberated radical.



Four Ways to Forgiveness was recommended by Common Action at the panel "Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction" at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009; it had also been recommended by a poster to the anarchysf mailing list, in 2000. It's also included in the Swindon Anarchist Group's list of Anarchist/Resistance Novels. Heckert and Cleminson's Anarchism and Sexuality has an entire chapter by Laurence Davis, on 'Love and Revolution in Ursula Le Guin's Four Ways to Forgiveness', which he sees as undeservedly neglected, and in which he seeks to "draw out its anarchist dimensions and consider some of its political implications for our contemporary world."



The short stories in the two late collections, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea and The Birthday of the World, and Other Stories, are discussed at some length by Max Haiven. He says:



"While these stories do not explicitly address anarchism or even touch on obviously anarchist themes, it is my argument that they are possessed of a distinctly anarchistic tenor and that they stand as anarchist interventions. This, to the extent that they offer sites of reflection, provocation and meditation for anarchists and non-anarchists alike that challenge us to think and rethink resistance, gender, relationships, ideas and, perhaps most importantly, authority."



Heckert notes The Birthday of the World, and Other Stories, for its "tales of love and resistance in a bisexual polyamorous culture". One of the stories, 'Coming of Age in Karhide', is included in the Think Galactic reading list. Le Guin's poem 'Notes from the Inner City' was first published in Fifth Estate #373 in Fall 2006. Laurence Davis, in the book already cited, notes that the story 'Old Music and the Slave Women', which appears in The Birthday of the World, is actually a fifth contribution to Four Ways to Forgiveness; he describes it as "perhaps motivated in part by Le Guin's indignation at the presumption, especially common in science fiction, that slaves who do not revolt against their oppressors are either contemptible or of no consequence."



Freedom's 2018 obituary describes Le Guin as "One of the most influential writers of her generation, author of possibly the most famous anarchist science fiction ever penned [. . .]", whose writing, from the 70s onward, "remained a lodestone for anarchist authors worldwide."


William Le Queux // The Invasion of 1910

(1906)

This reactionary and militaristic future-war story, a well-known example of the kind, was referred to in Pilgrim's 1966 review, but without comment. It is similar in tone and style to a more modern example, Hackett's The Third World War.
 


Ann Leckie // Ancillary Justice

(2013)

Included in the Think Galactic reading list.


Phil Lord and Christopher Miller // The Lego Movie

(2014)

Lego minifigure winds up involved in a resistance against a tyrannical businessman who plans to glue everything in the Lego worlds; quite a bit of SF and comic-book type action.
 
Recommended by several contributors on the Anarchism subreddit as a film advocating anti-capitalism. Also recommended by two others on Liberty.me, as a good movie for libertarians and anarchists.
 


Fritz Leiber // Gather, Darkness!

(1943)

For Moorcock, writing in 1978,  "Fritz Leiber is probably the best of all the American SF writers for his prose-style, his wit and his humanity, as well as his abiding contempt for authoritarianism, and Gather, Darkness is one of the best SF books to relate political power to religious power" . . . .



The book concerns an underground witch conspiracy against establishment theocracy, all founded on scientific gadgetry. Though commendably irreligious, it is lightweight.
 


Stanisław Lem // The Star Diaries (1957/1971); Solaris (1961); The Futurological Congress (1971)

(1971)

The Star Diaries is referenced by Clore, without comment.
 
A poster to the anarchysf mailing list in 2006 considered Solaris to be "insufferably slow, pretentious, incomprehensible and non-entertaining". Nevertheless, it is included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 
For another poster to anarchysf mailing list the same year The Futurological Congress "was incredibly fun, fairly easy to read, deeply insightful, and even having read it more than a decade ago, I still find my memory of it profoundly enlightening." It's included in the GoodReads Left-wing Science Fiction and Fantasy list.
 


Madeleine L'Engle // A Wrinkle in Time

(1962)

SF for children, but now reads as rather dated, and over-religious.
 
Warmly remembered by a contributor to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, who quotes a web article on the book as saying ""There’s a political, anti-conformist message, and at its heart is the importance of family, community, freedom of choice, and, most of all, love."
 


'Lessa, Takver and Alyx' // 'Daily Life in Revolutionary Utopia: Feminism, Anarchism & Science Fiction'

(1978)

A notable centre-page spread in the Canadian anarchist paper Open Road. The unidentified pseudonymous author(s) look(s) at the expected works by Le Guin, Piercy, and Russ, but also Brunner, Callenbach, Garskof, Reynolds, and Wittig. Available on the Internet at left page and right page.
 


Doris Lessing // The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974); Shikasta (1979)

(1979)

In Memoirs, an observer watches passively the collapse around her of urban life and the reversion to tribalism. Though there are occasional suggestions that the community is becoming anarchistic rather than merely anarchic, the dominant tendency is towards primitive patriarchy.



Shikasta is included in the Think Galactic reading list.


Ira Levin // This Perfect Day

(1970)

A classic and very readable dystopia, in which the protagonist rebels against a future totalitarian world. Somewhat reminiscent of The Prisoner. Winner of the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1992. Jeff Riggenbach regards it as "one of the top half-dozen libertarian novels ever published in our language."
 


C.S. Lewis // Out of the Silent Planet (1938); That Hideous Strength (1945)

(1945)

Out of the Silent Planet is the first part in Lewis's theological space trilogy. For Justin Fowler there are "hints of a subtle anarchist philosophy threaded throughout", and the novel is "a simply delicious work of literature that libertarians may treasure forever."



That Hideous Strength is the final part. It is included in Monsen's 50 works of fiction libertarians should read, and in Goodreads' Popular libertarian science fiction books


Sinclair Lewis // Arrowsmith (1925); It Can't Happen Here (1935)

(1935)

Paul Goodman drew attention to Arrowsmith in his 1971 New Reformation, but found the idealised figure of the dedicated scientific researcher "no longer believable". The book is almost fanatically pro-science, and its uncritical attitude to vivisection is alienating.
 
Ethel Mannin refers to It Can't Happen Here as "excellent", and "proving that it can" [i.e. Fascism]. (Mannin 1938:31) It tells of the rise of a home-grown fascist dictatorship in the USA, from the viewpoint of a New England liberal. There are a number of references to anarchists and anarchism, and the protagonist had earlier established his dissident credentials by questioning the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti. Though dated, the book is still quite powerful, and is strong on libertarian New England values.
 
The novel tied for the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 2007. 


Otter Lieffe // Margins and Murmurations (2017); Conserve and Control (2018); Dignity (2020)

(2020)

Lieffe comes to SF with an unusual and rather refreshing perspective. Margins and Murmurations (the first in a trilogy, each book of which is readable as a standalone novel) presents a not-too-distant future dystopia in which the LGBTQ+ community, sex workers, and disabled people are centre stage in the Resistance. Conserve and Control is set in the same future, but further ahead (a hundred years from the publication date), and, in the author's words, the second book "looks superficially like a liberal utopia – all permaculture gardens and trans-inclusive corporations – but is very much the most sinister world I could find the power to write in 2018." Dignity is at a nearer stage in the same future, when the pandemic of the 2020s is still within living memory; Lieffe says her intention was for Dignity to be "the most utopic writing I could find within myself."



Anarchist Studies published an extended interview with the author in January 2021. The extent to which her work can be described as anarchist is explicitly discussed; rather evading the word, she replied "I mean, if book shops create a ‘radical, sex work positive, trans feminist, speculative fiction’ genre section just for my work, I’m okay with that." However, the discussion makes it clear that her intention was to present visions of a revolution that people could relate to:



"The revolution is absolutely made up of people and their contributions and their agency. It’s a lot of meetings and processing dynamics and drinking tea around a fire trying to figure out how to care for each other and meet our material needs. Every time we solve our conflicts without calling the cops, we are living a part of prison abolition. Every time we find ways to care for each other and hold on to each other in a culture centred on disposability, we are growing the revolution. In that sense, I think the revolution is the central story here and not the context."


Brad Linaweaver // Moon of Ice

(1988)

Alternate history in which Germany won World War II, and a daughter of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, has become a renowned revolutionary anarchist. Hilda Goebbels likens her own disillusionment with Germany with Emma Goldman's Disillusionment with Russia. Well-written, but the story-line is disappointing. The author is prone to suggesting that as an anarchist Goebbels should share his romantic view of the American dream.



Prometheus Award winner.


Brad Linaweaver and Edward E. Kramer, eds // Free Space

(1997)

"An anthology of (mostly original) libertarian capitalist short stories." (Dan Clore) Better than it sounds; in particular Victor Koman's 'Demokratus' is an enjoyably retro take on democracy extended ad absurdum. The anthology won a Special Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1998.
 
 


Brad Linaweaver and J. Kent Hastings // Anarquía. An Alternate History of the Spanish Civil War

(2004)

This is something genuinely new, and without real precedent that I know of. The premise is that, instead of being squeezed out of the equation, the Spanish anarchists prevail, thanks to an alternate Wernher von Braun, who—with Hedy Lamarr—designs a rocket-based weapon which he puts in their hands. Prominent in the novel, too, are George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Konrad Zuse, and an imaginary pulp science fiction writer. The book is so well-researched, and the mise-en-scène so comparatively unfamiliar, that it is easy to suspend disbelief, in uncertainty as to what relates to our history and what to the alternate history presented.
 
In the course of the narrative there is much discussion of the various flavours of anarchism active in Spain of the 1930s, not to mention the agorism that hadn't yet been invented in our history.
 
The book ends all too quickly—almost before it's really got going—but there is a suggestion of a sequel in the offing, which is definitely something to look forward to.
 
Take a look at the (now archived) official website, for more on this.
 


Gustave Linbach // The Azrael of Anarchy

(1894)
An upper-class Anglo-Indian actively promotes anarchist terrorism, in the belief that once 'anarchy' prevails there will inevitably be the need for a supreme ruler, and he himself will step in as Dictator of the British Empire. His monomania extends to actively encouraging a cholera epidemic in England, but of course he meets his comeuppance.

Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, ed. // Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World

(2018; first published as Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável)

The first solarpunk anthology, published in Brazil. Described by the publisher as a collection of optimistic science fiction stories which envision a world run on renewable energies. Quite a diverse collection, with none of the authors known to me, but overall—despite its good intentions—rather disappointing.
 
One story—'Once Upon a Time in a World,' by Antonio Luiz M.C. Costa—includes a character named 'George Orwell', who strongly self-identifies as an anarchist.



Saab Lofton // A.D.

(1996)

An inhabitant of a dystopia ruled by the Nation of Islam and the White Aryan Resistance becomes a sleeper who wakes in a Libertarian Socialist Democracy (LSD). 'What a libertarian socialist democracy means is that we have the social policies of a libertarian, the fiscal policies of a socialist, and everything is decided by direct democracy.' (135)


Michael Anderson // Logan's Run

(1976)

Depicts a hedonistic future society, in reality a dystopia where population and resources are kept in equilibrium by killing people when they turn 30. At the dénouement the fraud is exposed.
 
Listed at Libertarian Movies, which says "The film explains in the beginning that this society was created in order to protect mankind from war, pollution and overpopulation, and shows dramatically how authoritarian control over independent individuals creates a society with its own problems."
 


Jack London // The Iron Heel (1907); 'The Enemy of All the World' (1908)

(1908)

London had knowledge of the anarchist movement of his time, writing sympathetically here of the Haymarket martyrs ("ferocious and wanton judicial murder"—Penguin edn: 163), greatly admiring Louise Michel, and encountering Emma Goldman in person in 1897 and 1909. Goldman wrote that "As the artist he did not fail to see the beauties of anarchism, even if he did insist that society would have to pass through socialism before reaching the higher stage of anarchism." (Goldman 1931: 468) He was asked to write a preface for Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, which he did, though it was then refused, as he had taken the opportunity to propound the superiority of his own views over those of the anarchists. According to Goldman,



"His argument was summarized in his dictum: "The man who can't shoot straight can't think straight." Evidently Jack assumed that the world's best thinkers were also the best shots." (506)



The Iron Heel is written as a contemporary account of the abortive coming revolution and the oligarchy that suppresses it, with a commentary by a supposed historian 700 years hence, written after the triumph of socialism. It has attracted and irritated anarchist critics in roughly equal measure. Vigné d'Octon, in 1922, for example, wrote that "There are, one could say, pages of Jack London which could have been signed by Kropotkin, others which evoke the generous spirit, ardent and clairvoyant at the same time, of Reclus, of Bakunin, of Proudhon, of all those who, disgusted and indignant at the cruelties of capitalist and bourgeois society, engaged in the implacable struggle against the bosses and gods which are its incarnation. It was worth being read and re-read." (Vigné d'Octon 1922 II:57). That said, "Certainly, The Iron Heel is a fine and powerful book, worthy in all respects of Jack London, but I prefer his others." (Vigné d'Octon 1924: 63) Other anarchist critics, including Jack Robinson and S.E. Parker, were dismissive of the view that London had foreseen the rise of fascism, and condemned him for his racism and leader-worship. Evan Lampe has a two-part article on this novel, beginning here.



'The Enemy of All the World' is a trivial revenge against the world story, featuring a violent anarchist—though London acknowledges that "Perhaps the word is misused, and he is better described as a nihilist or an annihilist."


Barry Longyear // Circus World

(1980)

Included in the science fiction reading list on the R.A. Forum website by contributor Ronald Creagh. Momus—the world in question—was settled by circus performers, and has no government.


Rian Johnson // Looper

(2012)

Time travel tale with initial promise, marred by spurious and unnecessary telekinesis and irrelevant sentimentality.
 
Shortlisted for best sci-fi ever committed to film by one contributor to Facebook's Anarchy and Science Fiction Forum in 2016.
 
There is a whole thread about Looper on the Anarchism subReddit, dating from the year of release. The original poster said (among other things) "I hate how movies set in the future so often assume a Hobbesian nightmare world of all against all in the absence of law and order and reinforce this assumption for average moviegoers," getting a response ". . . I think you missed the theme. I think the point was the elite were basically plundering a sinking ship. The poor still had last century's technology." The last but one post in the discussion, by the OP, noted "I just always fantasize about people with libertarian ideas getting access to a hollywood budget and offering people a different kind of vision to a wide audience, since, for obvious reasons, people are more likely to watch a movie than read a book." Don't we all!


Peter Jackson // The Lord of the Rings trilogy - The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003)

(2003)

Not sf, but nevertheless discussed in Ilya Somin's 'Libertarianism and science fiction', where the series is found to have "very strong libertarian elements."
 
 


Adam McKay // Don't Look Up

(2021)

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed satire intended to call attention to the global climate crisis. The subject of much discussion on the Facebook Anarchist Film Group in December 2021: mixed opinions, but mostly negative.



Simon Louvish // The Resurrections: A Novel; aka Resurrections from the Dustbin of History

(1994)

"A political thriller set in a parallel universe in which the libertarian Marxist Rosa Luxemburg has led a successful communist revolution." (Dan Clore) There are in fact numerous other major divergences, dating back at least as far as Napoleon. There are also a number of explicit anarchist references, including one in which a character speculates about the possibility of alternate universes, one much like our own, but another in which Bakunin succeeded in having Marx expelled from the First International.
 
Included in Bould's Red Planets reading list.


Grey Lynn // The Return of Karl Marx

(1941)

Sf satire in which Karl Marx returns from the grave and is expelled from the Communist Party for political deviation. The foreword was written by Herbert Read, who also commissioned Lynn to illustrate the 1946 edition of his own novel, The Green Child.
 
 


m

p.m. (Hans Widmer) // bolo'bolo

(1983)

This is an interesting speculative utopia, more an extended essay than a work of fiction—but certainly worth reading in this context. Killjoy says it is "considered one of the primary anarchist utopia novels", and in 2013 the same critic wrote that "P.M.'s society is perhaps the one I'm most drawn to" . . .



Dan Clore describes it as "A full-length attempt to design a libertarian socialist society with enough respect for the diversity of humanity's desires that a community of cyberpunks who live online might be placed next to a community made up of bands of hunter-gatherers. Frequently whimsical but well thought-out; sometimes verges into semi-fictional form."



For Uri Gordon this "anarchist-inspired vision of an alternative society" makes the point that "the diverse and inherently un-enforceable nature of the anarchist project leaves it necessarily open to change and challenge from within." (Gordon 2009: 268)



Recommended by Gelderloos. Used as the basis for a workshop on utopia at the BASTARD conference, and touched on by Mamatas in The BASTARD Chronicles 2015.



Most recently (2019), bolo'bolo has been discussed at some length (ten pages) by Ruth Kinna (see bibliography). She treats it as among the "most influential modern anarchist utopias," noting that it is one of those "imagined as fleeting possibilities rather than enduring alternatives." (214) This is the fundamental difference distinguishing it from Kropotkin's utopianism, with which in her view it "resonates." (2220).



p.m. has written articles for Fifth Estate, e.g. 'The next mutiny on the Bounty', in the Spring/Summer issue of 2005.



See also Cohn 224-5, 230-1. 


Compton Mackenzie // The Lunatic Republic

(1959)

Comically portrays a future utopian society on the Moon, but for Freedom's reviewer it was "another totalitarian-technocratic horror story". (Uloth 1959) It is in fact a light-hearted work, more a skit on 50s Britain than a warning about totalitarianism.


Ken Macleod // The Star Fraction (1996); The Stone Canal (1997); The Cassini Division (1999); The Sky Road (1999); Cosmonaut Keep (2000); Dark Light (2001); Newton's Wake (2004); Learning the World (2005); The Night Sessions (2008); Intrusion (2012); The Human Front Plus (2013); The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (2016), Insurgence (2016), Emergence (2017)

(2017)

Distinctive left-wing Scottish take on sf, displaying evidence of the author's own activism.



"Portrays a future that includes both a libertarian socialist society and a libertarian capitalist society." (Dan Clore)



. . . "while both anarcho-communist and anarcho-capitalist worlds have appeared in science fiction, only The Cassini Division shows them making contact and slowly starting to subvert each other." (Walker)



In March 2011 Macleod published a review of a new interpretation of the work and influence of the individualist Max Stirner, in issue 1 of the new journal i.



The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, and Learning the World were Prometheus Award winners. Macleod has described Star Fraction as "a libertarian novel about communists," and Stone Canal as "a communist novel about libertarians".



All except Newton's Wake and Learning the World are included in Zeke Teflon's Favorite Anarchist Science Fiction Novels. Newton's Wake is recommended on a relevant Ask Metafilter page, and is included in LibraryThing's anarchism, science fiction tagmash.



The Night Sessions is in a different vein from the others, an sf/crime fiction hybrid, set in a secularist world in which faith-heads are a mistrusted minority, and all flavours of fundamentalism equally abhorred.



In Macleod's 2002 article on 'Anarchism and Science Fiction' he notes that, after being introduced to anarchism in his youth,



. . . "off I went and read all I could find about Anarchism, starting with Giovanni Baldelli’s Social Anarchism, April Carter’s The Political Theory of Anarchism, and the Cohn-Bendits’ Obsolete Communism. They didn’t make me an Anarchist, but they changed my life. By way of retaliation, I’d like to get more Anarchists interested in science fiction, and change theirs.



"What I’d like to see is not just more SF informed by Anarchism, but an Anarchist movement and climate of opinion much more informed by SF than it currently is."



In the same article he stated that he couldn't have written The Star Fraction without Nozack's Anarchy, State and Utopia, or The Sky Road without Gambone's Proudhon and Anarchism. Elsewhere he said that Star Fraction also owed a debt to Rothbard's For a New Liberty, and Stone Canal to Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom.



Farah Mendlesohn's 'Impermanent Revolution: The Anarchic Utopias of Ken MacLeod', in her Rejected Essays and Buried Thoughts, considers Macleod's 'Fall Revolution' series (the first four novels above) at some length. She argues that "Each of MacLeod’s utopias is built upon a different anarchist theory." In summary:



"The Fall Revolution Quartet tries to show how a viable anarchy might function, but unlike many utopian authors MacLeod is anxious to provide a choice of models: this multiplicity of models is in itself crucial to any anarchist project. To insist on only one model, only one truth for utopia, would be to revert to ideological authoritarianism. MacLeod outlines for us four potential or actual utopias: a Trotskyite utopia (which never comes to pass and which I will not be considering here) in The Star Fraction, a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist society in both isolated and universalist form in The Stone Canal, a socialist Stirnerite anarchy in The Cassini Division, and in The Sky Road, an ecotopia which may or may not be anarchic or libertarian, depending on one’s definition. The common threads between the three established utopias are the rejection of the state as the primary means of organisation, and the assertion of utopia as a necessarily civilised and technological project, rather than as a retreat to primitivism."



The 2017 Anarchist Writers reviewer, however, was unimpressed by the Fall Revolution sequence: "not a fan", and "at a loss on how they relate to 'Anarchy.'"



Intrusion is a sort of low-key dystopia set in a New Labour inspired surveillance society and nanny state, in which a pregnant mother resists pressure to conform by taking 'the fix', a pill that corrects defects lurking in the child's genome. Cory Doctorow's boingboing review says "MacLeod himself is a Marxist who is lauded by libertarians, and his unique perspective, combined with a flair for storytelling, yields up a haunting, gripping story of resistance, terror, and an all-consuming state that commits its atrocities with the best of intentions." The novel is "highly recommended" by
Zeke Teflon
, for whom this is "the best near-future dystopian sci-fi novel that’s appeared in years." Teflon, however, is annoyed by MacLeod's "impenetrable Britishisms and (is this even a word?) Scottishisms"; this side of the Atlantic MacLeod's uncompromising use of the language is refreshing.



The Human Front Plus is one of the PM Press short books coupling a title novella with a short or an essay, an author interview, and a bibliography. In this case the novella is an entertaining alternate history. In the interview (with Terry Bisson), when asked whether he would describe himself as a libertarian, Macleod replied ". . . I don't call myself a Libertarian, in the sense of a supporter of the Libertarian Party or anything like that. My usual handwave for my position is "hard-left libertarian" but in practice I just vote Labour."



The Corporation Wars: Dissidence is the first book of a hard SF trilogy centring on sentient robots, dead soldiers digitally reincarnated, and complex worlds of simulation, engaged in megacorporate combat. Again, favourably reviewed by Teflon, for whom it is "highly recommended."
Teflon
also recommends the second book, Insurgence, and, in a later review, Emergence (though with the rider that having read the previous two was a prerequisite).



Alfonso Martínez Rizo // El amor dentro de 200 años - Love in 200 Years (1932, not yet translated into English); 1945. El advenimiento del comunismo libertario. Una vision novelesca del porvenir (1945: The Coming of Libertarian Communism. A Fictional Vision of Things to Come; 1933, not yet translated into English)

(1933)

El amor is treated amply by Mariano Martín Rodríguez, who says of it that it "presents a society following libertarian communist principles in a technologically advanced future. This is a consumerist society, fully democratic and sexually liberated—homosexuality is not an issue, and even one of the love interests in the novel is queer—but it is not a truly anarchist utopia", but is more by way of being a utopian novel. For Rodriguez, it remains "the best example of pro-anarchist Spanish speculative fiction".



1945 is a Spanish anarchist utopia, set in what was just thirteen years in the future at the time of writing. Rodriquez gives the following summary:  



"This short political novel narrates the peaceful triumph of libertarian communism in Spain following a general strike declared by anarcho-syndicalist unions, which represent most of the population, thus expanding the already large base of Spanish anarchists at that time. Money, private property, and all prior institutions are peacefully extinguished as anarchist unions take over their functions."  



Martínez Rizo was vice-president of the CNT's Sindicato de Obreros Intelectuales in Barcelona, and his familiarity with the CNT and FAI is clear in his first-person utopia. Jesse Cohn's Underground Passages has a few pages on this work, noting the author's attention to what he calls the 'moral' process of emancipation, which takes place at different rates for different people, as well as his use of language which he finds "remarkably similar to the kind of linguistic transformation Orwell witnessed in the freshly liberated Barcelona" of 1936.  



The text is available in Spanish in Volume II of the 1991 three-volume Ediciones Tuero publication of Utopías Libertarias; Vol. II is entitled II. Utopías Libertarias Españolas, siglos XIX-XX.  


George Miller // Mad Max

(1979)

In a post-apocalypse Australia a cop seeks revenge on a violent motorcycle gang.
 
Included in libcom.org's Working class cinema: a video guide.


George Miller // Mad Max 2, aka The Road Warrior

(1981)

Also in a post-apocalypse Australia, an embittered loner contracts to help a small, petroleum-rich community escape a band of marauders. 



In a 2011 blog on 'Anarchy, Security and Freedom', for Politics and Government at Shepherd University, readers are invited to compare the real anarchy of Somalia with the post-apocalyptic society of Mad Max 2:
 
. . . "the anarchy of Somalia and the anarchy of The Road Warrior is not chaotic. In post-Apocalyptic Australia, for instance, Lord Humongous has a following. He's clearly in charge and his band of marauders provide a level of collective security not available to most people living there. In Somalia, people are struggling in a more open and less structured fashion, but there is still a level of everyday order. Money is being made by some people and there is enough stability for some people to spend their money on goods (e.g. food, fuel, clothing) and services (e.g. pirating is a service that some people in Somalia provide).



"What do you think? Does a place like the anarchical Somalia or post-Apocalyptic Australia have something to offer that a governed society lacks?"



Included in libcom.org's Working class cinema: a video guide.


George Miller // Mad Max: Fury Road

(2015)

Fourth in the series; strong on action, the story unimpressive.
 
According to Conservapedia's Worst Liberal Movies, this is "Feminist propaganda that endorses and celebrates anarchy." Can't be all bad then. 



Douglas French writes: 



"But is this really what anarchy would look like? R. Brownell over at The Libertarian Republic thinks so. In describing the movie he writes, "This post-apocalyptic reality devised by franchise creator and director George Miller, shows the fallacy of anarchism with a flair of theatrics in a way which makes members of the audience truly ask themselves whether or not they could survive on their own if faced with the challenges and danger Max and his cohorts are forced to encounter."



"It seems even some libertarians forget that all the world’s problems are caused by government. What is good in the world happens despite it.



"[. . .] It’s not another hero we need, it’s anarchy."


Charles Eric Maine (David McIlwain) // The Isotope Man (1957); The Tide Went Out (1958); Count-Down (1959); Subterfuge (1959); The Darkest of Nights (1962)

(1962)

Maine had a particular attraction for Freedom's reviewers of the late '50s and early '60s. Although probably not even among the second tier of SF writers, one can see why: a persistent anti-authoritarian streak runs through his work. Pilgrim regarded The Tide Went Out as Maine's best book, epitomising Maine's preoccupation with the "perfidy of governments".


Nick Mamatas // Sensation (2011); The People's Republic of Everything (2018); The Planetbreaker's Son Plus (2021)

(2018)

Blurb to Sensation: "When Julia Hernandez leaves her husband, shoots a real estate developer, and then vanishes without a trace, she slips out of the world she knew and into the Simulacrum—a place where human history is both guided and thwarted by the conflict between a species of anarchist wasps and a collective of hyperintelligent spiders."  



Clever and funny, it is disconcertingly narrated by the spiders, collectively using the 'arachnid plural' We. More anarchic than anarchist, though.



Mamatas was the keynote speaker at the 2015 BASTARD conference (Berkeley Anarchist Students of Theory And Research & Development), on the topic 'Hard Utopias, Soft Science Fiction.'



The People's Republic of Everything —a short-story collection including his short novel Under My Roof —was warmly reviewed by Carrie Laben in Fifth Estate #401, Summer 2018; the inclusion of the definitive text of Under My Roof —"a satire about nuclear war and nuclear families"—Laben regards as "A highpoint for both anarchists and lovers of literature". The story 'The People's Republic of Everywhere and Everything' includes a quotation from Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti.



The Planetbreaker's Son Plus (one of the PM Press Outspoken Authors series) features the eponymous novella, which Jon Frankel's review in The Anarchist Review of Books, issue #3, Spring 2022, describes as "a thought experiment that tests the proposition that humanity can ever escape anything: personality, history, Earth, and, ultimately, physical existence." Frankel concludes that "Musk and Bezos would still be greedy, narcissistic jerks whether they were coded in molecular biological systems or quantum computers."



In a 2019 interview Mamatas self-identified as an anarchist.


Brit Mandelo, ed. // Beyond Binary. Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction

(2012)

Self-explanatory anthology. Referenced in links from Facebook's Anarchists and Science Fiction, and Solarpunk Anarchist, pages. Included in the Think Galactic reading list.


Alexander Mackendrick // The Man in the White Suit

(1951)

Ealing comedy in which a research scientist invents an indestructible dirt-repellent fabric, but wealthy mill owners and trade unions try to suppress the invention.
 
Included in the Libertarian Movies filmography. For Osborne (see bibliography), this was one of the few selections in his guide "to receive the perfect 'double-five' score—that is, dead-on libertarian content and first-rate production quality/entertainment value."


Lothar Mendes // The Man Who Could Work Miracles

(1936)

Adaptation of the H.G. Wells story, on which Wells himself, worked, revising the plot to reflect his socialist frustrations with the British upper class, and the growing threat from extremism in Europe.
 
Mark Bould's 2005 Socialist Review article, copied to the Anarchy-SF mailing list, described the film as "pretty good".


Nicolas Roeg // The Man Who Fell to Earth

(1976)

A humanoid alien comes to Earth, where he is progressively corrupted by our world.
 
Described in Bould's Red Planets filmography as a "Hyperbolic parable about alienation in the dawning information era."


Jonathan Demme // The Manchurian Candidate

(2004)

Second film version of the Richard Condon novel; political thriller about Gulf War veterans with implanted nanotech command devices that will oblige them to kill when prompted, with one of the vets intended for a presidential assassin.
 
Tom Jennings found it an "effective" update, with the revisions "appropriate", but felt it had lost "much of the political sharpness of the source novel".
 


Bruno Massé // Necropolis

(2012)

Gothic dark fantasy, catalogued as science fiction by CIRA, but barely justifiably, presumably based on its far-future post-civilisation setting. Though the author is said to be a member of the
anarchist writers' bloc in Montreal [Anarchy
101 Q&A
], and the book apparently has the imprimatur of John Zerzan and others [Amazon], there is nothing particularly anarchist about it, and the writing is dire. Not
recommended.


G.A. Matiasz // End Time (1994); 1% Free (2016)

(2016)

End Time is set in a near future (2007) in which war and civil war rage across the former Soviet Union and much of the globe. Prosperous, competing regional capitalist blocs have been consolidated in Europe, North America and East Asia under transnational corporate leadership. The US is fighting a sophisticated, high-tech counterinsurgency war in southern Mexico, against a popular libertarian revolution claiming the tradition of Zapata. A military draft has been reinstated, and a strong antiwar movement flourishes on American streets. In a small town north of San Francisco a group of antiwar college students gains possession of enough bomb-grade riemanium to build a nuclear weapon, and Oakland rises in revolution to become the 21st century's Paris Commune.



Described by Hakim Bey as "a very smart meditation on the near-future of anarchism" (blurb), Randall Barnhart, reviewing the book on Amazon.com, commented: "Yup, this is the greatest piece of anarchist agit-prop since . . . well, since forever. There is nothing better." In the same place Britt A. Green summed it up as "Well-thought out, anarchist, sci-fi."



1% Free is set in a similar near future, with a detective tracking a serial killer on behalf of an alien client. Politically, the context is a balkanised California, with Palm Springs a free city in secessionist Aztlán. The novel was reviewed in 2016 by Comrade Motopu at Libcom.org.



the Wachowskis // The Matrix

(1999)

Set in a dystopian future in which reality as generally perceived is actually a simulated reality called 'the Matrix', created by a global machine intelligence to subdue the human population while their bioelectricity is used as an energy source. Neo, a hacker, learns this truth and joins a group of rebels fighting to free the harvested humans. Strongly influenced by cyberpunk and the work of Philip K. Dick. 



Freedom reviewer Chris Hurt wrote, in 2003: 



"Is "The Matrix_ really bad? Actually it helped me understand the cryptic comments of the poststructuralists. For instance, Guy Debord's enormously inaccessible Society of the Spectacle has always been a struggle for me to get through. But after seeing the film, it all makes perfect sense. [ . . . ] In this sense, The Matrix is precisely what it advertises itself to be, a matrix. It's the product of a particular organisation of the relations of production pushing us into a state of passivity. It's founded on the separation of ourselves from our culture, regurgitated back at us at dizzying speed. Yet the film also provokes such critical thoughts as these. So I give it both a one and a ten out of ten."



The movie, and its sequels, was much discussed on the anarchysf mailing list during its active period, and still crops up from time to time on Facebook pages such as 'Solarpunk Anarchists' and the 'Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum', where in November 2016 three contributors listed it among their contenders for 'best sci-fi ever committed to film'. A discussion on the Anarchism SubReddit began with using The Matrix as the benchmark for identifying films advocating anti-capitalism. Jesse Cohn noted that "some contemporary anarchists have critically endorsed" the film (Cohn 1999, citing Sanda Jeppeson, 'The Matrix; Revolution or Simulacrum in Hollywood?', Social Anarchism 36 (Spring 2004). Thomas Michaud, in his essay on 'Science Fiction and Politics', locating The Matrix firmly within the field of cyberpunk, cites it is an example of anarchist denunciation of the use of technology to control people.
 
The film is discussed at some length in Taylor Andrew Loy's 'Anarchy in Critical Dystopias: An Anatomy of Rebellion' (in Shantz; see bibliography). Loy says "Neo may begin The Matrix as 'just' a cyberpunk, but by the end he has also become a self-governed Anarchist.' [p205] He sees Neo's final voice-over as addressing both the AI and the movie audience itself —



. . . "I'm going to show them a world . . . without you. A world without rules and controls. Without borders or boundaries. A world where everything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you."



— and concludes that "Not only does this statement clearly refer to an Anarchistic world, it is also a useful general description of the telos of Anarchistic rebellion: the perpetual generation of change and revolution without constraints." [p215] 


the Wachowskis // The Matrix Reloaded

(2003)

Second in the Matrix trilogy. Strong on effects and numerous fight sequences, but otherwise of little interest. Taking a different view, though, Freedom reviewer Richard Griffin wrote, in 2003:



"This is a film all anarchists should go and see. This isn't because it's a great work of art, because it isn't (although it's entertaining enough). But it does deal with issues at the very core of anarchism—control, power, free will and choice. [ . . . ] Through the film character after character muses about freedom and control and power, and the message is clear: we need to dismantle power to be free. Can't everyone in the multiplex see that this applies to capitalism? [ . . . ] This is revolutionary stuff."


the Wachowskis // The Matrix Revolutions

(2003)

Last of the trilogy. More of the same.
 
Of the finale, Shawn Taylor notes that "While the freeing of the humans and the emergent better world scenario can be read as utopian, the conflict narrative is only paused until the need to engage reveals itself."



Taylor Andrew Loy, in his 'Anarchy in Critical Dystopias: An Anatomy of Rebellion' (in Shantz; see biblio), finds the second two films convoluted, and mostly chooses to disregard them. Of Revolutions, he concludes:



"Despite its clever title, "The Matrix: Revolutions" ends with Neo's martyrdom precisely because he fails to achieve a state of "permanent revolution." Instead, he chooses to preserve the power balance embodied in the technological infrastructure of the Matrix—in other words, he out-sources their present problems to the future generations of Zion."



JessEcoh, writing for the anarchysf mailing list in April 2004, didn't hold back: . . . "the third film totally dropped the ball, was a pure exercise in spectacle itself, was embarrassing, was ridiculous, was phony through and through. and that ending—it belonged on one of those pamphlets the mormons or the jehovah's witnesses hand out. just awful—smarmy orthodoxy."


Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel; TV series // Max Headroom

(1987/1988)

Cyberpunk satire on network news, featuring a computer-generated host. Episode 8, 'War', centres on a terrorist group called the 'White Brigade' dedicated to "neo-radicalistic anarcho-syndicalism"; their fanatical leader is actually in a commercial relationship with one of the TV news networks.
 
Seen by Sharp and Pointed as "intelligent, oftentimes funny cyberpunk with a sharp political edge": "wonderful" and "Probably the best sci-fi series ever to appear on the 'big 3.'"



Bould's Red Planets encapsulates the production as a "Punky dystopian drama later sanitised as a US primetime series." 


Paul McAuley // Red Dust (1993); The Quiet War (2008); Gardens of the Sun (2009)

(2009)

Red Dust is a complex novel set on a Chinese-run Mars where terraforming is failing fast. One character is consistently referred to as an anarchist, but little is made of this, the label apparently chiefly intended to evoke the exotic.
 
The Quiet War sequence concerns tensions between Earth and the outer planets. The second novel follows on directly from the first.



For a 2009 poster to the anarchysf mailing list, "The Outers have variants of Libertarian societies while Earth is ruled by the Oligarchies." Included in the Sharp and Pointed list of essential novels of anarchist science fiction, the two books, while "antiauthoritarian but not anarchist", "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."


Anne McCaffrey // To Ride Pegasus

(1973)

Freedom's inadequate 1975 review missed the book's central law-and-order message. (Brent 1975)
 


Cormac McCarthy // The Road

(2006)

Superlative post-apocalyptic novel, but Jesse Cohn sees it as one of a number of scenarios of disaster substituting for popular radical narratives in the context of the ongoing global economic crisis (391). Leona, in The BASTARD Chronicles 2015, similarly includes The Road among her examples of "the embrace of hopelessness and alienation" that we should be wary of.



Teflon comments on this novel that its "premise is so absurd (all life on earth extinguished except for humans) that the book should be dismissed out of hand. (Of course, McCarthy is an acclaimed 'literary' author, so, at least in academic eyes, he deserves to be taken seriously — as should the postmodernist b.s. artists.)
 


Shepherd Mead // The Big Ball of Wax

(1954)

"Good entertainment", for Freedom's reviewer, "with the moral 'It might happen here'." (M.G.W. 1955) It's a highly entertaining satire comparing high-pressure advertising with religious evangelism, written by the author of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying.


Tom McGrath // Megamind

(2010)

Weakly humorous cartoon superhero film, strictly for children.
 
Listed by a contributor to the Reddit discussion on Have you any movie recommendations containing Anarchy? as a movie "with political implications/subversiveness", and "especially interesting from a leftist perspective".
 


Louis-Sébastien Mercier // Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (1772; first published in 1771 as L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s'il en fût jamais)

(1771)

Significant work of proto-sf, a utopian vision of a future France. Nettlau, in his Esbozo, describes it as a "utopia of progress in general not socialist."


Judith Merril

(--)

. . . "an ex Trotskyist turned libertarian." (Moorcock 1978)


Fritz Lang // Metropolis

(1927)

Set in a 2026 monumentalist dystopia, the story relates the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city's ruler, and Maria, a poor worker, to overcome the class divisions of their society. Although for SFE the film "is trite and its politics ludicrously simplistic", albeit visually powerful, it's nevertheless been hugely influential.
 
Whilst celebrated by one contributor on the Anarchism sub-Reddit as anti-capitalist and anti-bolshevist, another felt that "It also features class collaboration and propagates the myth of a weaker lower class awaiting its bourgeois hero to bring freedom and peace between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat." Noting some fascist undertones, another pointed out that Lang's wife, Thea von Harbou, who wrote the original novel and the screenplay for the film, would later become a Nazi sympathiser.
 
It was one of 69 films screened in Barcelona during the 1936/7 season, from a list drawn up by Solidarida Internacional Antifascista [Diez: 92].
 


Marissa Meyer // Renegades

(2017)

Superhero YA novel (young YA, I would say). Action takes place in the aftermath of conflict between two groups of people with superpowers, known as the Anarchists and the Renegades, of which the latter consider themselves superheroes and the 'good guys'. In fact neither faction is particularly attractive, though probably Meyer intends the reader to understand that there's good and bad on both sides. The so-called Anarchists seem to have very little to do with anarchism, in any case.



Louise Michel // The Human Microbes (1886); The New World (1888)

(1888)

Among the literary works of the French anarchist Louise Michel is The Human Microbes, described by Santo Catanuto as "a Jules Verne-style 'science fiction' novel". (Catanuto: 30) An English translation by Brian Stableford was published in 2012, and it now appears that Catanuto's description is wide of the mark. It is in fact a lurid short novel, written while Michel was in solitary confinement in prison, described in the blurb as "like Eugène Sue on speed". Not itself SF at all, it was planned as the first of a six-novel series, of which only one further novel appeared—The New World (also translated by Stableford and published in 2012; there is a passing mention of Bakunin); it seems that the series, as projected, would have developed to depict not just the worldwide transformation of Earth but an expansion to other worlds, which in Stableford's words "would indeed have made it an unparalleled epic of anarchist scientific romance." (introduction to the Black Coat Press edition). Both novels are referred to in the 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary.



See also Cohn: 199-203; and under Jules Verne, for a putative link.


China Miéville // Perdido Street Station (2000); The Scar (2002); Iron Council (2004); Un Lun Dun (2007); The City and the City (2009); Embassytown (2011); The Last Days of New Paris (2016)

(2016)

Perdido Street Station and Iron Council were recommended by Common Action at the panel "Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction" at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009. Iron Council was reviewed by Anarcho, at Anarchist Writers, who was put off by the author's SWP credentials, but nevertheless found it "a reasonably interesting book written by someone with real imagination."



The Scar has been recommended on the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum. While I would endorse the recommendation—the floating pirate city of Armada is particularly attractive—this, along with Miéville's two other New Crobuzon books, are aptly described as 'New Weird', and not easily categorised as sf.



Un Lun Dun was also recommended at the Seattle Bookfair, but it is young adult urban fantasy, not sf.



The City and the City is included in the Think Galactic reading list.



Embassytown is included in David Agranoff's list of "anarchist-themed-sci-fi". It's also suggested on the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction forum, and mentioned briefly in the Winter 2013 issue of Organise!



The Last Days of New Paris is an alternate history novella in which surrealist imagery from our own reality has been actualised. It was reviewed at length at Red Wedge.



Miéville is a Marxist, and a member of the Socialist Workers Party.
 


Victor Milan // The Cybernetic Samurai

(1985)

Prometheus Award winner.


Steven Spielberg // Minority Report

(2002)

In the year 2054 a specialized police department apprehends criminals based on the precognition of three psychics.



Included at Libertarian Movies. Stephen Carson says "The movie brilliantly explores issues of predestination and free will while demonstrating the injustice of a 'justice' system that punishes not for actual crimes, but for ones that are yet to be committed… The ultimate 'tradeoff' of liberty for security." Eric Laursen, in his 2021 The Operating System, observes that "The society depicted in Minority Report is one the State has always aspired to create." [p140]
 


J. Leslie Mitchell (writing as 'Lewis Grassic Gibbon') // Three Go Back (1932); Gay Hunter (1934)

(1934)

In Three Go Back "A transatlantic airship goes through a timewarp and crashes into a mountain of Atlantis. The three survivors are found by a tribe of Basque-speaking Cro-Magnons, whose society has no government, property, war, superstition, clothing, or other vices of civilization." (Dan Clore) The novel is surprisingly effective, and Mitchell's portrayal of the Cro-Magnon society is sympathetic and passionate.



In Gay Hunter the eponymous protagonist is swept 20,000 years into the future for a few weeks, revelling in post-civilisational primitivism.



William K. Malcolm, in Klaus and Knight, eds: 'To Hell with Culture', devotes a chapter to Mitchell, who is quoted as saying "I am a Scotsman, an artist, and—an integral part of my being—an anarchist. My art is implicit anarchy." Specifically, Mitchell also referred to himself as a "good anarcho-communist." Later, though, he recalled: "So I went Anarchist for a bit, but they're such damn fools, with their blah about Kropotkin (whose anthropology is worse than Frazer's) and Bakunin." Nonetheless, for Malcolm, "His utopian political ideal portraying a free and just society is anarchist in conception, predicated, very like Kropotkin's, on a belief in natural human values and instincts." He speaks disparagingly, though of Mitchell's sf:



"Put simply, his weakest writing—the rather glib fantasy and magic realism of his story cycles and of the pulp novels Three Go Back, The Lost Trumpet and Gay Hunter —involved the direct depiction of [ . . . ] an anarchist utopia happily stripped of the maladies of modern civilization—but thereby also divorced from the frantic social concerns of life in the twentieth century."
 


J. Mitchinson // T.A.D.—The Anarchist's Dream

(2007)

Although one lead character is cursorily described as a Christian anarchist, the title is entirely misleading. Naïve self-published sf.


Jacques Tati // Mon Oncle

(1958)

It's a bit of a stretch to regard this as science fiction, but I'm happy to count it as such on the strength of its inclusion in Bould's Red Planets filmography, where it's described as a "Comedy about the absurdity of ultramodernity." It's a delightful light comedy, and beautifully observed, having a gentle dig at consumerism, and suggesting that there might be more important values than materialism.
 


Duncan Jones // Moon

(2009)

A lone supervisor of mining operations on the moon, approaching the end of his contract, discovers that he is in fact a clone of the original, and will be replaced by another clone as his own life expires; the second clone, accidentally revived before the expiry of the first, with whom he conspires, escapes to Earth.
 
Included in Libcom.org's guide to working class films.
 
One of Rich Dana's three nominations for Best Sci-Fi Ever Committed to Film, on the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum in 2016. The film is also the subject of one of the anarchySF podcasts, in which it is described as "surprisingly leftist."
 
 


Michael Moorcock // The Black Corridor (1969); Breakfast in the Ruins. A Novel of Inhumanity (1971); The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century. A Romance (1976); The Cornelius Chronicles (1977); The Entropy Tango. A Comic Romance (1980); The Nomad of Time (1982, comprising The Warlord of the Air (1971), The Land Leviathan (1974), and The Steel Tsar (1981)); The Opium General and Other Stories (1984); The Dancers at the End of Time (1993—originally published in three volumes, 1972–1976)

(1993)

Michael Moorcock, described by Vittorio Curtoni as a "bizarre beatnik figure" (25), has been involved in politics for much of his life, having been first attracted, by his own account, by the anarchist movement of the 1950s (Moorcock 1983: 12). At that time he used to attend anarchist meetings in Brylcreemed hair, blazer, tie and flannels, rather than orthodox bohemian wear; contrariwise he would wear beatnik clothes to a church fete (ibid.: 75). He later joined successively Labour, Liberal, and Labour parties, finally reverting to anarchism.



In 1978, at Stuart Christie's request, he contributed 'Starship Stormtroopers: Anarchist and Authoritarian Ideas in Science Fiction' to the fourth issue of the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review; this article is one of the major sources on this theme, and surely the best-known.



In 1983 Moorcock published his political testament, The Retreat from Liberty. He speaks knowledgeably of historical anarchism, referring to Proudhon, Kropotkin, Stirner, Berkman, and Voline (his 1982 novel The Brothel in Rosenstrasse, which is not sf, also mentions Bakunin). Among contemporaries he refers to the British anarchists Stuart Christie, Albert Meltzer, and Nicolas Walter, and to the American Noam Chomsky. With the then marginal state of the anarchist movement, he pinned his hopes for the future on the women's movement.



In The Black Corridor, against the disintegration of British society, a businessman escapes into space; he is, however, progressively shown to be no better than the world he is escaping. A very bitter and pessimistic work, it does however insist on the individual's responsibility for the creation of a decent society, and the necessity for means to correspond to ends.



Breakfast in the Ruins is a sequence of vignettes of Karl Glogauer at dates from 1871 to 1990—key historical loci, from the Paris Commune to Vietnam, via Auschwitz. He is frequently shown, coldly, as perpetrator as well as victim of atrocities. Chapter 9 features Glogauer with the army of Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian anarchist of the 1920s. Makhno himself is shown as miserable but reckless and cruel. The novel is shockingly amoral in presentation, but presumably with the intention of forcing a reappraisal of the reader's moral stance.



The Cornelius Chronicles constitute some of Moorcock's best work, centring on the attempts of Jerry Cornelius, a sort of transcendental hippie James Bond, to relate to the late twentieth century world. Nestor Makhno's army is again encountered. On this occasion it is in wild alliance with an army of Scottish anarchists and their fleet of a hundred airships painted in black anarchist livery and St Andrew's crosses. The opportunist Cornelius, known as a Makhnovist sympathiser, winds up as governor in Kiev. Andrew Hedgecock, writing in Freedom in 1986, saw Cornelius as "a template for Moorcock's ironic attacks on authoritarianism, racism and traditionally defined gender roles"; on this seminal tetralogy the author declines to editorialise, compelling enhanced reader participation—hence the "narrative is consonant with the central notion that self discipline is a necessary condition for freedom." Moorcock confirms this:



"The whole point of my fiction is to allow readers to decide for themselves their own moral attitudes. The Jerry Cornelius stories, for instance, are pure anarchism in their refusal to "guide" the reader in any direction. I try to set out the material and let them decide what they think." (see Killjoy, 2009)



This is entirely consistent with his statement, the same year, that



"I remain a Kropotkinist anarchist, which many people will see as unrealistic, but, if I’m unrealistic, so be it. I see my anarchism as a moral position, in that it’s scarcely a realistic political one! But from that position I can very quickly determine what action to take." [Moorcock on H+ and Anarchism]



An interview with Moorcock was published in Freedom in 1988, in which he said



"I began political life as an anarchist — in those days I suppose it was a much more naive belief. I then went through a period of trying to express myself politically through more conventional political parties and eventually realised they are all so damn corrupt I might as well be an idealistic anarchist and humanist and maintain my own political position by that means. That also fits in better with my support for the feminist movement."



In The Entropy Tango Makhno, following the success of his Ukrainian revolution, gallivants around the globe attempting insurrections in Ottawa, Yucatan, Somalia, Bohemia and Queensland, before finally being electrocuted by the Americans after looting San Francisco. Not preachy about anarchism, but the message probably gets across.



The Makhnovist uprising was also successful in the parallel universe of The Nomad of Time series; in The Steel Tsar (1981), Makhno once again appears as a character and engages in political arguments with Stalin. The first novel in the sequence,The Warlord of the Air is a quasi-Griffithian story of a time-traveller, airships, and a utopian community. Anarchists are prominent, but are not very favourably portrayed—they are the first, for example, to use the atomic bomb. The book slurs over the differences between socialism, communism, and anarchism, but as no more than a potboiler can't be expected to be good propaganda. That said, Margaret Killjoy has described this as "the ultimate proto-steampunk, if you ask me, and probably the punkest steampunk to date".



Makhno also appears in Byzantium Endures (1981)—which is tagged as SF in the CIRA catalogue, and in LibraryThing's tagmash for 'anarchism, science fiction'—but actually isn't.



Makhno appears yet again in The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century. The Opium General and Other Stories includes a long Cornelius story and a few essays. Among the latter are the most accessible republication in print of 'Starship Stormtroopers', and a review of a book on Makhno, whom Moorcock describes as "a martyr to a cause that can never be lost but which the world may never properly understand."



Of The Dancers at the End of Time a poster to anarchysf wrote: "Theme is an anarchic society where all material needs have been met. There's only a few people but boy are they bored! Could be seen as an attempt to play around with a situationist scenario?"



For Bruce Sterling, Michael Moorcock is "the gold standard in these matters, if you ask me". 


Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons // Watchmen

(1986)

Alan Moore first got involved in radical politics in the 1960s. Since his 20s he has seen himself as an anarchist: "it seems to me that anarchy is the state that most naturally obtains when you're talking about ordinary human beings living their lives in a natural way." (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, 2007; republished in Killjoy's Mythmakers & Lawbreakers. Anarchist writers on fiction.) In 2022 he

said
". . . I think that anarchism is the best political position. At least anarchism as I see it, which is not just do whatever the hell you like. It’s the
exact opposite of that. It’s taking responsibility for what you do and for your own life. That is the way that I prefer to live my life politically."



Watchmen is a truly remarkable comic book alternate history with darkly and richly characterised superheroes and a story that cautions against trusting heroes and leaders of any description: who watches the watchmen? Not least among those extolling its virtues is Michael Moorcock, who has said that "What was especially substantial about Moore's work was not the innovations, the new riffs on the super-hero theme, but the fundamental question of the nature of power and those we invest with power." (Moorcock 2012, reprinting a 2003 review.) Moorcock also wrote the introduction to an Italian 20th anniversary edition in 2006, in which he describes this work and V for Vendetta as "sophisticated moral parables far and away more stimulating and interesting than most of the fiction being produced then or now". Both works are also noted in the 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary


Alan Moore & David Lloyd // V for Vendetta

(1988, 1989)

Set in a near future London where a fascist state took over after the Bombs were dropped, with V "the kind of Guy Fawkes style hero who starts blowing up monuments and bases of operation. He basically proclaims himself to be an anarchist in a rather touching scene involving a statue of Lady Justice, where he is lamenting about how she betrayed him and he has found a new lover now, Anarchy. It goes into the whole psychology of being a revolutionary terrorist and what brought him to this point, and they switch to a lot of different POVs. . . . In one part of the comic in a speech, V tells the people how he can only do what he can do to remove the State Apparatus but once they are free they must make their own decisions upon what to do, and if they want to repeat the mistakes of the past. It is pretty brilliant . . .". (posting to anarchysf)



Iain McKay, writing in Freedom in 2005, said the book includes "some excellent anarchist propaganda", and is a "modern classic," "a masterpiece by a master of his craft."



It won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 2006. See also Cohn: 326-7.
 


Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill // The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

(1999–2011)

Steampunk-flavoured comic-book series, recycling characters from sundry Victorian writers, including Wells, Stoker, Doyle, Verne, Rohmer, Stevenson, and Haggard, also owing a debt to Michael Moorcock.
 
Moorcock himself wrote in 2003 that he found the series "wonderfully entertaining," saying it "inhabits the world of late Victorian and Edwardian imperialism only to examine it, confront it, subvert it and so cast a cold eye on contemporary imperialism, manifested in the deeds and actions of George W Bush and his yapping dancing papillon Tony Blair." [Moorcock 2012: 291]
 
Included in Bould's Red Planet reading list, and in Sarat's reference list at Airships, Anarchists & Anachronisms.
 


Scotto Moore // Battle of the Linguist Mages

(2021)

Overly-complicated narrative depending too much on gaming, but readable enough. Part of the storyline involves an anarchist resistance. Anarchism doesn't, however, feature heavily, although at one point a character sneaks in a quick plug, almost as subliminal propaganda:



"Look, people think anarchists just want to tear down the world order out of spite or because they prefer chaos for aesthetic reasons. That's exactly what the oligarchic media machine wants the masses to believe—that anarchists are dangerous and immoral and out of control. The oligarchs don't want people imagining a world order where they're not trapped at the bottom of the pile, where they're more than just cogs generating wealth they don't get to share.



"But anarchy really means you allow people to self-organize, instead of letting dictator-presidents and corporations rule by fiat. Anarchy means you volunteer to live in a network of empowered communities instead of just passively accepting a militarized police state as the default. Anarchy means you look out for the people around you instead of counting on some inevitably corrupt, top-down system of government to catch everyone who falls on hard times." [p175]



Thomas More // Utopia

(1516; first English translation 1551)

The work that coined the very term. SFE makes it clear that this is a more complex work than is often seen, and in particular points to "More's insistence that his humanistic, rationally governed world was amenable to change, and that his picture of Utopia had caught only a moment in its evolution towards a more perfect constitution for the life of men on Earth."
 
It was seen straightforwardly by Max Nettlau, in his Short History, as authoritarian and statist. Berneri, however, devotes 30 pages to Utopia, reasonably concluding that "we prefer to admire More for his indictment of the society of his time rather than for the set of laws and institutions which he himself devised. "


Richard (K.) Morgan // Altered Carbon (2002); Broken Angels (2003); Market Forces (2004); Woken Furies (2005); Black Man (2007; aka Thirteen); Thin Air (2018)

(2007)

Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies together constitute a trilogy described by Teflon as having "distinct anarchist undertones". Clinton Fry, on the Facebook Anarchists and Science Fiction page, wrote that Woken Furies "is about as good as sci fi gets. There are good bits in there about the nature of power, anarchism, the inherent failures of central planning technocracy….lots of good stuff."



Market Forces is "An overtly political projection of the future of corporate capitalism." (Teflon) For Bork, on FB Anarchists and Science Fiction, this is one of two books by Morgan that "play with some interesting concepts for anarchists". For Wally Conger, who includes this novel in his
Top Ten Sci-Fi Liberty Novels
, "all Libertarian Leftists—whether agorist, georgist, mutualist, or other—should thoroughly enjoy this brutal and extraordinarily well-written page-turner."



Black Man is highly recommended by Zeke Teflon, who describes it as "A very dystopian look at a future theofascist USA." 



Thin Air is described by Teflon as "set on a very dystopian Mars a couple of centuries hence," and "a commentary on the results of colonialism in a neo-liberal context", with an intricate plot in which "every single corporate, political and governmental entity is corrupt and treacherous." For him this too is highly recommended.


William Morris // News from Nowhere (1890; revised 1892) ; The Tables Turned; or, Nupkins Awakened: A Socialist Interlude (1887)

(1887)

In 1886 Morris invited Kropotkin, whom he had recently met, and liked immediately, to write for his paper, The Commonweal, but he declined. It was probably through Morris's early contact with Kropotkin, though, that the Commonweal press facilities were used to print Freedom. That year, in a letter, he spoke of "us semi-anarchists", which is really as close to anarchism as Morris ever admitted to (Mackail 11:149). In a letter the following year, he wrote: "I distinctly disagree with the Anarchist principle, much as I sympathise with many of the anarchists personally, and although I have an Englishman's wholesome horror of government interference and centralisation . . ." (Morris 1951:5). In 'Socialism and Anarchism', a letter in Commonweal on 5th May 1889, Morris wrote: "I will begin by saying that I call myself a Communist, and have no wish to qualify that word by joining any other to it."
 
He himself was always well-liked by anarchists. An anonymous commentator in Freedom in 1891 observed that "Like other people, Anarchists admire his artistic genius, but, in addition, there is not an Anarchist worth his salt who, being acquainted with William Morris, does not respect him as a good comrade and an honest man."



News from Nowhere—"A vision rather than a dream" of a utopian future—was written as a libertarian response to Bellamy's Looking Backward. The polity is described as communist throughout, as one would expect, but the vision parallels closely many people's notions of an ideal anarchist society. No attempt to précis the book could possibly do it justice. Perhaps a single clue to its appeal might be found in Chapter XIII, 'Concerning Politics'—which is just twelve lines long, "because we have none."



Anarchists have generally taken Morris's tale to their hearts. For an anonymous Freedom writer of 1891, "Comrade Morris is not avowedly an Anarchist by conviction; but in character he is a born-Anarchist, and in very much of his writing—for instance, News from Nowhere—the most hypercritical of Anarchists would have to borrow a pair of spectacles to discover serious points of disagreement." Peter Kropotkin, in his 1896 memorial to Morris, described News from Nowhere as "perhaps the most thoroughly and deeply Anarchistic conception of future society that has ever been written. . . . his ideal society is undoubtedly the one which is most free of all our State and monastic traditions; the most imbued with the feelings of equality and humanitarian love; the most spontaneously growing out of a spirit of free understanding."(109) Much later Jeff Cloves, in Freedom in 1968, summed up the feelings of many: "I'm not bothered by jeers about the impracticality and implausibility of News from Nowhere. All that I know is that when I read it, I think . . . that's what I want, that's how life ought to be." Murray Bookchin, in his The Ecology of Freedom, refers to Morris as "my favorite utopian".



Most recently (November 2021) Javier Saithness has written that "Although this novella depicts communist h(e)avens, it may more accurately be classified as an anti-modern utopia integrating Romantic, pastoral, and even proto-solarpunk themes." In his view "The importance of Morris' Romantic-revolutionary outlook should not be underestimated. All of it remains relevant today."



With The Dispossessed, News from Nowhere ranks as one of the two essential texts in the context of this guide.



In the lightweight satirical playlet The Tables Turned, "the sleeper who awakes in a libertarian-socialist society in Part II is the corrupt judge who presides over the farcical trial of socialists and anarchists in Part I." (The pre-revolution Part 1 is much the longer of the two parts.) "There, he has to face the Council of the Commune (the general assembly of the local population, or folk-mote), who refuse to waste chains by shackling him, or to take care of him in a prison (they have none, anyway), but instead teach him to do useful work farming so that he might become a self-employed individual like everyone else." (Dan Clore)


Grant Morrison // The Invisibles

(1994–2000)

Included in Killjoy's list of stories that feature sympathetic anarchist characters. Also recommended by Common Action at the panel "Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction" at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009. Also see Cohn: 386.
 


James Morrow // Towing Jehovah

(1994)

A satirical look at the improbable claims of religion, centring on the death of God as a literal event, with his corpse found floating in the Atlantic. Affectionately irreverent.
 
Much appreciated by Tom Flynn, in Science Fiction and Atheism. Included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 


Walter Mosley // Blue Light

(1998)

A mysterious blue beam of light strikes California in 1965, and those touched by it—known as the Blues—are changed forever.



Described in Mark Bould's Red Planets reading list as "a peculiar apocalyptic story about race, sex, identity, death, transformation and possibility. Among the 'black expressionists' listed by M. Asli Dukan at Invisible Universe. Included in the Think Galactic reading list.


Sam Esmail // Mr. Robot

(2015→, TV series)

A disaffected hacker is recruited into a group seeking to bring down capitalism by wiping out debt. There are numerous references on the internet to the eponymous Mr Robot—the group's leader—being an 'anarchist', or even an 'insurrectionary anarchist', but this isn't supported by the programme content. Nonetheless, it's attractively anti-capitalist.
 
Briefly discussed on its own libcom.org forum, for one poster "The politics are naive, but it was still really good." For another "Mr. Robot's excellent and as far as the politics go, it pretty accurately depicts the shitty politics of Anonymous (more or less the model for a fictional organization in the show) and the nonsense that's often passed around as 'anarchism' these days among young American activists without IMO making is seem much more appealing than it is in real life." Another thought "it's got more to do with the Occupy Wall Street thing." While a fourth dismissed it as "Blanquist cyber-anarchist fantasy", the response was that "It's recuperation, but it's interesting because somewhere along the way recuperation is going to fail just like the rest of the capitalist project."



There are three relevant pages on www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism, though I ignore the first, as it predates the first transmission. The initial poster on Has anyone been watching "Mr. Robot"? was "pleased to see that the anarchist 'Mr. Robot' is not an asshat cartoon villain (which is usually how 'anarchists' are portrayed in the media)." Later comments were more sceptical: "Episode 1 was pretty okay but it's hard to take it too seriously when it's coming from USA network and packaged for prime time television"; "Beware the capitalist, they will package up your rebellion and sell it back to you in order to incorporate and defuse it. Never forget why you like it…"; "[ . . . ] nobody in the show is an anarchist why do ppl keep using that word"; "I don't really see the point, it's capitalist reformism all over again"; "The show does not play to anarchist philosophy(s), it acts as a reservoir for anyone alienated or who feels occasionally alienated by the current blah." But the last response prompted a different viewpoint: "[ . . . ] I would argue that the general anti-capitalist/anti-corporate themes do, in fact, "play to" anarchist philosophy. Nobody seems to espouse any anarchist philosophy, per se, but the fact that anarchist ideas and tendencies are the primary driver of the plot, without explicitly saying it, actually makes the show that much more subversive and effective in my opinion." A new post on Mr. Robot expressed the view that "It's obviously extremely anti-capitalistic, one would maybe even say pro-anarchism, and the main characters voice-over provides us with a lot of social commentary."
 


Jim Munroe // Angry Young Spaceman

(2001)

Jim Munroe has been an anarchist since his teenage years, has his own publishing label, and proactively supports self-publishing. His is one of the featured interviews in Mythmakers and Lawbreakers.
 
Of his books, comic books, video games and movies, his very entertaining Angry Young Spaceman is included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 


Pat Murphy // The City, Not Long After (1989); 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation' (1989)

(1989)

. . . "a stateless community wages a non-violent war against invaders" . . . (Cohn: 119). San Francisco, after a plague, is inhabited by artists, who actively and successfully resist an attempt to re-establish governmental order, using creative means that minimise (but don't eliminate) personal violence.
 
'How I Spent My Summer Vacation' is the final story in the themed Time Gate anthology, edited by Robert Silverberg with Bill Fawcett; the liberated simulacrum of Mikhail Bakunin (from the earlier Sheckley story) reappears in friendly conversation with Queen Victoria, and is later contemplating his potential future as an anarchist computer virus.
 


Merril Mushroom // 'Darcee's Temptation'

(2006)

Short story published in Fifth Estate. In a future dystopia it dawns on a woman that it needn't be the way it was.
 


n

Ramez Naam // Nexus

(2012)

Joint winner of the 2014 Prometheus award. Recommended as a "fun read" by a contributor to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum.


Hayao Miyazaki // Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (風の谷のナウシカ)

(1984; 2005, unedited and redubbed version)

Set a thousand years after an environmental disaster, this appealing anime film tells the story of Nausicaä, the young princess of the Valley of the Wind, who is opposed by a neighbouring kingdom that seeks to eradicate a jungle full of giant mutant insects, as she tries to resolve the conflict amicably whilst protecting the local fauna.



Reviewed by Connor Owens at solarpunkanarchists.com, for whom it "embodies all the best traits of the anime films that came after it: ecological awareness, links between ecocide and the militaristic desire to dominate nature, and the aspiration to adopt a cooperative relationship to the natural world instead of one based on hierarchy and destruction."


Ray Nelson // Turn Off the Sky

(1963)

Features two anarchists, one a pacifist, the other a violent exponent of propaganda by the deed. Although the author has at least grasped that anarchism is about opposition to the state, and there is a relevant story element in which the pacifist is witness to an act of violence and ponders whether on not to involve the police, his knowledge is clearly minimal: he has one of the anarchists associating himself with Lenin and Trotsky, at the head of the professional revolutionaries. Meanwhile, the leader of the Anti-Political Party is elected President of the World.


Josef Nesvadba // 'In the footsteps of the abominable snowman'

(1964)

Story of telepathic yetis, part of which is set in Spain during the Civil War. Speaks unusually warmly of the anarchists: one character says "'They were men of courage and I remember them often. Naturally they had no idea that reason and intellect would get them nowhere.'"(1979 NEL pb collection of the same title: 169)


Mark Romanek // Never Let Me Go

(2010)

Melancholic dystopia set in an alternate England in which life expectancy has been extended beyond 100 by the expedient of breeding clones for their body parts; three such clones struggle to come to terms with this, while embroiled in a love triangle that gives them little satisfaction.
 
Included in libcom.org's Working class cinema: a video guide.
 


Annalee Newitz // Autonomous (2017); The Future of Another Timeline (2019)

(2019)

Autonomous marks an impressive debut novel, with a 22nd century tale of autonomous robots, indentured humans, drug piracy and anti-corporate activism.



Future of Another Timeline is a feminist time travel novel, in which at one point (in 1893) there's some discussion of Lucy Parsons, IWW, and The Alarm, as well as of Emma Goldman, and of Alexander Berkman's attentat on Henry Clay Frick; and the appended guide to Historical Sources confirms the historicity of the few pages concerned.



Both are included in the Sharp and Pointed list of essential anarchist sf, whose reviewer commends the second novel's "very well drawn and diverse settings, [and] well argued political/social points".


Chris Newport // The White Bones of Truth

(1996)

Recommended by Common Action at the panel "Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction" at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009.
 


Robert Nichols // Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai (1977–9); Red Shift (1977)

(1977)

Daily Lives is a short tetralogy, set in a near-future alternate-world central Asian land. Strong on ecological and (unusually) traditional-religious values, the anarchist influence is explicitly acknowledged. Written in a fragmented, poetic and impressionistic style, it's an interesting and important modern utopia. Daily Lives is preceded by an introductory work, Red Shift, in which characters include 'Errico Malatesta' and 'Sandy Berkman'.
 
"While Daily Lives is not widely known, it is one of the most important contributions to both literary and theoretical utopianism." (Clark 2009: 21-2) It was a significant influence on Ursula K. Le Guin, who is on record as saying that " . . . Nghsi-Altai is in some respects the very place I was laboriously trying to get to, and yet lies in quite the opposite direction . . .". (Le Guin 1982)


Audrey Niffenegger // The Time Traveler's Wife

(2003)

Appealing romantic fiction in which the time traveller has a genetic condition which causes him involuntarily to jump around his own timeline, while true love surfs over this fragmented chronology. One or two minor characters lean towards anarchism.


Thom Eberhardt // Night of the Comet

(1984)

Earth passes through the tail of a comet, reducing most of humanity to red dust, but leaving a few zombies, some unscrupulous scientists, and a couple of teenage girls and a boy they meet, who outwit the bad guys, with irrepressible good humour.
 
In an interview copied to the Anarchy-SF mailing list in 2003, this was named by Ken Macleod as on his short list of great SF movies.


William F. Claxton // Night of the Lepus

(1972)

Preposterous story of killer giant rabbits.
 
John J. Pierce at reason.com described it as "worthy of the March Hare".


George A. Romero // Night of the Living Dead

(1968)

Classic zombie movie, the newly dead apparently revivified by unexplained radiation from a returning Venus probe.
 
Included in the Red Planets filmography (see Bould, in bibliography), as an anti-racist movie. SFE comments that some have seen "the savagery – and helplessness – of both ordinary people and zombies [ . . . ] as symbolic of the horrors of the Vietnam War."



Donovan Irven, in his paper 'Anarchism of the Living Dead', argues that



[ . . . ] "the zombies in Romero’s film are the heralds of a radical decoding and deterritorialization. Rather than being the predisabled people who, as slaves, serve to implement the codes of their masters, mapped out on colonial/capitalist territory, the zombies, as immune to the dominant codes that striate and structure society, are the horrific implementation of the radical deconstruction of those codes. [ . . . ] What marks Night of the Living Dead as the completion of a transition of the zombie from the capitalist’s dream to the capitalist’s nightmare is the utter nihilism exhibited in the film. [ . . . ] After Night of the Living Dead, the zombie is also that mechanism of the State’s radical decoding . The undead breaks down all social norms, all of the axioms of the State apparatus become meaningless and lose their force as the zombie hordes spread. Yet, the state of emergency generated out of the zombie apocalypse also occasions the reactionary and even more violent assertion of State ideology [ . . . ]"



For Wendy McElroy, Romero's message "is not leftist but anti-authoritarian and a jarring cry out against the dehumanization of society through programming. [ . . . ] "Over and over, stereotypes are both broken and bitterly reinforced. The ultimate message: authority and mass mentality are the enemies." 


Rudolph Cartier // Nineteen Eighty-Four

(1954)

Telerecording of the original mostly-live BBC broadcast, still seen as a superb version, with a memorable lead from Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. The political messages come across strongly.
 
Listed as a dystopian film at Black Flag Blog's Anarchism and film.



Reviewed by Alex Peak, for whom "The teleplay’s bleak ending demonstrates why we all must, at all times, be sceptical of government, and be wary of allowing it to have power. For power, in the hands of a state, invariably means the power to oppress." Peak, citing Professor Tony Shaw's British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus, notes that it was this broadcast that "effectively 'launched' Orwell as a 'public' writer, marking the point when the language of his novel entered the popular imagination."


Michael Radford // Nineteen Eighty-Four

(1984)

Second film version of Orwell's novel, with a definitive performance by John Hurt as Winston Smith, managing also to look like Orwell himself.
 
Also listed as a dystopian film at Anarchism and film.



Libertarian Movies says "Orwell's warning against totalitarianism has obvious appeal for libertarians, but the vision portrayed here, I would think, would get under anybody's skin."
 
Osborne (see bibliography) finds this film "very effective [ . . . ] bleak in every aspect, thoroughly controlled, and impossible to escape." He concludes: "[Hurt's] is such a powerful portrayal that many viewers will find the ultimate defeat of the individual in the hands of the mega-state depressing [ . . . . ] It's not the most uplifting film, but it's certainly a very important one."


Larry Niven // 'Cloak of Anarchy'

(1972)

In a future 'Free Park' anything goes, though automated 'copseyes' hover around ensuring there is no violence. Ron Cole decides to sabotage the copseyes and see what results, taking the opportunity to expound his theory of anarchism, which is actually anarcho-capitalism—"'After all, anarchy is only the last word in free enterprise.'" Though maintaining that the Free Park experiment without copseyes (which results in chaos) is too short an experiment to pass judgement on anarchy, at the conclusion of the story he recants, and declares anarchy unworkable because unstable.
 
The story is badly written and badly argued, deliberately playing on the ambiguity of anarchy as a form of polity and anarchy as chaos.


Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle // Lucifer's Hammer (1977); Oath of Fealty (1981)

(1981)

In Lucifer's Hammer Earth is devastated by the impact of a comet, and survivors struggle to keep going. The novel is described as a favourite, in Hill's Libertarian History of Science Fiction.



Wendy McElroy describes Oath of Fealty in the following terms: "Libertarians either love this book or hate it. Set in the very near future, it portrays an autonomous contractual community established in Los Angeles County, under attack by radical environmentalists." SFE calls the novel "a particularly cleverly thought-out exercise" in the "kind of doublethink" in which "the bureaucratic organizations of the state are replaced, at least so far as the key characters are concerned, by hyperorganized command structures in which the ethic of individual freedom supposedly being upheld is chimerically bonded to ideals of slavish loyalty and self-sacrificing 'honour'".


Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn // Fallen Angels

(1991)

Prometheus Award winner.


Cornel Wilde // No Blade of Grass

(1970)

A global blight on grasses and cereals leads to social breakdown, and a small band fights its way to precarious safety in the north of England. Based on John Christopher's The Death of Grass.  



Included in Goliath's 10 Obscure Sci-Fi Films Worth Seeking Out, a link shared on Facebook's Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum and on Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist.


William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson // Logan's Run

(1967)

More extreme than the 1976 film based on it, in which people are killed off when they reach the age of 30, in the novel itself people are killed at the age of 21. A contributor to the anarchysf mailing list in 2000 considered it "still a great book and scary as hell."


Benjamin Ross Hayden // The Northlander

(2016)

Nearly a thousand years in the future, after humanity and nature have recovered the land, a hunter travels across a desert valley to protect his tribe and find a way for them to survive. With a Métis director and a number of First Nations actors, this is so far the only indigenous futurist film included in this listing.
 


Alice Nunn // Illicit Passage

(1992)

. . . "highly anarchist, workers / working class organizing & revolting—really really excellent & one of the most political science fiction novels I've read in a long time . . ." (posting to anarchysf). Original and very readable, but less anarchist and more feminist than this quote suggests.
 


o

M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi // Everything for Everyone. An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072

(2022)

This remarkable novel is structurally unique in sf in being presented as an edited collection of oral history interviews with New Yorkers living in 2072, in which no single story predominates, but collectively the reader learns of the extraordinary societal changes that have taken place in the previous years (i.e. the fifty years since the date of publication). The response to climate change and complete economic and political collapse has been global (apart from an unreconstructed Australia), and radical in the extreme. It has taken place with extraordinary rapidity, and without any utopian consistency, so that in some instances the transition has been far from peaceful. But the world in 2072 is now essentially 'communist', in a vision which is essentially anarcho-communist, though the term isn't used. The vision, as well as the history, is well realised, and largely credible.



A very recent publication, the work has already been well received. Juno Jill Richards reviewed it for Blind Field Journal, the review being re-published on the Anarchist Federation website. For Richards, "Everything for Everyone is not a dystopian end of the world, nor even a singularly perfect utopia, but something between. It is a process of making new forms of collective life as the content of revolution, shorn of romance. Indeed, nostalgia is a posture the book pointedly refuses, for the ways that it makes rigid a single version of revolutionary change."



For Phil Kaplan, in his Spectre review, Everything for Everyone "provides us with a wonderfully inspiring depiction of the most incredible, audacious, and yet plausible future any of us could hope for." "Every socialist needs to read this book. Every abolitionist, every Marxist, every anarchist, every revolutionary needs to read this book. Every person who has ever wondered how the world will function after the final retirement of the market, the commodity form, money, wages, rent, coercive gender roles, prisons, police, class, nation states, borders, profit, and in general the dominating power of any humans over any others." . . . "[T]his book is a stunningly effective antidote to the recalcitrance that revolutionaries have shown when asked to describe the future we seek to construct." Kaplan concludes:



"In its politics as well as its form as jointly produced and inherently interpersonal, it demands being read, discussed, and critiqued together. We can ask our questions and raise our issues while we still revel in this intense and absolutely lovely presentation of humanity’s future on our planet and beyond. Another world is indeed possible. This short book (239 very fast-turning pages) vividly and believably shows us what it is we can win."



Perhaps this is a premature judgement on my part, but I can't help feeling that this is, for anarchists, the most significant work of sf written since Le Guin's The Dispossessed.



Nicholas P. Oakley // The Watcher

(2013)

"The Watcher, set in the anarchist Confederation universe, examines issues raised by ‘primitivist’ or green anarchist theory by considering the ethical and sociological implications of a culture that rejects technology but tries to remain free." (author's blog) One of Teflon's essential anarchist SF novels.
 


John October (pseudonym of Christopher Portway) // The Anarchy Pedlars

(1976)

Despite the title, has nothing to do with anarchism.
 


Nnedi Okorafor // Who Fears Death

(2010)

More fantasy than SF, but included in SFE, so accepted here. School of Octavia Butler. Included on the Think Galactic reading list.
 


Malka Older // Infomocracy

(2016)

Debut novel with a promising premise of potential interest: in an internet-dominated world, nation states have fragmented, and the primary political units are now the 'centenals', micro-states with a population of just 100,000-odd. Teflon's See Sharp Press review is spot on in identifying the book's strengths and weaknesses, of which the latter outweigh the former. Given the premise, the dearth of information on how the centenals operate, internally, or how the system came about, or the political differences between the various factions fighting a global election, is significant. For Teflon the promise—despite the quality of the writing in other respects—remains unfulfilled.
 


Henry Olerich // A Cityless and Countryless World. An Outline of Practical Co-operative Individualism

(1893)

A Martian (but here called 'Marsian' or 'Marsite') traveller to earth is encouraged to describe at length the utopian society of his native planet. Explicitly influenced by Herbert Spencer, the novel projects a surprisingly open and free society, with no government and no organised religion, and equal rights for men, women and children, but with a strong sense of order and self-regulation. Though the word is never used by Olerich, it is explicitly treated as an anarchist SF utopia by Brigitte Koenig in her essay in Davis and Kinna's Anarchism and Utopianism, included in Nettlau's 'Utopies libertaires', and referred to in Cohn's Underground Passages. It's also noted by Bob Black for Olerich's advocacy of a 2-hour working day [Black 2015: 223].
  


Chad Oliver // 'The Ant and the Eye'

(1953)

The disarming of a future Hitler before anyone knows of him. One feature of the developing social context is, obscurely, "a spurt in membership in the Anarchist Party" (William F. Sloane: Stories for Tomorrow, London, 1955, p273)


Boris Sagal // The Omega Man

(1971)

After the destruction of most of humanity by biological warfare, a survivor battles against a group of anti-technology albino mutants.
 
Libertarian Movies says "Libertarians will enjoy the aspect of the individual creator/scientist as hero, fighting against the crowd". Also reviewed in Osborne (see bibliography).


Stephen Oram // Fluence

(2015)

A rigidly stratified society in a near-future London, in which social media determine rank.



The author describes himself as "a civil servant with a gentle attraction to anarchism". (Oram)



Keiichi Sugiyama // Origin: Spirits of the Past (銀色の髪のアギト)

(2006)

Global civilisation has collapsed, following a failed attempt at geo-engineering, which covers the world in sentient trees. Individuals brought forward from the past seek to reverse the process, but eventually realise the future is to live in harmony with the mutant trees.
 
Connor Owens, at solarpunkanarchists.com, notes that "The finger is pointed more at militarism and statism as being responsible for environmental devastation more than some kind innate species-wide propensity towards wrecking the Earth." Though finding the film "excessively preachy and unsubtle", he concludes that "Origin succeeds in coming close to what's called the social ecology school of environmental thought, emphasising human-nature cooperation and balance between the two as a solution to conflict, rather than one dominating or destroying the other."
 



George Orwell // Nineteen Eighty-Four

(1949)

Orwell had considerable knowledge of anarchism and anarchists, most notably from his period as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, described in his Homage to Catalonia (1938 and 1953), where the anarchists are described very favourably. Though after 1939 he distanced himself from anarchist views (disagreeing with their wartime pacifism), he became a good friend to anarchists. During and after the Second World War he came into personal contact with the anarchist movement in Britain, mixing with them at Freedom Bookshop and in pubs, and developing friendships with well-known British anarchists of the day, including Herbert Read, George Woodcock, and Vernon Richards; in 1946 he was billed to speak to the London Anarchist Group on Russian foreign policy (though it's not certain the talk took place); he contributed a book review to Freedom, and in 1949 donated a typewriter to Freedom Press, also giving financial support to NOW, Woodcock's anarchist publication. That year, while Orwell was treated in a sanatorium in Gloucestershire, his adoptive son Richard was lodged at the nearby Tolstoyan anarchist Whiteway Colony, where he attended school. (Bowker: 403) It was said that "At most, George Orwell may be said to have been an anarchist fellow-traveller; but he was one of the best there ever was." (Walter 2011: 211 [Walter 2011 is the key reference for Orwell and Anarchism]; Goodway: 346-7) In an unexpected tribute, Class War's Ian Bone has written that "Orwell's kind of pipe-smoking English radicalism was a greater influence than Bakunin or Kropotkin." (Bone) (See also Laursen, in bibliography) for a recent work of particular interest.)
 
Nineteen Eighty-Four has been seen by some anarchists as a vindication of Bakunin's opposition to the Marxist view of the state (Woodcock 1966: 49). Like most people, anarchists have seen the novel as a masterpiece (Woodcock 1953: 150, P.S. 1983). For Herbert Read it was "the most terrifying warning that a man has ever uttered" (Read 1950: 105). For Woodcock "what gives 1984 its peculiar force is the way in which it accepts Zamiatin's hints of the continuity between the present and the possible Utopian future, and shows that these may be not merely signs of direction, but actual parts of a new social structure even now forming around us." (Woodcock 1956: 97) Anarchist writing as the year itself approached and passed noted how accurate some of Orwell's prognosis had been, especially how Britain had indeed become no more than Airstrip One, an eastern outpost of the American Empire (PS 1983, Albon 1984). "The most important insight of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he shared with the anarchists, that the urge to power is more durable and more dangerous than all ideologies, has been abundantly borne out with the decay of ideology in Russia and the increase in the number of regimes in the modern world that depend wholly on naked power." (Woodcock 1984: 20) The anarchist activist Albert Meltzer, who admittedly only met Orwell once, was less impressed with his writings: "To be honest, I thought Orwell a lot wittier than his writings, which I found usually, and at that time always, a dreadful bore. Such an opinion became literary heresy." (Meltzer 1996)
 
The book tied for the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1984.
 
 


p

Ada Palmer // Too Like the Lightning

(2016)

This is the first volume of an innovative and (perhaps overly?) complex tetralogy, in course of publication. Notably it features a post-capitalist world 400 years hence in which the nation state no longer exists, discussion of religion is disallowed, and gender attribution is largely irrelevant. Organisation is organised by macro-scale affinity groups operating sundry polities which people can opt into or out of. There is also much interplay with the world of the 18th century Enlightenment, with intelligent discussion of notable figures such as Diderot and de Sade.



A whole anarchySF podcast was devoted to this work in September 2020. For Yanai Sened it is "As well thought out a utopia as I could imagine", but Eden Kupermintz commented that it also demonstrates that there is an inescapable price to utopia.


Edgar Pangborn // A Mirror for Observers

(1954)

Included in the Think Galactic reading list.


Robert S. Fiveson // Parts: The Clonus Horror

(1979)

At a secret facility where clones of politicians are being farmed for their organs, a clone discovers the truth of his situation.
 
Described by Osborne (see bibliography) as "the only libertarian horror movie of which I am aware."
 


Emile Pataud and Emile Pouget // How We Shall Bring about the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth (original title Comment nous ferons la Révolution)

(1909; second edition with preface by Peter Kropotkin 1911)

Plodding but worthy attempt at describing how the syndicalist revolution took place in a near-future France. The clunky English translation doesn't help.
 
Kropotkin advises that too much attention should not be given to the detail. Rather, what the book seeks to give is "the general idea of the revolution", to borrow Proudhon's phrase. Also, clearly, "it is not Anarchism that they picture for us." But:



"In this book of Pataud's and Pouget's can be felt [ . . . ] the life-giving breath of Anarchism in their conceptions of the future, especially in the pages devoted to Production and Exchange. And what they say on this subject should be seriously considered by every worker who loves Freedom, Justice, and Equality, as well as by everyone anxious to avoid the sanguinary struggles of a coming Revolution. [Preface: xxxiv]"



See also Cohn: 222-5.  


Laurie Penny // Everything Belongs to the Future (2016); 'The House of Surrender' (2016)

(2016)

The author describes the novella as "a near-future quasi-dystopian anarchist fable about biotechnology, surveillance, state violence, love and time." [interview] Activists (nowhere described as anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists, notwithstanding the advance publicity) steal anti-aging pills from gerontocrats to distribute them freely to the local dispossessed, but are betrayed by a police nark. Though described on the Facebook Solarpunk Anarchists page as an anarcha-feminist, Penny refers to herself as "a pinko queer feminist social justice warrior" (though on her Twitter feed in 2018 she does indeed describe herself as anarcha-feminist).



'The House of Surrender' was noted by Zakk Flash, on Facebook's Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, as "A short story set in a voluntary jail in an anarchist society." A podcast of the story, and Margaret Killjoy's interview with the author, may be found here.
 


Marge Piercy // Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1970); Woman on the Edge of Time (1976); He, She and It aka Body of Glass (1991)

(1991)

Dance the Eagle to Sleep tells of an attempt by a group of student revolutionaries to set up a communistic alternative society within an oppressive near future USA. Very much of its period. It was deemed "pretty good" by a contributor to Anarchy 101's What is your favorite anarchist novel? As of September 2018, it's included in Nick Mamatas's Anarchist StoryBundle.
 
Woman on the Edge of Time concerns a woman who is confined in a mental hospital whose only escape is into the future, to what Lessa, Takver and Alyx, in Open Road, call "the future-anarchist village" of Matapoisett. In the novel, Piercy herself doesn't use the term 'anarchist', although there is indeed no government: the closest thing to it are the township and regional planning councils, which are chosen by lot. However, in her introduction to the 2016 edition she says: "Like most women’s utopias, the novel is profoundly anarchist and aimed at integrating people back into the natural world and eliminating power relationships." The book was enthusiastically reviewed in Anarchist Feminist Magazine in 1985. It is included in Zeke Teflon's Favorite Anarchist Science Fiction Novels.
 
He, She and It was recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction', at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009.
 
Of her own politics, Piercy has said "I learned a lot from Marxism but probably lean more toward syndicalist anarchism."
 


John Pilgrim // 'Science Fiction and anarchism'

(1963)

This pioneering article was first published by Pilgrim in issue 34 of Anarchy magazine, based on lectures he'd given in 1960 (he'd had an earlier article entitled 'Viewpoint: The Anarchism in Science Fiction' published in Freedom in the year of his lectures). Leaving aside earlier works on utopian fiction, (and not counting anarchist reviews of individual works of sf, in which he'd been preceded by Arthur W. Uloth and others), this seems to have been the first real treatment of anarchism and sf, written years before Moorcock's better known article (which itself was in part prompted by his memory of Pilgrim's take on the subject, which was clearly unfair to Pilgrim).
 
Pilgrim himself was a journalist, as well as playing washboard with the skiffle group The Vipers, who had a residency at the famous 2i's coffee bar; and playing blues with Big Bill Broonzy, and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee.
 


H. Beam Piper // Little Fuzzy

(1962)

Revolves around determining whether or not a small furry species discovered on an alien planet is sapient. In the words of Wikipedia, it "features a mild libertarianism that emphasizes sincerity and honesty."
 


H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire // A Planet for Texans (a.k.a. Lone Star Planet)

(1958)

Won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1999.


Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia // The Platform

(2019)

SF/horror set inside a monolithic tower with two inhabitants on each level and a platform descending from the top providing food, which inevitably is all entirely consumed long before it reaches the bottom level; inhabitants of the lower floors are reduced to cannibalism. Inhabitants are periodically redistributed at random throughout the block, so that everyone has experience of both plenty and starvation. The message seems to be that people are all basically the same, it's the system that's to blame; but this is rather crass, as that's the premise in the first place.



Reviewed in DiY Culture. Also discussed briefly in an
anarchySF podcast.


Andrei Platonov // Chevengur

(written 1928/9; translated into English 1978)

Unusual novel set in the early years after the Russian revolution, and featuring a single impoverished community and its utopianising efforts to implement a naïve understanding of communism.</p>




Michel Antony
suggests that this novel may have suggested to Ursula Le Guin the idea of setting an ambiguous utopia in a world of scarcity.


Edgar Allan Poe

(--)

In his writing, but not in his politics, Poe was much influenced by William Godwin. Godwin actually lived long enough for one of his late works (Lives of the Necromancers) to be reviewed by Poe in the Southern Literary Messenger (December 1835). Poe was appreciated by the individualist Émile Armand, who instigated the publication of a French translation of Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), and of a collection of his tales, at the turn of the 20th century.


Frederik Pohl // 'The Midas Plague' (1954);'The Tunnel Under the World' (1955); The Years of the City (1980)

(1980)

Bould's Red Planets lists the two short stories as "Among the very best 1950s SF satires." Vittorio Curtoni called 'The Tunnel Under the World' a "great masterpiece", "like a Kafkaesque nightmare transposed to our days." (Curtoni 1978)



The Years of the City depicts New York in the 21st century. The political system is what is known as 'demarchy', a form of decentralized participatory democracy in which all government offices are filled by average citizens chosen using a form of selective service, with an overall goal of reducing bureaucracy and legislation.


Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth // The Space Merchants (1952); Gladiator-at-Law (1955)

(1955)

One of the best-known of 1950s SF novels, the cynical dystopia of The Space Merchants is a strong attack on advertising and consumerism; for the advertising company boss, "'Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely'" (c. 4). For M. Eagle "There can be few more biting (or amusing) satires of capitalism-gone-wild"; and Vittorio Curtoni also found it "a most enjoyable novel which dismantles and overturns [the] mechanisms of cosmic imperialism." (25) The novel is the subject of one of Evan Lampe's blog posts.
 



Gladiator-at-Law features big-business intrigue, in which a house-production monopoly is overthrown by a motley crew of the dispossessed. Pilgrim found it notable, and unusual in that the insurrection is successful. (Pilgrim 1963: 371)


Rachel Pollack // Unquenchable Fire (1988)

(1988)

Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, eds // The Survival of Freedom

(1981)

Very dated (Cold War) libertarian anthology of essays and SF short stories. Includes two short essays by the anarcho-capitalist David Friedman, including 'Why Anarchy?', with a lukewarm introductory note by Pournelle. It won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 2001.


Terry Pratchett // Night Watch

(2002)

A worthy winner of the 2003 Prometheus award, and included in LibraryThing's anarchism, science fiction tagmash. The dark humour is British in flavour.
 
 
 


Shane Carruth // Primer

(2004)

Complex and cerebral, the film concerns the accidental discovery of limited time travel, the storyline unravelling with recursive iterations. Technically slick, especially considering its phenomenally low budget ($7000).
 
Included in Bould's Red Planets filmography, where it's described as a "Dystopian vision of the inescapable here-and-now."
 
Recommended on one of the Anarchism sub-Reddit's discussions; and shortlisted as Best sci-fi ever committed to film, by one contributor to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction forum.
 


Patrick McGoohan // The Prisoner

(1967/1968; TV series, 17 episodes)

"I am not a number. I am a free man!"
 
Anyone not yet familiar with this TV masterpiece is behind on their homework. I don't propose to describe it or offer plot summaries here, but restrict myself to its reception by libertarians of the left as well as the right, both camps sharing common ground in the defiant individualism and refusal to conform of the central character, Number Six, not to mention the brilliant realisation of the micro-dystopia that is The Village.
 
Reason.com has shown its approval of The Prisoner on a number of occasions: it was the only SF series listed among the site's "five television shows all libertarians should watch", and shortlisted as libertarian sci-fi, as well as being dubbed libertarian for both featuring individualist heroes and "incredibly oppressive systems that crush the human spirit."
 
But the most extended libertarian critique is Chris R. Tame's 6-page article Different Values. An Analysis of Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, first published in New Libertarian Review in 1974. For Tame "The theme of The Prisoner was strikingly clear, then: the Man versus the State, Autonomy and Individualism versus Regimentation and Conformity, the Individual versus the Collective." [Tane's emphasis]



"McGoohan's basic theme throughout The Prisoner was surely that responsibility for our lives and our society resides within ourselves—within the self. In other words, it is the 'sanction of the victim' upon which the despotism of State and Society ultimately rests. The individual can resist and question authority and the dominant social values, or he can, as most people in fact do, abdicate the responsibility, abdicate autonomy and individuality, and succumb to Society. It is within 'Number 1', one's self, that the decision is made as to whether one is a 'prisoner' of Society or not."



For Tane, too, "Technically, The Prisoner was brilliant, certainly the most imaginative and dazzling television series ever executed."



He concluded: "The Prisoner will always remain an inspiration to those involved in the struggle for individualism and liberty, to those who will "not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or numbered" and who wish to make their life their own."



The series won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 2002, so far the only TV series ever to have achieved this distinction.



In 2017, fully 50 years since the series' first broadcast, it still seems reasonable that the entry in SFE should conclude that The Prisoner "is in the opinion of many—often those discontented with Space Opera—the finest sf television series to date."



 


Philip Pullman // His Dark Materials trilogy—Northern Lights (1995); The Subtle Knife (1997); The Amber Spyglass (2000)

(2000)

Recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction' at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009. The first volume is included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 
 


Peter Watkins // Punishment Park

(1970)

Vietnam-era near-future 'documentary', with hand-held 16mm filming, and heavily reliant on improvisation by amateurs, in which US dissidents are given a choice of a long prison sentence or 'Punishment Park', in which they face a three-day ordeal in the California desert while being hunted by police and national guard troops.
 
Listed among Brian Bergen-Aurand's 20 Great Anarchist Movies That Are Worth Your Time. Bergen-Aurand says "The roughness and direct address of issues of race, class, gender, and imperialism mark Punishment Park as an extremely valuable relentless, didactic composition. This film is a raw version of The Hunger Games, without the fairytale disguise."
 
Included by Glenn in his essay 'Film as Subversion', in the 2015 BASTARD Chronicles, as a subversive drama. Glenn says "One of the most incendiary films produced during the Vietnam period, this film was effectively banned in the USA after opening for four days in an obscure Manhattan theater. It has never played in a major US cinema house nor has ever appeared on National TV."
 
Listed as a dystopian film at Black Flag Blog's Anarchism and film.
 
On a personal note, as a British exchange student in the US in 1970, I found this an astonishingly truthful reflection of my recollections of that period, after Kent State and the invasion of Cambodia.
 


Graham Purchase // My Journey with Aristotle to the Anarchist Utopia

(1994)

Yet another sleeper awakes, this time to be given a guided tour of Bear City in the Cat-River bioregion, an eco-anarchist (or green-syndicalist) utopia. (Dan Clore; Killjoy's Mythmakers & Lawbreakers, 2009)
 
Worthy and rather laboured, but mercifully short. Killjoy (2013) takes a more charitable view: "Its prose is clumsy but its politics are fascinating" . . . .


James DeMonaco // The Purge

(2013)

On Purge Night, when the near-future US government legalises crime for 12 hours in the hope of reducing the numbers of proles, a wealthy family find themselves the focus of attention of a group of marauding resentful neighbours.
 
Reviewed by Margaret Killjoy at The Anarcho-Geek Review, who noted that "the filmmakers actually took the themes of the movie in interesting directions," one theme being class war, though as a whole the film is essentially "a liberal parable," indeed "terribly liberal." Killjoy points out, too, that the focus on violent killing is unrealistic, as during a temporary suspension of law enforcement people are much more likely to indulge in looting than in revenge murder.


James DeMonaco // The Purge: Anarchy

(2014)

Sequel to The Purge. On Purge Night a mother and daughter, a young couple, and a purger bent on revenge join forces after finding themselves on the city streets, trying to survive the chaos and violence that ensues.
 
The film received, reluctantly, a surprisingly positive review from D. Markotin, at the Anarcho-Geek Review. Finding it "rather excellent", Markotin writes that "The Purge: Anarchy hits on three themes quite dear to my heart: the evils of class society; the evils of government; and how revenge usually makes everything worse but that revolutionary violence is okay." "Strangely, one of the themes of this film is that without government, we won't just run around killing one another. Which I find to be a very defensible position. And it strikes a fascinating, and I would argue anarchistic, balance between pacifism and the glorification of violence." In conclusion, "The movie is definitely not above critique. But I'm incredibly impressed at how the film created an enjoyable, plot-driven action film (not really a horror film) out of a rather intense class war parable. And maybe I'll even forgive them for using the name anarchy in the title."
 
The Anarchism subReddit has a long discussion of this film under the title Anti-anarchist propaganda from Hollywood: The Purge: Anarchy. This shows a considerable diversity of opinion on the film's merits or otherwise.
 


Thomas Pynchon // Gravity's Rainbow (1973); Against the Day (2006)

(2006)

Gravity's Rainbow is long and difficult, with over 400 characters and multiply fractured plots, and has been seen as quintessentially postmodern. Set principally in 1945, the centrality of rocketry and rocket engineering, coupled with reflection on determinism, paranoia and conspiracy, bring it within the purview of science fiction without ever really approaching the genre per se. Compelling, even when (as often) impenetrable. The interest for anarchists is less overt than in Against the Day. Both works were discussed in a session called 'Against the Day: anarchism in the fiction of Pynchon' at the 2012 BASTARD conference.



Against the Day is an exceptional, and exceptionally long, transgeneric novel steeped in science fictional influences, and heavily laced with anarchists and anarchist activities reflecting the period setting (1893 to just after World War I). There are, in particular, references to Tucker, Bakunin, Stirnerite individualism, the Haymarket martyrs, the IWW, Zapata, Villa and the Mexican revolution, and a number of assassinations: Czolgosz's of McKinley, Bresci's of Umberto I, Sipido's attempted assassination of the Prince of Wales, and Berkman's attempted murder of industrialist Henry Clay Frick.



Some of the novel's characters are themselves anarchists, sympathetically portrayed, as noted in Killjoy (2009 and 2011). Joanna Freer, in Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture, has noted that "As his literary career has progressed, the author's antipathy to capitalism has become ever more visible, as has his relative sympathy for anarchist solutions, which is fully confirmed by Against the Day (2006)." The novel was reviewed by Michael Moorcock in the Daily Telegraph in November 2006, the review being reprinted in Moorcock (2012: 278-280):



"Against the Day is a fine example of a successful marriage between the popular and the intellectual, between fiction and science. [ . . . ] Gloriously, demandingly, daringly, Pynchon has rediscovered vulgarity and continues to proved that the novel has never been more vibrant, more various or better able to represent our complex world."



For James Gifford (see bibliography) the novel demonstrates Pynchon's "profound knowledge of anarchist and syndicalist history."



Among the top works in LibraryThing's tagmash: anarchism, science fiction, it's the favourite anarchist novel of one contributor to Anarchy101.



There is a relevant and useful chapter by Graham Benton, 'Daydreams and Dynamite: Anarchist Strategies of Resistance and Paths for Transformation in Against the Day', in Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise, eds (2011) Pynchon's Against the Day. A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide (Newark: University of Delaware Press).



q

Geoff Murphy // The Quiet Earth

(1985)

A cataclysmic event that has caused humankind to disappear overnight leaves three survivors, all of whom had died at the moment of the "effect" and been reborn, one being a scientist who had taken an overdose in guilt at his part in causing the catastrophe.
 
In an interview copied to the Anarchy-SF mailing list in 2003, this was named by Ken Macleod as on his short list of great SF movies.


Robert Altman // Quintet

(1979)

Atmospheric post-apocalyptic drama set in the arctic tundra of a new ice age, featuring the players of a deadly game.
 
Included in the list of 10 Obscure Sci-Fi Films Worth Seeking Out, linked to by contributors to Facebook's Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, and Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist.
 


Pierre Quiroule (pseudonym of Joaquín Alejo Falçonnet) // La ciudad anarquista americana (The Anarchist City of America; not yet translated)

(1914)

This utopian narrative revisits some of the most controversial topics of the philosophical debate on Anarchism, while simultaneously offering practical alternatives to previous models of libertarian communism." Quiroule founded La Liberté (1893–1893) and was a member of the editorial board of La Protesta, which was the most representative publication of anarchist journalism in Argentina; he was "one of the most prolific authors of the Argentine Libertarian movement". The fully-fledged utopia of the 'Ciudad de los Hijos del Sol' (complete with fold-out map of the anarchist city) is set in a future apparently around 1930.
 
The work is the second volume of a trilogy, the other parts being Sobre la ruta de la anarquía (On the Route to Anarchism) (1912) and En la soñada tierra del ideal (In the Dreamt Land of the Ideal) (1924). The first volume describes a successful urban revolution in Europe, inspired by the 1871 Paris Commune. The final volume depicts a nameless city in the distant future, and explores confrontation between syndicalists and anarchists. The text of the complete trilogy may be found at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschedenis (IISG), Amsterdam. (Juan-Navarro, Heffes 2009: 119–123)
 
Referenced in the 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary.
 
Also see Rodriguez, 2016.
 
The full text is available in Spanish in Volume I of the 1991 three-volume Ediciones Tuero publication of Utopías Libertarias; Vol. I is entitled I. Utopías Libertarias Americanas. La Ciudad Anarquista Americana de Pierre Quiroule. Quiroule's utopia forms the second half of the book, the first half consisting of useful introductory and contextual essays by the three editors, Luis Gomez Tovar, Ramon Gutierrez, and Silvia A. Vazquez.
 
 


r

Ayn Rand // Anthem (1938; abridged 1946); Atlas Shrugged (1957)

(1957)

Rand was far from being an anarchist (she once describe anarchy, as a political concept, as "a naive floating abstraction"), but her immense influence on the libertarian right and the anarcho-capitalists can't be denied. (Rand 1963) Murray Rothbard, a leading influence on the development of anarcho-capitalism, asserted in his 1973 work For a New Liberty that "her philosophical influence remains prodigious on the great bulk of libertarian youth" (15).
 
Anthem is a dystopia set after a future war, in which the only crime punishable by death is the speaking of the word 'I'; inevitably the hero rebels, and comes to regard the very word as a god. In its exaltation of egoism, and to some extent in its style, it is reminiscent of Stirner's The Ego and His Own. It tied for the 1987 Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award.
 
Atlas Shrugged is Rand's most influential book, a sustained diatribe against socialism, in which the great industrialists withdraw their 'services' to society as civilisation collapses, with a view to rebuilding capitalism on the ruins. John Galt, Rand's messiah-figure, makes clear that there is no question of being opposed to the state as such; he regards police, army, and courts as the "proper functions of a government" (Signet pb edn: 987), and only opposes government initiation of force. It tied for the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1983.


Herbert Read // The Green Child

(1935)

Utopian fantasy, meriting inclusion by virtue of Read's importance in the history of anarchism in Britain. George Woodcock found this novel to be "a parable illuminating the dialectic that runs through all of Read's works: the necessary interplay between freedom and order, between reason and instinct, on which the organic reality of life as well as of art depends." (Woodcock 1972a:77)
 
Read invited Emma Goldman to tea in 1938, and became (with Ethel Mannin) one of the only two "real comrades and friends" that she made during her three years in London [Goodway: 129, 132]


John Milius // Red Dawn

(1984)

After the USA is invaded by the Soviet Union, with support from Cuba and Nicaragua, a group of high school students fight a guerrilla resistance. Heinleinian stuff, probably intended as what is these days referred to as YA, but in this case the old word 'juvenile' seems more appropriate.
 
Libertarian Movies says that "for libertarians, it's certainly pro-Second-Amendment and anti-socialism". Osborne's review (see bibliography) further describes it as a "red-blooded, patriotic movie". But don't let me put you off . . . .
 


Philip Reeve // Mortal Engines

(2001)

YA novel set in a post-apocalyptic world in which cities have been mounted on wheels and are roaming the world predating on each other; London is the featured 'traction city'.
 
Included in the Think Galactic reading list.


Alex Cox // Repo Man

(1984)

Increasingly improbable adventures of a repo man in Los Angeles involving government agents and, apparently, aliens. Full of "punk aesthetics and black humour", as SFE puts it.
 
Categorised by Glenn in his essay 'Film as Subversion', in the 2015 BASTARD Chronicles, as a subversive comedy, and "A hysterically funny, savage attack on religion, family values, the American way, and punk itself." A 2015 showing at the Liverpool Small Cinema described it as a "Genre-busting mash-up of atomic-age science fiction, post-punk anarchism, and conspiracy paranoia"; this description is lifted from Eureka Video's blurb, which adds that Repo Man is "Arguably the defining cult film of the Reagan era".
 
Recommended by three contributors to the Anarchism SubReddit as a film advocating anti-capitalism, though the third (Peppermint Pig) qualifies this: "It questions authority as much as it questions self purpose, but there's really no anti-capitalist argument being made as an underlying theme."
 
Quoted as an epigraph in David Graeber's Debt. The First 5,000 Years.
 


Restif de la Bretonne // Discovery of the Austral Continent by a Flying Man (1781, as La découverte australe par un homme-volant, ou le Dédale français; tr. Brian Stableford, 2016)

(1781)

Notable work of proto-sf. The title gives the gist, though the later part of the book is utopian in character.



This and other works by this author are included in Nettlau's Esbozo, in which he describes the utopia as one of socialism. Black (see bibliography) notes that Restif treats of work as almost a game, and games as forms of education.


Alastair Reynolds // Revelation Space (2000); Chasm City (2001)

(2001)

Both are included in Teflon's list of Anarchist Science Fiction: Essential Novels, where Revelation Space is described as "Antiauthoritarian but not specifically anarchist"; Chasm City is set in the same universe. Revelation Space is also suggested by pharm on MetaFilter. Both are also recommended by Clark on Popehat; both are over-long space operas.
 


Mack Reynolds // Planetary Agent X (1965); Commune 2000 A.D. (1974); Amazon Planet (1975); Lagrange Five (1979)

(1979)

John Pilgrim found the Ultima Thule of Planetary Agent X to be "delightful". (Pilgrim 1963) In the United Planets there are said to be several run on an anarchistic basis. One is a planet called Kropotkin, with Bakunin the capital.
 
In Commune 2000 A.D.:
 
"The government, through technocratic means, has eliminated the need for most individuals to work, and has instituted a Universal Guaranteed Income. Only those who come out on top when taking tests to determine their Ability Quotient are able to obtain jobs. More and more, jobless individuals join communes and pursue their own interests—there are communes for homosexuals, lesbians, artists, nudists, kids who hate everyone over thirty, swinging singles, and many others. A government official objects that "An increasing number of the communards don't participate in even the civil elections. Most aren't eligible to participate in the guild elections, because they hold no jobs, but they don't bother to vote in the civil elections, either. To put it bluntly, they're anarchists." After the main character, who has been assigned to investigate the communes, discovers that the communards are in a conspiracy to institute anarchism by eliminating the political state and transferring democracy to the economic sphere, one member tells him that they prefer the term libertarians. Say anarchist to most people and they think in terms of bomb-throwing fanatics. (Reynolds was an activist with the syndicalist Socialist Labor Party.)" (Dan Clore)
 
Amazon Planet received favourable mention from Lessa, Takver & Alyx, in 1978.
 
Lagrange Five is set on a space colony run on broadly syndicalist lines, though with a population consisting only of Earth's intellectual elite. China Miéville included it in his list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read (which was also copied to the anarchysf mailing list in 2002), describing it as "examining a quasi-utopia without sentimentalism". It's also listed in Bould's Red Planets reading list.
 


Waubgeshig Rice // Moon of the Crusted Snow

(2018)

The experience of living through the apocalyptic breakdown of society as seen from a First Nations community in northern Ontario. Understated, and all the more effective for it.



Maurice Richardson // The Exploits of Engelbrecht: Abstracted from the Chronicles of the Surrealist Sportsman's Club

(1950)

For Michael Moorcock this was "one of the best examples of imaginative fiction to appear in England since the war" . . . (Moorcock 1978). According to the SFE Richardson was also an influence on Spike Milligan.
 


Eugen Richter // Pictures of the Socialistic Future (Freely Adapted from Bebel) (1894; first published in 1891 as Sozialdemokratische Zukunftsbilder: frei nach Bebel

(1894)

Surprisingly effective early dystopia, depicting a diarist's progressive disenchantment with a near-future socialist state.
 
Very warmly reviewed on the Mises Institute's website: "This is the book that shouts out, as clearly as any ever written: we were warned!"


Rigo 23 // Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program

(2009– )

Art installation exhibited in Queens, New York, in 2019, the result of Rigo's collaboration "with Zapatista painters, weavers, carpenters, singers and activists by asking them to imagine and help model a spaceship inspired by both their revolutionary politics and Mayan conceptions of the cosmos." (Kissick)



Wm Harrison Riley // 'A Visitor from Luna'

(August 1901)

Short published in Freedom. The lunar visitor is disappointed with Earth, and moves on.
 
"I have heard of a country in which the people live naked and unashamed; where there is no hypocrisy, no usurer, no spirit-dealer, no prison, and where there are no locks or bolts; a country in which all men and women do their share of the little work that is needed, where there is no war or usury and all work and share equitably. I am going to that country, and I hope I may be permitted to live and die there."



Obviously written under the influence of Samuel Butler, the story has a very considerable charm of its own.



Adam Roberts // Salt (2000); Gradisil (2006); New Model Army (2010)

(2010)

Salt features two planetary colonist communities in ideological conflict, one of which is explicitly anarchistic in flavour. An intelligent and well-written debut novel. The author himself—a British academic and historian of sf—says:
 
"I think I'm on safer ground when I mention the political and ideological issues that the book rehearses; questions of political affiliation, of the negotiations between cultural and personal difference, of the relationship to (patriarchal) authority and of the limits of control. That the book is also a self-conscious exercise in intertextuality is, I hope, equally clear: it draws on Herbert's Dune and on Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed as well as Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister and the poetry of Robert Browning. I hope, in saying this, that I am only saying what is obvious from the novel itself. It remains the bleakest of my books, but I continue to find an austere and strangely uplifting beauty in certain aspects of bleakness, so I say this with no suggestion of apology." (author's website)



Gradisil tells of three generations of a family central to the history of the Uplands, a low Earth orbit settlement predominantly of the super-rich, from 2059 to 2131. While initially the Uplands is an anarchy of sorts, it soon becomes a quasi-republic. Farah Mendlesohn, in Callow & McFarlane (see bibliography), notes that the first part "is a not untypical tale of libertarian colonialism in which rather a lot of incorrect assumptions about 'how the west was won' are transported into space," which "is a very twentieth-century interpretation of how western expansion, or even the founding of America, worked." "The belief that colonial (and other expansionist) enterprises are the actions of individuals resisting the state, is a form of institutionalized sociopathy that has infected the American body politic and the genre of science fiction." She also observes, in an endnote, that "One political issue I have with most SF, and Roberts's in particular, is that historically communalist societies are better at surviving." Gradisil is included in the list of 'Stories that explore anarchist societies' in Killjoy's Mythmakers and Lawbreakers.
 
New Model Army posits a kind of mercenary army, in a fracturing near-future UK, that dispenses with feudal hierarchy through moment to moment decision-making by wiki: what is put forward as 'real democracy'. The work is discussed at length by Thomas Wellman, in Callow & McFarlane, who concludes that it "invites us to call two visions of modern Europe into question that have become institutionalized in real-life: the narrative of the peaceful (and ever closer) union, and the war-inducing concept of the nation-state", and that it is "far from a simple thought experiment conducted in guerrilla warfare, but a highly relevant and sceptical treatment of two fundamental principles of modernity." In the same collection of critical essays, a Borgesian piece by Paul Graham Raven draws out explicitly the anarchism of the novel, comparing it, as a utopia, to Le Guin's The Dispossessed; he notes that the peer-to-peer capabilities of the wiki "allow individuals to circumvent state-dominated media and organize effective collective action against the state, and—possibly, as Roberts's slingshot ending implies—transcend to a higher order of collectivity: the paradoxical post-geographical state, an atomised collective to whom borders are mere fictions, false maps superimposed upon the one, true, free territory." Andrew M. Butler's essay, immediately following, also notes "the anarchistic, leaderless structure" of the eponymous NMA.


Jack Robinson

(1967)

Among Jack Robinson's many articles for Freedom and Anarchy are a couple of minor items: 'The Noble Experiment' (Anarchy 1967) is a satirical tale of the prohibition of the smoking of tobacco in 1993–4; 'After 1984—What?' (Freedom, May 1970, as by Jack Spratt) is a 200-word short-short on the replacement of voting by opinion polls and the computerisation of parliament. Both are very slight.


Kim Stanley Robinson // 'The Lucky Strike' (1984); Three Californias trilogy: The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast (1988), and Pacific Edge (1990); Mars trilogy: Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), Blue Mars (1996); Antarctica (1997); The Martians (1999); The Years of Rice and Salt (2002); Capital Code trilogy: Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), Sixty Days and Counting (2007); Galileo's Dream (2009); 2312 (2012); Aurora (2015); New York 2140 (2017); Red Moon (2018); The Ministry for the Future (2020)

(2020)

From an on-line interview:



"Faliol: Are you a libertarian anarchist?
KSRobinson: No, I am a green socialist, roughly. A utopian. I don't like libertarianism as I understand it because it seems to keep private property, police, and other aspects of the current system, indeed it seems to keep capitalism.
Faliol: I myself agree with Chomsky's ideas.
KSRobinson: I like Chomsky's writing very much. He should be more represented in mainstream American press; it's a sign of how bad they are that he isn't. But I still don't like libertarianism. Nor anarchism either, though at least that one has a nice idea at its heart.
Faliol: Have you read Bakunin?
KSRobinson: Yes, I have read Bakunin, maitre'd of anarchism."     (Dan Clore)



Robinson is sufficiently sympathetic to anarchism, however, to have written the introduction to Killjoy's 2009 Mythmakers & Lawbreakers. Anarchist writers on fiction. Here he describes himself as "a leftist, interested in opposing capitalism and to changing it to something more just and sustainable", who has "once or twice tried to depict societies with anarchist aspects or roots". He spoke on 'The Politics of Science' at the 2010 Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, and again on 'Science and Capitalism' at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair in 2013.



In a 2018 interview Robinson again gave his views on anarchism:



"KSR I’m a statist; I don’t believe anarchism is a way to get through the next couple of centuries. I thoroughly approve of anarchism’s ultimate goal of the total horizontalisation of power but, to me, anarchism is a horizon that is centuries out.



"HF At least one literary critic has coupled your name with Murray Bookchin.



"KSR I’ve read Bookchin and I admire his work. I’m thinking more of anarchisms that conflate capitalism and the state. I separate them, just as I separate capitalism and science. I’m also thinking of the anti-humanism of certain anarchisms, those that turn into libertarianism very easily in an ugly way, those that say it doesn’t matter if six billion people die because then we’d have a sustainable number. What’s good in anarchism is the idea of a complete horizontalisation of power and prosperity. It’s a great long-term horizon to aim for. It’s like utopia itself. I’m a utopian, but I wouldn’t say I’m an anarchist because I don’t think a state monopoly on violence is a bad thing at this point in history. It’s better than the alternatives, better than chaos, better than the freedom to burn as much carbon as I want. I think that carbon use should be legislated and controlled and priced, and anarchy doesn’t provide a way of doing that."



'Lucky Strike' is included in Zeke Teflon's Favorite Anarchist Science Fiction Novels, where it is described as "A fine if short parallel-universes novella on the morality of 'just following orders.'" It's also included in the Think Galactic reading list. The slim PM Press edition includes an additional essay on historical determinism and alternate histories, and a useful interview with the author by Terry Bisson; this edition was "very highly recommended" in Teflon's review.



The Three Californias trilogy depicts three different futures for Orange County; for B.A. Mahrab "This series delves into the different types of future scenarios we may very well face as a species—each one completely within mankind’s ability to create now, and none of which fall outside the realm of plausible possibilities." The Gold Coast is described as an "exemplary critical dystopia" in Seyferth's 'Anarchism and Utopia'. See also Canavan, Klarr, and Vu, and Heer.



The Mars trilogy represents "Basically an anarchist revolution & construction of society" (posting to anarchysf). For Lewis Call the trilogy is "Robinson's vision of an anarchistic Mars"; Robinson's gift economy is "the most interesting anarchistic element of Robinson's meticulously detailed Martian society", "the articulation of a way of thinking about politics and economics which is radically new, and yet also profoundly old." (Call, 2002; see also Huston's 'Murray Bookchin on Mars'.) James Gifford, in The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism [p581], notes that "While Robinson has predominantly aligned himself with Marxist social critiques, he has remained open to anarchist paradigms, and he addresses antiauthoritarian values extensively in his Mars Trilogy." The Martians is a collection of stories and poems closely linked to the trilogy. Two of the pieces included are of particular interest: 'The Constitution of Mars', and 'Some Worknotes and Commentary on the Constitution'. The constitution reworks elements of the US, Australian, and Swiss constitutions in a pretty systematic way, in which the most interesting innovation is that the duma (roughly equivalent to the US House of Representatives) is selected by a process of sortition rather than election.



Antarctica was recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction' at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009. Set in Antarctica in the near future, environmentalism and sustainable living are central, with much interest shown in the formation of cooperative and anarchic social systems. From the same mould as the Mars trilogy, it has been nicknamed 'White Mars'. A vivid and unforgettable paean to the cold wilderness of the continent.



According to one reviewer, Robinson's alternate history The Years of Rice and Salt includes a discussion of anarchist ideas of a post-scarcity economy. There's also some discussion on this novel in an online

conversation
between Kevin Carson and Roderick Long (starts at 1:13:50).



For Maeve66, writing for the US Solidarity, Robinson's Capital Code trilogy, on the theme of climate change, is "well worth reading, for the science, and the potentials and limitations on electoral reform as a solution to anthropogenic climate change." B.A. Mahrab sees this trilogy, among other Robinson works, as central to the developing sub-genre of solarpunk.



Galileo's Dream is an exceptional blend of sf and historical fiction/biography, and one of Robinson's best works. Teflon describes it as "A well executed time-travel novel involving Galileo
and his conflict with the Catholic Church and the Inquisition." Elsewhere he particularly recommends this work and Aurora, while noting that neither is related to anarchism.



The marvellous 2312 is included in the Think Galactic reading list, and viewed as "anarchist-themed-sci-fi" by David Agranoff.



Aurora is a generation starship novel with a powerful message from the author, namely that "Earth is the only home, and fixing our relationship with it is the only possible solution to the anthropogenic mass extinction event that we are in the process of starting." [Robinson, interviewed by Dave Haeselin]; escaping Earth's problems in this way he sees as an "impossible transcendence". Teflon's response, however, was at best lukewarm: "worth reading", and "Recommended (barely) for its political and ecological points."



New York 2140 is set in a water-logged New York post-climate change. Perhaps not his strongest work, but "Unfettered capitalism and the practices that led to the 2008 economic meltdown are squarely in Robinson’s crosshairs in New York 2140, where the future is no less unscrupulous than the present" [Singularity Hub]. Facebook's Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, and Solarpunk Anarchists, drew attention to its publication. Infoshop has re-posted Roderick Long's C4SS review, which is less enthusiastic: "I highly recommend New York 2140 as a beautifully written, richly allusive, perpetually engaging and provocative novel. But I cannot recommend it as a lens through which to view the causes and likely cures of the social ills that beset us."



Red Moon features a moon mainly colonised by China, with a lot of discussion of political philosophy and the meaning of democracy. The political context is intentionally opaque, and Robinson has explicitly said he sees this as a realistic counterweight to the fantasy revolution of Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. A review in New Socialist highlights one scene set in 'the free crater', which features a community organised as a "documented anarchy", its activities and decisions recorded to a blockchain distributed ledger. The novel's publication was the occasion of an intelligent and informative interview in the Chicago Review of Books.
Sethness
, in The Commoner, has a couple of paragraphs on Red Moon.



The Ministry for the Future is an outstanding novel on the theme of the climate emergency, set in the near future, and projecting the possible course of how it may be overcome. Unusually, I think this is the only science fiction novel to have had two distinct reviews published by the Institute for Anarchist Studies, both in June 2021. George Katsiaficas expresses disappointment, saying :



"I wish I could be more positive. Robinson’s work certainly has good buzz and occasional spark. He is a revered figure for many of my friends. My disappointment is the same problem I have with our society: technological overdevelopment has not been accompanied by deep thinking about our social reality. Robinson’s failure to give his characters any real depth can be correlated with his inability to comprehend the need for social revolution, for the transformation of everyday life, not simply legislation. [ . . . ] Robinson may well be “one of the most important political writers working in America today,” but it should also be said that the universe of discourse in this book stifles the expression of utopian possibilities. When even one of our most speculative fiction writers fails to imagine a world already anticipated in the praxis of tens of millions of people, our road ahead will surely be long and winding. So long as we continue to “progress” (and regress!) with technology but do not confront the social roots of its brutal applications, we will produce an abysmal fate for all forms of life."



Javier Sethness Castro, on the other hand, writes much more positively:



"The Ministry for the Future continues Robinson’s critically visionary, optimistic, and reconstructive speculative fiction. In narrative form, he explains why we must change the system, and presents us with a panoply of means—revolutionary and reformist alike. He emphasizes the need for a 'Plan B' to be developed ahead of time, to sustain the revolution, once it breaks out [ . . . ]. The Ministry for the Future depicts a dynamically utopian story of estrangement, self-discovery, and creative struggle to ensure a better future. [ . . . ] At its best, Ministry conveys what could be."



The Annares Project has a very relevant interview with Robinson from February 2021, on YouTube.



Kim Stanley Robinson, ed. // Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias

(1994)

Anthology of 'notable short works of utopian fiction and dystopian fiction, incorporating elements of primitivism and of eco-anarchism.' (Wikipedia)
 
Interesting and readable, and unusual for including a worthwhile 5-page bibliography—but not especially anarchist.


Paul Verhoeven // RoboCop

(1987)

Set in a near-future crime-ridden Detroit, the film concerns a police officer who is shot dead by a criminal gang but subsequently revived by a megacorporation as a superhuman cyborg law enforcer.



Identified by one contributor to the Anarchism SubReddit as a film advocating anti-capitalism. Described in Red Planets as a "violent, anti-corporate satire."



Richard Porton gives a nod to this film in the second edition of Film and the Anarchist Imagination, saying of it that "Verhoeven's speculative fiction proved eerily prophetic inasmuch as it predicts the hyper-militarization of the police and its collusion with the corporate sector."



For Javier Sethness this film and Sleep Dealer "critique borders, inequality, and labor in a manner consistent with anarchist principles, calling to mind the ongoing importance of class struggle, humanism, cross-border organizing, and migrant solidarity."


Jim Sharman // The Rocky Horror Picture Show

(1975)

Cult transgressive musical affectionately referencing classic SF and horror movies for comic effect.
 
Red Planets says this film "Unlocks the queerness of popular SF."
 
One comment on the Libertarian Film Festival blog says "Now… the Rocky Horror Picture Show… THAT's libertarian! (j/k… or am I?)"


Gareth Edwards // Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

(2016)

Set immediately before the original film, Rogue One follows a group of rebels on a mission to steal the plans for the Death Star from the Empire's military Keep.
 
Notable in the contemporary world for apparently upsetting the so-called 'alt-right', sensitive to any suggestion of a parallel between the evil Empire and the 2017 US political scene. [Romano, Preza] As much as anything this is because of the ethnic diversity of the cast: Facebook's Solarpunk Anarchists commented "More of this in our speculative fiction please." But even in this latest incarnation, it appears the universe remains overwhelmingly male.


Norman Jewison // Rollerball

(1975)

In a megacorporate future the masses are distracted by a brutal gladiatorial sport played on rollerskates and motorbikes, designed to show up the futility of individual effort, so keeping the proles in their place. A superstar of the sport breaks the game by winning against the odds, even when the game has been fixed to end his career.
 
Included in the Red Planets filmography.
 
Libertarian Utopias and Dystopias describes the film as a good example of how Hollywood "finds the idea of corporations more powerful than government to be quite scary."
 


Joel Rosenberg

(--)

From a 1985 convention report online:
 
"Rosenberg said he and Mike McGarry are writing a novel, in which all the Earth's libertarians are dumped on an alien planet, and the history of the planet followed for the next 150 years. He described it as a thought experiment—but then couldn't resist telling us how it comes out: feudalism. Joel, if you've predetermined the conclusion (I remarked), it's not an experiment! One might also question the the wisdom of someone who knows so little about a subject writing a book about it. (Rosenberg was uncomprehending, even contemptuous of the distinction between the anarchist and the limited government libertarian. Most if not all of the Founding Fathers were libertarians in the latter sense.)"



Unless the reference is in fact to Rosenberg's Thousand Worlds sequence (1984–1990), which according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction features mercantile libertarians, but for which McGarry is not also credited, it would appear that this novel never appeared, and is now unlikely to, given Rosenberg's death in 2011.
 


Mordecai Roshwald // Level 7

(1959)

Level 7 is the deepest layer in a bomb shelter, and the novel describes the feelings of a military officer closeted there as the world disintegrates above him in nuclear holocaust.
 
For John Pilgrim this was a "horrifying picture" of the all too probable future. Later anarchist reviewers welcomed its republication, and called it "The Finest Novel yet written on Nuclear War in its aftermath". (Pilgrim 1963, Bates 1981, anon. 1983)
 


'The Xipehuz'

(1887 (most recent English translation by Brian Stableford, 2010))

Strong depiction of the violent defeat of an alien invasion. Mentioned by Nettlau in his Esbozo: rather randomly, as it appears to have little relevance to his history of utopias.


J.K. Rowling // Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix

(2003)

Included in Anders Monsen's 50 works of fiction libertarians should read; Monsen sees it as embodying well the lessons of questioning authority. It's not actually sf, but the whole Harry Potter series is recommended by Charlotte Diana in a post to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, as featuring "an increasingly libertarian message as the story progresses." Mo Moseley, reviewing for Freedom in 2013, found the anti-authoritarian beginning to the series "promising," and the series "good fun," Moseley anticipating that the anti-authoritarianism would ultimately disappear. A recent academic study has confirmed that "Despite differing perceptions of the books’ prevailing ideology, there is a consensus surrounding at least three themes. These include 1) the value of tolerance and respect for difference; 2) opposition to violence and punitiveness; and 3) the dangers of authoritarianism."


Rudy Rucker // Spacetime Donuts (1981); Software (1982); Wetware (1988); Freeware (1997); Realware (2000); Postsingular (2007); Hylozoic (2009); Surfing the Gnarl plus (2012)

(2012)

Spacetime Donuts is a dystopian story involving the psychological liberation of a supercomputer leading to the breakdown of authoritarian society. Rucker is on record as saying "What I wanted to do with that book was to make a strong anarchist statement" (Vernon: 25). There is a decent amount of hip talk of smashing the government, and the book is certainly good anarchic entertainment, but the whole is not very profound, and not as strong as Rucker evidently intended.



In Software the main character, who gave robots free will, leading to their rebellion and creation of an anarchist society on the moon, is offered immortality by them, in the form of a replication of his software; he proves to be dependent on the computer for the use of his new hardware. The novel refreshingly overturns the Asimov priorities, and the robot anarchy is attractive, but it's worrying that the author suggests that robots with free will might evolve towards power-seeking. Wetware, Freeware, and Realware have the same backdrop, and the tetralogy is included in Zeke Teflon's Favorite Anarchist Science Fiction Novels.



According to the author, Postsingular and Hylozoic have some anarchist elements.



Surfing the Gnarl plus is a short collection of two stories, an essay, an interview, and a bibliography. Reviewed by Cory Doctorow on boingboing.



Rudy Rucker, Terry Bisson and John Shirley were on a panel on Anarchism and Science Fiction at the March 2012 San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair, which is available as a podcast on Rucker's website.
 


Rudy Rucker, Peter Lambourn Wilson, & Robert Anton Wilson, eds // Semiotext(e) SF

(1985)

The Semiotext(e) anthology was reviewed in the New Anarchist Review in July 1990. Rich Dana, in 2014, described this "wonderful book" as "perhaps the quintessential Anarcho-SF anthology".


Joanna Russ // 'When It Changed' (1972); The Female Man (1975); The Two of Them (1978)

(1978)

'When it Changed' is included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 
The Female Man depicts three parallel versions of the female experience and what it might be, from a radical feminist stance. Whileaway, which is apparently Russ's utopia, is decentralised, and perhaps without government as such, but the verdict of the Open Road critics was that "The book's feminism is apparently not consistent with an anti-authoritarian structure" (13).
  
The Two of Them was a recommendation made during the panel discussion at the 2009 Seattle Anarchist Bookfair.


Bertrand Russell // 'Zahatopolk'; 'Faith and Mountains'; 'The Infra-redioscope' (all published in The Collected Stories of Bertrand Russell)

(1972)

Russell wrote sympathetically of anarchism in his Roads to Freedom (1918), was familiar with its theorists, knew personally Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, worked alongside anarchists in various campaigns, and for decades exercised a libertarian and liberating influence on his contemporaries. Among his less earnest activities was the writing of a small body of fiction, some of which is SF or near-sf. These three stories have some (though only slight) interest to anarchists.


Eric Frank Russell // 'Late Night Final' (1948); Wasp (1957); The Great Explosion (1962)

(1962)

". . . Russell was motivated by a strong distrust of authority of all kinds, and his own political philosophy was close to anarchism." (James: 155) The Great Explosion incorporates the novella '. . . And Then There Were None' (1948). The novel follows a Terran re-colonising expedition as it encounters various societies, descended from criminals, health faddists, pacifists, etc. The concluding novella describes the encounter with a world of Gands, highly anti-authoritarian followers of Gandhi; virtually the entire expeditionary force deserts to them. It is probably fair to say that 'And Then There Were None' was the nearest SF work to an anarchist utopia prior to Le Guin's The Dispossessed, and was praised as such in the pages of Freedom and Anarchy at the time, starting with a full-length review at the hands of Arthur Uloth in 1954, under the headline "An Anarchist Utopia". He said that "Like William Morris's News from Nowhere it makes an anarchist society not only attractive, but also eminently practical"; this is because "The inhabitants of this libertarian planet are not saints, they are ordinary people, and their system works." (Uloth 1954) John Pilgrim in 1963 speculated on "just how much influence this much anthologised tale has had in forming the political opinions of the fallout generation. " (Pilgrim 1960, 1963; Eagle 1969). NB the work itself never uses the 'A' word.
 
"According to James J. Martin's Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827–1908, the society of the gands is very similar to that advocated by American anarcho-individualists such as Josiah Warren. Highly recommended." (Dan Clore) The book tied for the 1985 Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award.
 
In 'Late Night Final', "As the crew of an invading spaceship learn to communicate with the anarcho-communist natives, they defect one by one until no one but the captain is left onboard. Recommended." (Dan Clore)
 
Wasp features a one-man sabotage campaign against the Sirian Empire. It went down well at the time, but by 1986 was perceived as entertaining, but quaint and sexist. (Uloth 1969, DP 1986).
 


Mary Doria Russell // The Sparrow

(1996)

Included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 


Geoff Ryman // Air (or Have Not Have)

(2004)

Included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 


'Han Ryner' (Jacques Élie Henri Ambroise Ner) // 'The Ape-Man' (first published as 'L'Homme-Singe', 1894); 'The Revolt of the Machines' (first published as 'La Révolte des machines', 1896); The Human Ant (first published as L'Homme-fourmi, 1901); The Pacifists (first published as Les Pacifiques, 1914); The Superhumans, a Prophetic Novel (first published as Les Surhommes, roman prophétique, 1929) [all first publications in French]

(1929)

The Human Ant—written by a French individualist-anarchist—describes the experiences of a man who is magically transformed into an ant, for a year; included in the CIRA catalogue, and referenced at Cohn: 165. It's also the title of a collected translation by Brian Stableford which includes this novel, as well as The Pacifists and a few short tales.



The Pacifists is "the tale of an anti-civilization, pacifist anarchist utopia" (Killjoy, 2009) on an uncharted island. See Granier (in French). Referenced in the 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary. Also see Cohn: 180-1.



Both novels are collected in Brian Stableford's 2014 translation, The Human Ant and Other Stories.



The Superhumans, 'The Ape-Man', and 'The Revolt of the Machines' are all collected in Stableford's 2011 translation, The Superhumans and Other Stories. All are referenced in Cohn. The longest, and most imaginative, is the title story but, as Stableford charitably says in his introduction, "its very extravagance gives it a surreal aspect that insulates the reader from its more discomfiting arguments".
 
 


s

Sofia Samatar // A Stranger in Olondria

(2013)

Included on the Think Galactic reading list. Also included in a few lists linked to from relevant Facebook groups. But, though a good read, this is in no way describable as science fiction.
 


Sandy Sandfort, Scott Bieser, and Lee Oaks // Escape from Terra

(2008/2012)

Web comic, now in a three-volume printed version, which "examines a market anarchy based on Ceres and its interaction with the aggressive statist society on Terra" [Wikipedia, on anarcho-capitalism].


Haile Gerima // Sankofa

(1993)

An African-American model on a photo-shoot in Ghana visits the Cape Coast slave castle, where traditional drumming transports her back, as it were in a trance, to the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery.
 
Included in Bould's Red Planets filmography, but it's a bit of a stretch to see this as sf.
 


Hans Stefan Santesson // Crime Prevention in the 30th Century

(1969)

This very poor thematic anthology receives a mention in John Brent's 1975 Freedom review of McCaffrey's To Ride Pegasus.
 


José Saramago // Blindness (1995); Seeing (2004)

(2004)

In Blindness everyone suddenly and inexplicably goes blind, and their world rapidly becomes a foul and smelly place where everyone simply fends for themselves as best they can. In a Guardian interview copied to the anarchysf mailing list in 2004 Ursula Le Guin, asked to recommend modern authors who best represent the spirit of the Tao, singled out Saramago for mention: "I think part of what appeals to me so much in the novels of José Saramago is that his people go along with events without trying to "master" them—they do by not doing. The woman who is the central character of Blindness is truly a great hero to me."
 
Seeing is included in Killjoy's list of stories that explore anarchist societies (in Mythmakers & Lawbreakers). It explores the consequences of an election in which the majority cast blank votes. Not really sf, though.
 
Although according to SFE Saramago self-identified as a "libertarian communist", he joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and remained a member until his death.
 


Pamela Sargent, ed. // Women of Wonder. Science-fiction Stories by Women about Women

(1974)

Sargent's important thematic anthology was referred to by Curtoni as "the first women's (and feminist) anthology of sf" (Curtoni 1978: 26); but he obviously knew the work only by repute, since he attributed it to Joanna Russ. Sargent's long and interesting introduction was quoted from in Lessa, Takver & Alyx's 1978 Open Road article (8).


Richard Henry Savage // The Anarchist. A Story of Today

(1894)

Although John Clute, in SFE, describes this work as of sf interest, it really isn't. There's nothing science fictional about it, beyond it being set in a future very close indeed to 1894: Victoria is still on the British throne, and in the author's view "the three greatest men of the day" are Gladstone, Bismarck, and Pope Leo XIII.



The work is primarily a lurid romance, with the usual cardboard cut-out anarchists.


Jang Joon-hwan // Save the Green Planet (지구를 지켜라!)

(2003)

Stylish and violent comedy/science fiction/horror/thriller, in which a psychotic sociopath kidnaps a pharmaceutical company executive in his lone defence of Earth against aliens from Andromeda in whom nobody believes but himself, yet in the end the industrialist does indeed turn out to be the Andromedan king. If it's not a cult movie, it ought to be.
 
"Capitalists are aliens!", as Bould's Red Planets filmography notes laconically.
 


John Scalzi // Fuzzy Nation (2011); Redshirts (2012)

(2012)

Fuzzy Nation is a re-envisioning of H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy. A fine comic SF novel, highly recommended by Zeke Teflon at the See Sharp Press blog.



Teflon included Redshirts in the same category, noting that "since Sheckley, Scalzi is unquestionably the best comic sci-fi writer".


John Scalzi, ed. // METAtropolis

(2009)

Included in Killjoy's list of stories that explore anarchist societies. See also Killjoy's review at The Anvil, which sees this as a work of 'outsider anarchism'; and a response by Paul Raven at futurismic.


Richard Linklater // A Scanner Darkly

(2006)

Fine film version of the Philip K. Dick novel, which was in turn one of his finest.
 
Categorised as subversive by Glenn, in the BASTARD Chronicles, who is not alone in thinking that this is "the only film that faithfully adapted a story by him" [Dick]. "It questions the War on Drugs, solipsism, personal relationships between police and criminals. It asks if it is possible to spend your life fighting something and become it."


David Cronenberg // Scanners

(1981)

Mutant telepaths vying for power.
 
Categorised as subversive by Glenn, in the BASTARD Chronicles, who says "the real horror is the mega corporations controlling the world, ala James Bond, Illuminati stuff . . . entertainment."
 


Alex Rivera // Sleep Dealer

(2008)

Interesting vision of resistance in a Mexico still exploited by the United States, but by means of remote robotic control without immigration from the south.



Categorised as a notable contribution to Latinxfuturism, it has been favourably referenced on anarchist Facebook pages. For Javier Sethness this film and RoboCop "critique borders, inequality,
and labor in a manner consistent with anarchist principles, calling to mind the ongoing importance of class struggle, humanism, cross-border organizing, and migrant solidarity."


Nat Schachner // 'The Shining One'

(1976)

A future war Angel of Mons story, in which war is vetoed by means of electronic gimmickry. A minor character, Valverde, declares himself "An anarchist—an individualist! I wish for no State to regiment me, to tell me what to do." (Roger Elwood, ed.: Visions of Tomorrow, 1976, Pocket Books pb edn 284)
 


Paul Scheerbart // Die große Revolution (The Great Revolution, A Lunar Novel (not yet translated into English)

(1902)

Scheerbart is said to have been inclined towards an individualistic anarchism under the influence of the philosopher Max Stirner (Rottensteiner). This 'lunar novel' is included in Nettlau's Esbozo.


J. Neil Schulman // Alongside Night (1979); The Rainbow Cadenza (1983); The Fractal Man (2018)

(1983)

Alongside Night "features an agorist-anarchist underground that eventually supplants the state." (posting to anarchysf). Intentionally promoting the agorism of Samuel Edward Konkin III, it won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1989.



The Rainbow Cadenza won the 1984 Prometheus Award. Martin Moore Wooster, at

Libertarians in Space
, described it as "a subtle and underrated dystopia that deserves to be better known."



The Fractal Man works hard at being funny, but is little more than an extended self-indulgent in-joke for agorists, in which multiple intersecting timelines incorporate sundry versions of Konkin himself, not to mention alternate versions of L. Neil Smith, Victor Koman, and Brad Linaweaver, and of course Schulman himself. Reviewed on the Libertarian Futurist Society blog.


Joss Whedon // Serenity

(2005)

Space Western; a repackaging of what had been intended as the second series of TV's Firefly.
 
Formerly listed as libertarian science fiction at Examiner.com [dead link]. Winner of a Special Prometheus Award in 2006.



Rocha and Rocha's Joss Whedon, Anarchist has a few pages on the film considering the extent to which its principal characters are libertarian or "anarcho-socialist."


Thomas Sewell // Sharper Security

(2012)

Anarcho-capitalist novel set in the relatively near future, featuring an Arizona of competing sovereign security companies. Decidedly subliterary.


Juan Serrano y Oteyza // 'Pensativo' ('Thinkable', not yet translated into English)

(1885)

The author was a prominent anarchist in 19th century Spain. 'Pensativo' is a utopian novella, positing a possible Proudhonian mutualist society. Referenced in Nettlau's Esbozo and the 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary.


Brian Clement // The Seventh Shadow

(2009)

Two-minute short, a spoof trailer for a nonexistent film about beings from another dimension using cults to enable their enslavement of humanity; one character in the film is a Spanish anarchist. (HPLfilmfestival)
 


George Bernard Shaw // Back to Methuselah

(1921)

Shaw was familiar with anarchist literature—references to Godwin, Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Tucker, and Tolstoy abound in his work; among these he was on fairly close personal terms with Kropotkin and Tucker; and in the 1880s he was familiar with British anarchists such as Charlotte Wilson, Henry Seymour and Joseph Lane.
 
Several times he contributed articles to anarchist publications: 'What's in a Name? (How an Anarchist Might Put It)' in 1885 to The Anarchist, Britain's first anarchist paper; 'Strikes. (From the State Socialist Point of View)' in 1890 to Freedom; 'The Quintessence of Ibsenism' in 1891 to the American Liberty and 'Why I Am a Social-Democrat' in 1894 to the British Liberty.
 
The first of these appeared to be pro-anarchist, and was later published by anarchists as 'Anarchism versus State Socialism'; Shaw always subsequently claimed that the views he had described were not his own. By 1888 he was firmly entrenched in his own brand of Fabianism—he wrote in a letter that "I am no anarchist: I am a practical politician" (Shaw 1965: 184); and in the same year he gave a lecture at the Communist Club on 'Anarchism refuted' (Amalric 1977). In 1891 he published 'The Impossibilities of Anarchism', his definitive denunciation; in this work he found individualist anarchism unacceptable because it failed to tackle the problem of inequitable distribution, and communist anarchism also unacceptable since it failed to offer an incentive to labour without coercion. His opinions of anarchism received no later substantial revision.
 
Back to Methuselah is an episodic dream of human evolution from Genesis to the 32nd millennium; humanity by 31920 had outgrown corporeal life and exists on a spiritual plane only. It has been suggested that some of the Lamarckian ideas used here by Shaw may have been suggested by Kropotkin, who had published a number of articles on the inheritance of acquired characteristics in The Nineteenth Century and After in 1910 (Hulse). Woodcock considered that the theme Shaw chose for development in this play was Godwinian (Woodcock 1962: 86).


Nisi Shawl // Filter House (2008); Everfair (2016); Talk Like a Man plus (2020)

(2020)

Filter House was recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction' at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009, where Shawl herself was a panellist. See her own 'Armchair anarchy list'. Filter House is included in a number of interesting reading lists: Think Galactic, Paul, Dukan, and Shawl's own Crash Course.



Talk Like a Man plus is another of the excellent PM Press Outspoken Authors series. The book was reviewed at some length by Rich Dana in the Spring 2020 Fifth Estate. For Dana, Shawl is "one of the genre's most adventurous talents", and this collection "is an excellent introduction to Nisi Shawl as a writer of speculative fiction as well as a person who thinks deeply about social issues."



Everfair is also referenced in Dana's review. He says "An alternative history of the 'Belgian' Congo which the author describes as 'AfroRetroFuturist,'; Everfair combines the aesthetics of Afrofuturism with the stylistic approach of the Steampunk science fiction sub-genre." In my view it's a brilliant idea for a novel, but only imperfectly realised. 


Robert Shea

(--)

Co-author, with Robert Anton Wilson, of the Illuminatus trilogy (see under Wilson and Shea). A member of the Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, for several years Shea edited an anarchist zine, No Governor.
 


Robert Sheckley // 'The Seventh Victim' (1953); 'Skulking Permit' (1954) ; 'A Ticket to Tranai' (1955); Untouched by Human Hands (1955); 'Pilgrimage to Earth' (1956); 'The Prize of Peril' (1958); 'The People Trap' (1968); 'The Resurrection Machine' (1989); 'Simul City' (1990)

(1990)

'The Seventh Victim' is among those cited in Curtoni's bibliography. It concerns a society in which murder has been institutionalised as, paradoxically, a means of reducing crime. The 1966 novelisation (The Tenth Victim), instanced by Curtoni, is distinctly inferior.
 
In 'Skulking Permit' a backwater planet is re-contacted by Imperial Earth; the inhabitants attempt to revive old Earth customs—crime, police, etc.—but fail by misunderstanding the (lack of) Point Of It All; Earth abandons the attempt to conscript colonists. It is a splendid anarchic story: the colonists have lived without authority so long that there's manifestly no need for it.
 
'A Ticket to Tranai' features an exotic utopia in a remote corner of the galaxy; an Earth visitor is suitably freaked out. Society on Tranai is minimal-statist or anarcho-capitalist, though in distinctive ways: government is restricted to minor matters like care of the aged and beautifying the landscape, and is financed by tax collectors who are literally robbers in black silk masks; government officials wear explosive badges which will be detonated on a majority vote in favour of assassination. Though the story has attractive elements, it is vitiated by sexism—married women are kept in a stasis-field purdah, a state which is subject to only token criticism.
 
Untouched by Human Hands—Sheckley's first short-story collection—is listed in Curtoni's bibliography. As well as 'The Seventh Victim', 'Keep Your Shape' is noteworthy as a nice parable of liberation and the throwing off of formalist shackles. In general, it's a good collection.
 
'Pilgrimage to Earth' is referred to in Curtoni's article. Love is purveyed to tourists as a commodity, which not surprisingly proves disillusioning.
 
"The television quiz becomes the occasion for the release of that cruelty which is so functional to the system"—such is Curtoni's succinct description of 'The Prize of Peril'.
 
In 'The People Trap' possession of land becomes the reward of successful competition in a ritual race. The bandit leader Steinmetz declares, with Sheckley's tongue in his cheek, that "Rules is rules, even in an anarchy."
 
The two later stories include Bakunin as a character. Both are included in Killjoy,'s list of stories that feature sympathetic anarchist characters. 'The Resurrection Machine' features the resurrection of simulacra of Bakunin and Cicero; the virtual Bakunin is mistreated by one of the experimenters, whose colleague retaliates by 'freeing' him within the computer network. The story is part of the themed Time Gate anthology, edited by Robert Silverberg with Bill Fawcett, and Bakunin reappears later in the volume in Pat Murphy's 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation.' 'Simul City' appears in the sequel volume Time Gate, Vol. 2, Dangerous Interfaces, where Bakunin plays a lesser role; in other stories in this volume, by Anne McCaffrey ('Pedigreed Stallion') and Karen Haber ('Simbody to Love') Bakunin has little more than a walk-on role; McCaffrey's story must be unique in including an encounter between Bakunin and Margaret Thatcher . . . .


Mary Shelley // Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, rev. 1831); The Last Man (1826)

(1826)

In one respect Mary Shelley is the prime example of association between SF and anarchism: for the mother of science fiction was daughter to the father of anarchism, William Godwin, and wife to the Godwinian Percy Bysshe Shelley. Critical opinions differ, however, as to how much Godwin's philosophy influenced her works, or for that matter P.B. Shelley's own brand of Godwinism. Though the influence on her upbringing must have been considerable, she chose to keep her distance from radicalism. As she wrote in her journal, "I believe we are sent here to educate ourselves, and that self-denial, and disappointment, and self-control, are a part of our education; that it is not by taking away all restraining law that our improvement is to be achieved; and, though many things need great amendment, I can by no means go so far as my friends would have me." (quoted in Spark 1952: 5) It seems likely that this reflects the strongly feminist influence of Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.



Frankenstein, now widely regarded as the first work of modern science fiction, is too well-known to need description here. On its appearance it bore a dedication to Godwin; and it's noteworthy that Shelley had been re-reading her father's great work Political Justice in 1817, whilst writing Frankenstein: one entry in her journal (13 April 1817) actually reads "Correct Frankenstein; read Political Justice" (Shelley 1947: 78). Godwin read the proofs of Frankenstein in October 1817, and Fiona Sampson suggests that, as Shelley recorded making alterations to the novel directly after her father's departure, the alterations may have reflected his discussions with her (Sampson 2018: 157). Godwin subsequently praised the work in his letters to his daughter. On 15 November 1822 he described the novel as "a fine thing; it was compressed, muscular, and firm; nothing relaxed and weak; no proud flesh." (Marshall 1889: II.52) And by 14 February 1823 he could write that "Frankenstein is universally known, and though it can never be a book for vulgar reading, is everywhere respected." (ibid.: II.68). He himself oversaw the production of the book's second edition in 1823, while Mary was still in Italy.



Critic John Rieder, in his 2008 Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, considered that the novel "serves the polemical function of arguing that criminality is not inherent, but rather is produced by political injustice, along lines that derive from the rationalist philosophy of Shelley's father, William Godwin's, Political Justice". More recently (2013), John Zerzan has described Frankenstein as "a classic warning about the hubris of technology's combat against nature".



Richard Gough Thomas, in his 2019 William Godwin, a Political Life, considers Frankenstein's debt to Godwin is obvious, but notes too her philosophical independence from her father: "In Godwin's novels, characters espouse moral principles that they fail to live up to; in Frankenstein, the principles themselves are open to question ( . . . )."



The Last Man, though historically important in SF as a very early post-catastrophe story, is overwhelmingly tedious, and was understandably out of print for over a century. The character of Lionel's father, as described in the novel's opening pages, has been seen as a portrait of William Godwin (Luke 1965: xii). In an 1824 letter from Godwin to the author he gave at best lukewarm opinions on the extracts she had sent him.
 


Lewis Shiner // Frontera (1984); Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988); Slam (1990)

(1990)

Frontera was one of the first cyberpunk novels, and was among those discussed by Donahoo and Etheridge in their 1992 'Lewis Shiner and the "Good" Anarchist'.
 
Characters in Deserted Cities of the Heart have been seen as "perfect anarchists, demanding no pattern or meaning but accepting what is—in fact, they are working to make their version of acceptance a reality." According to Donahoo and Etheridge, "Shiner sees anarchy as a cleansing force necessary for the destruction of decaying social structures that are no longer viable, so that a newer, more functional society can evolve."
 
Slam itself isn't actually sf. But it's hugely enjoyable, so I'm happy to include it here. The novel is explicitly influenced by Bob Black's The Abolition of Work, as acknowledged by Black. "Shiner says: 'In fact, I was at a cyberpunk conference in Leeds this summer and one of the participants gave a paper on my stuff. It was not a terribly theoretical paper; his point was that all my books involve anarchy to one degree or another. The anarchist is perceived as a positive force to reawaken a stagnant society. He found this in a great number of my works. I'll buy into that, particularly since the novel I'd already finished—Slam, which he hadn't seen—is a blatant novel about anarchy. Genre distinctions or the presence or absence of certain tropes in a work is a very minor detail compared to the other stuff.'"
 
Shiner is reluctant to self-identify as anarchist, but he is a paid-up member of the IWW, and has stated that "I look to anarchists for inspiration, for those gestures of defiance that I can use in my work" (interview in Killjoy, 2009).



John Shirley // Transmaniacon (1979); Three-Ring Psychus (1980); New Taboos plus (2013)

(2013)

The protagonist of Transmaniacon is described as "punk, anarchic, exorbitant, his mind evacuated of normal constraints, death-loving." (SFE)
 
Three-Ring Psychus is a real curiosity, with a vision of 'The Great Unweighting', in which Jung's collective unconscious asserts itself and allows people control over their own gravitation, flitting about in a surreal vision reminiscent of Magritte's Golconda. A metaphor for freedom, this 'Upping' leads to a complete revisioning of society with thousands of micro-polities; the lead character explicitly feels "an increasing kinship with the anarchist viewpoint" (Zebra edn, p150).
 
Rudy Rucker, Terry Bisson and John Shirley were on a panel on Anarchism and Science Fiction at the March 2012 San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair, which is available as a podcast on Rucker's website.
 
New Taboos plus is a short collection of a novella, two essays, an interview, and a bibliography. Luther Blissett's Medium.com review was reproduced in the online Freedom in 2017. Asked, in the interview, how he would describe his politics, Shirley said:
 
"While I can see some virtue in some selfishness, and I believe in independent thinking and constantly critiquing government, I think we still have a profound need for a well-organized, democratic, centralized government. I have a streak of socialist in me, but I believe in a free market modified by regulation; capitalism modified by, for example, socialized medicine, social safety nets. It's not a choice between government and anarchy. It's about allowing some space for the anarchic in a structured society."


David Cronenberg // Shivers

(1975)

Described in Obsolete #10, in 2017, as a "masterpiece, in which a parasite runs rampant in a luxury high-rise apartment building, creating a population of sex-crazed zombies." The reviewer rightly compares it with Ben Wheatley's 2015 High-Rise, which reflects its "bizarre excellence."
 


Nevil Shute // On the Beach

(1957)

With most of the world already dead from the nuclear holocaust, Australians await the fallout; the central characters end up taking suicide pills.
 
Referred to by a number of anarchist writers, Freedom's 1958 reviewer Arthur Uloth wrote of this famous World War III novel "After reading this book I felt a desire to lose my temper and throw things about." (Uloth 1958)


Douglas Trumbull // Silent Running

(1972)

In a future where all plant life is extinct on Earth, an astronaut/ecologist is given orders to destroy the last of Earth's greenery, kept in a geodesic dome just outside the orbit of Saturn.
 
In the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum's 2016 discussion on the best sci-fi ever committed to film, this was listed by Rich Dana. It's also the favourite film of a contributor to FB's Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist. But note the damning verdict of the SFE: "the film is morally dubious, scientifically unsound and sociologically implausible."
 


Alan Sillitoe // Travels in Nihilon

(1971)

According to Sargent (153), this is a satire on anarchism (nihilism). Actually, it's nothing at all to do with anarchism, but is rather a satirical utopia (not really sf) about a nation of self-styled nihilists. Its perverse logic can nevertheless be quite beguiling.


Robert Silverberg // 'The Songs of Summer' (1956); Hawksbill Station (1968); Dying Inside (1972)

(1972)

In The Songs of Summer a man from the present is projected into a far-future post-holocaust world, and attempts to reinstate government. The community psychically isolates him in his own fantasy. The future society is very sparse and individualistic; this and the far-future setting imply no belief on Silverberg's part in either the practicality or the desirability of anarchism.
 
Hawksbill Station is a penal colony for political dissidents from a future Syndicalist USA, located a billion years in the past. With a change of government, and the discovery of a method of sending people forward in time, it becomes possible for them to return. A couple of the dissidents were anarchists before their exile. One of these, the man who profoundly believed in individualism and the abolition of all political institutions (c. 7), has ironically been obliged to swallow his theory and acknowledge the value of team work. This individualist version of anarchism is the only one presented. Anarchists are shown in a fairly positive light in the novel, but this appears to be despite their beliefs.
 
For Zeke Teflon, Dying Inside is "a masterpiece of description and character development. It’s depressing, but it’s a masterpiece nonetheless".


Clifford D. Simak // 'Beachhead' (1951); City (1952)

(1952)

In 'Beachhead', members of a human survey party perceive as a threat the warning from aliens that they will never leave the planet; they soon learn that it was merely factual, as an unknown factor destroys all alloyed metals on the planet—which is why the aliens had not developed a technology. The humans' smug confidence in their own faith is of no avail. For John Pilgrim this was a nice example of an SF writer cutting the scientist down to size. (Pilgrim 1963)
 
According to Darren Jorgensen, writing in Bould & Miéville, eds: Red Planets (201-2), Marxist Henri Lefebvre discussed a translation of City with the situationists, prior to the events of May 1968. Jorgensen writes:
 
"There is no causal relation between situationist praxis and City, and yet the two resonate with each other. City's description of a posthuman utopia run by machines and the actions of the situationists both realise a world without work. Thus the situationists allow us to read City literally, rather than metaphorically, as a realisation of that liberated consciousness that lies beyond capitalism. In playing a part in the situationist milieu, in informing the situationist experiments for re-imagining the city, Simak's City was part of a different continuum by which to think through the relationship of revolution to SF. This is a relationship of reciprocal exchange between text and revolution, as a novel informs a revolution that, in turn, enables a reading of the novel as revolutionary possibility."


Dan Simmons // Hyperion

(1989)

This, the first volume of the Hyperion Cantos, is briefly referenced in one of the anarchySF podcasts, where it is associated with Herbert's Dune and with M. John Harrison.


B.F. Skinner // Walden Two

(1958)

Walden Two is a provocative utopia based on experimentation in behavioural engineering. It's provocative because it's presented as a eutopia, to be admired, whereas many people, and most anarchists, would regard behavioural engineering as nightmarish totalitarian control. Frazier, Skinner's mouthpiece, denies "that freedom exists at all" (Macmillan pb edn, New York, 1962: 257). In 1980 Skinner explained that
 
"If acting for the good of the group is positively reinforced, people will feel as free and worthy as possible. I am in favour of that. It is the best way to promote government by the people for the people." (Skinner 1980: 5)



Despite this apparent opinion of Skinner's that freedom itself is just a weapon in the behaviourist's armoury, Walden Two presents arguments that anarchists need to be able to answer, and should be read with this in mind.
 


John Sladek // 'Heavens Below: Fifteen Utopias'

(1975)

One of the fifteen is the one-page 'Utopia: A Financial Report', in which the four planned nations of Fascesia, Commund, Capitalia and Anarche are the subject of an experiment on the social institutions of Homo sapiens; it is successfully completed, Utopia closed, the inhabitants destroyed, and the experimenters move on to the social behaviour of armadillos. Anarche had not proved viable: it was found that "Anarchers are evidently unstable, and frequently migrate to the other three nations."
 
'Heavens Below' is an entertaining mixture: 'Utopia: A Financial Report' is too short to establish anything much, especially given the overall satirical/ironic cast of the story as a whole.


Brian Francis Slattery // Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

(2008)

Included in Killjoy's list of stories that feature sympathetic anarchist characters.


Woody Allen // Sleeper

(1973)

Escapades of a clarinet-player and health food store owner who's been revived 200 years after being cryonically frozen, to find himself in an ineptly led police state; essentially slapstick humour.
 
Jules Evans, in his piece on 'Anarchism. The individual versus the state in American New Wave cinema', notes that "Even a comic jape like Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) explores an individual desperately—and farcically—trying to resist and escape an all-powerful state … and failing. There is nowhere for him to escape to."
 
Recommended by starrychloe on Liberty.me's Good movies for libertarians and anarchists.


Steven Lisberger // Slipstream

(1989)

Bounty hunters and a runaway android, in a post-climate change world of constant high winds.
 
Included in the list of 10 Obscure Sci-Fi Films Worth Seeking Out, linked to by contributors to Facebook's Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, and Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist. Some films are obscure for a good reason . . . .
 


William M. Sloane // Stories for Tomorrow

(1954)

Referred to in Pilgrim's 1963 Anarchy article, it's a good anthology for the period.
 


Joan Sloncewski // A Door into Ocean

(1986)

It's been suggested that this novel's hidden anarchism is very much in harmony with Murray Bookchin's social ecology (Sobstyl: 128).


Clark Ashton Smith

(--)

"He says: 'One other observation: Communism, as practised in the insect world, is a poor recommendation for its possible effect on humanity. Nothing sickens me more than to watch the mechanistic activities of ants, who have certainly achieved the ultimate in regimentization and co-operation. I guess I must be an anarchist myself; and I am sure I would be strictly non-assimilable in any sort of co-operative society, and would speedily end up in a concentration camp.'" (Dan Clore)


Cordwainer Smith // Instrumentality serie

(--)

Smith's series, most recently assembled in two volumes (Norstrilia, and The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Fiction of Cordwainer Smith), is an unfinished future history, mainly featuring 'underpeople'—humans made from animal stock—in an unusual Chinese-influenced quasi-mythic narrative style. The stories are variable in quality, but some are superlative sf; nevertheless, they are basically right-wing in political orientation. Included in the Red Planets reading list.
 
M. Eagle, in Freedom, found Smith's stories "somewhat odd" . . . (Eagle 1969) This is perhaps not surprising given the author's real identity as Paul M.A. Linebarger, godson to Sun Yat-sen, close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek, and an expert on psychological warfare, known to have done undocumented work for the CIA.
 
Ursula Le Guin's essay 'Thinking about Cordwainer Smith' was reprinted in her 2004 collection The Wave in the Mind. She concludes that "The durable and mysterious power of Cordwainer Smith's stories is not a matter only of their exuberant language and brilliant invention and hallucinatory imagery; there is a deep ground to them, a moral ground, lying in his persuasive conviction of the responsibility of one being for another."


L. Neil Smith // The Probability Broach (1980); Pallas (1993); Forge of the Elders (2000)

(2000)

The Probability Broach is a Parallel Earth story of an anarcho-capitalist society trying to influence our Earth, involving a Chandlerian cop. American free-market anarchism is integral to the work, involving informed discussion of the relative merits of minarchy and anarcho-capitalism; the general message is that "A free, unregulated laissez-faire market should, and can take care of everything government claims to do, only better, cheaper, and without wrecking individual lives in the process: national defense, adjudication, pollution control, fire protection, and police . . . " (del Rey edn: 3). There are bizarre aspects to the alternate history: the list of Presidents of the North American Confederacy include Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker and Ayn Rand; the former king of the UK now has among his titles Anarch of the Commonwealth; Peter Kropotkin became a wealthy uranium miner in Antarctica (his alternate world widow is a principal character in the novel). The author seems obsessed with hardware—Lucy Kropotkin claims that "freedom always calls for a little hardware" (del Rey edn: 98); this may have something to do with Smith being an ex-police reservist, gunsmith and self-defence consultant. Other works such as Tom Paine Maru (1984) and The Gallatin Divergence (1985) are in the same series.



The three novels listed in the title above were all Prometheus Award winners.


Only Forward

(1994)
Unusual blend of sf and dreamscape, in which a city has fragmented into curiously themed neighbourhoods: one for geeks, one for office-based workaholics, one run by cats, one for individuals who believe their souls are shaped like Frisbees, and so on. Strange, but very readable.

Recommended by a poster to the old anarchysf mailing list, in 2000.

Bong Joon-ho // Snowpiercer

(2013)

Set aboard the globe-spanning Snowpiercer train which holds the last remnants of humanity after an attempt at engineering an end to climate change has reversed the warming too far and created a new ice age. The train is stratified on class lines, front to back, and the under-class tail-section passengers rebel against the privileged few at the front of the train.
 
Eoin O'Connor, writing on the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum in 2015, summed it up as "Probably the most expensive film made recently which is pretty explicitly anti-capitalist (confirmed by the film's director), concerning class struggle, environmental collapse, and the ideological manipulation of the lower orders by the ruling elite."
 
Recommended at 'Good movies for libertarians and anarchists', where for one contributor "The whole movie is one giant metaphor for the Leviathan." Also noted by Jeet Heer.


Josh Friedman and Graeme Manson // Snowpiercer

(2020, ongoing)

Ongoing series based on the 2013 film. Perhaps surprisingly, Eden Kupermintz, in a February 2021 anarchySF
podcast
, judged the series even better than the film.


Andrei Tarkovsky // Solaris

(1972)

Soviet adaptation of Stanisław Lem's novel of the same name; a meditative psychological drama mostly taking place aboard a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. The scientific mission has stalled because the three scientists of the crew have succumbed to separate emotional crises. A psychologist travels to the space station to evaluate the situation only to encounter the same mysterious phenomena as the others.
 
With Stalker, categorised by Glenn in his essay 'Film as Subversion', in the 2015 BASTARD Chronicles, as subversive, but "almost unwatchable for an American audience." "Both force the viewer to examine their own desires and interpersonal relationships."
 
Two contributors to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum include this film among their shortlists of the best SF ever committed to film. "Super good and surrealist", but on the slow side, was the opinion of a poster to the FB Anarchists and Science Fiction page in 2016.


Steven Soderbergh // Solaris

(2002)

Not a remake of Tarkovsky's version, but a new version of the Lem novel on which both are based.
 
One contributor to the anarchysf mailing list, after Lem's death, "rather liked" the Soderbergh version. Layla AbdelRahim in 2009, however, "strongly disliked the trashy love-line of the re-make".
 


Rivers Solomon // An Unkindness of Ghosts

(2017)

Rebellion against tyranny aboard a generation starship. Fairly familiar territory, but this is an exceptional debut novel with a very original take, and a fierce and feisty protagonist.



The author's own website says, in no uncertain terms, "Rivers Solomon is a dyke, an anarchist, a she-beast, an exile, a shiv, a wreck, and a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. They write about life in the margins, where they are much at home."



The novel is a principal subject of one of the anarchysf podcasts.


S.P. Somtow

(--)

Based a tetralogy on the premise of Sturgeon's 'The Skills of Xanadu'. The tetralogy concerned was probably Inquestor, the four books being published as by Somtow Sucharitkul (Light on the Sound, 1980, The Throne of Madness, 1983, Utopia Hunters, 1984, The Darkling Wind, 1985).


Boots Riley // Sorry to Bother You

(2018)

Bizarre satirical extrapolation from telemarketing into bio-engineered 'equisapiens': part human part horse. Mentioned a few times on anarchist Facebook pages, most recently on the Anarchist Film Group page, where it's one of a handful of Afro-Futurist films recommended for anarchist comrades. Not recommended here.



Richard Kelly // Southland Tales

(2006)

Really, don't waste your time with this movie, for which I'm not going to provide even a single sentence plot summary. It's incoherent drivel.
 
Mark Bould included it in his Red Planets filmography, as a "depiction of the era of Homeland Security", which I suppose is accurate in part, so far as it goes.
 
Notwithstanding the Diptastical review, there are no anarchist characters.


Richard Fleischer // Soylent Green

(1973)

In a future overpopulated New York, large numbers survive on their rations of 'soylent green' wafers, supposedly made from plankton, but which are revealed to be recycled human protein.
 
Described on Facebook's Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist as a "dystopic classic". Also one of Rich Dana's candidates for Best sci-fi ever committed to film, on the FB Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum.
 


Norman Spinrad // Agent of Chaos (1967); Bug Jack Barron (1969);   'Heirloom' (1972); The Iron Dream (1972); The Void Captain's Tale (1983); Child of Fortune (1985); Little Heroes (1987); Greenhouse Summer (1999); Raising Hell plus (2015)

(2015)

Agent of Chaos concerns an underground movement which ideologises entropy as leading to chaos, and fights against the total control of the Hegemony over the solar system. Said to have influenced young American radical-anarchists in the 1970s (Platt:70), though it's hard to see why; there is, however, a passage in chapter 11 in which the concept of freedom is linked to that of the infinity of the universe, which equation is perhaps at the root of the attractiveness of SF for many anarchists and libertarians.
 
'Heirloom' is a minor anarchistic story, wholly derivative of Russell's '. . . And Then There Were None.'
 
For Michael Moorcock The Iron Dream—a heroic fantasy novel supposedly written by Adolf Hitler—was "intended to display the fascist elements inherent to the form." (Moorcock 1978) But for P.S., the same year, "Taken in small doses it is very funny. But the parody of fascism repeated over and over again numbs the mind and becomes a subliminal play for fascism." Zeke Teflon, however, considers it one of his favourite anarchist science fiction novels, describing it as "Alternately chilling and darkly funny. [ . . . ] An excellent illustration of the ugliness of the authoritarian psyche."
 
For Moorcock Spinrad used Bug Jack Barron to "display the abuse of democracy and the media in America." (Moorcock 1978)
 
"Spinrad says: 'Child of Fortune is another anarchist novel, because there's no government.'" (Dan Clore) The message of the book is unequivocal:
 
"True Children of Fortune have no chairmen of the board or kings. True Children of Fortune seek not after chairmen of the board or kings. Certainement, no true Child of Fortune would wish to be a chairman of the board or king!" (Bantam edn: 495)



The Void Captain's Tale is also set in a society with no government. (Lise Andreasen, posting to anarchysf mailing list, 2010)
 
Little Heroes and Greenhouse Summer are included in Killjoy's list of stories that feature sympathetic anarchist characters. Spinrad has said that his model, in Greenhouse Summer, "is some form of syndicalist anarchism—'anarchism that knows how to do business'—no national governments per se." (Shirley) Greenhouse Summer is also included in Teflon's list.
 
Raising Hell plus is one of the excellent PM Press Outspoken authors series. It was reviewed favourably by Zeke Teflon on its release; and Luther Blissett, for Freedom, summed it up as "Fun story. Punchy essay. Well worth buying and reading."
 
In a 1999 interview Spinrad confirmed that he was "an anarchist—but I'm a syndicalist. You have to have organized anarchy, because otherwise it doesn't work.' (Killjoy 2009)


Ivan Dixon // The Spook Who Sat by the Door

(1973)

In the then near future, the lead character is enlisted into an elite CIA training programme, and is subsequently recruited as its token black agent, but in reality consigned to a sub-basement where he is in charge of the photocopier. He quits, returning to his home stamping ground, where he uses his CIA training to develop an effective cadre of black guerrilla fighters. Black uprisings ensue across eight major US cities. Very much a product of its time, but despite its technical weakness now seen as culturally and historically significant.
 
Its 2004 release on DVD was welcomed on the Anarchy-SF mailing list. Included in the Red Planets filmography.


Andrei Tarkovsky // Stalker

(1979)

Screenplay by Arkady and Boris Strugatski, based on their 1972 novel Roadside Picnic. Depicts an expedition led by a professional guide known as the 'Stalker' to take his two clients, a melancholic writer fearing loss of inspiration and a professor conducting research but with a covert agenda, to a site known simply as the 'Zone', which has a Room within it with the supposed ability to fulfil a person's innermost desires. The trio travels through unnerving areas filled with sundry debris and traps while engaging in arguments, facing the fact that the 'Zone' itself appears sentient, while their path through it can be sensed but not seen. In the original novel it's made clear that the Zone contains abandoned debris from a visit by aliens, like picnic litter.
 
With Solaris, categorised by Glenn in his essay 'Film as Subversion', in the 2015 BASTARD Chronicles, as subversive, but "almost unwatchable for an American audience." "Both force the viewer to examine their own desires and interpersonal relationships."
 
"Super good and surrealist", but on the slow side, was the opinion of a poster to the Facebook Anarchists and Science Fiction page in 2016. Later the same year one contributor to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum listed it as their sole contender for 'best sci-fi ever committed to film'. At the end of the year another link from the Forum indicates that "Stalker is a strange and intellectual movie that is challenging on a first viewing. It is also pretty damn weird."
 
SFE gives a political reading, taking the film as "perhaps the grimmest metaphor for Russia produced by a Russian in our generation."
 


Olaf Stapledon // Last and First Men (1930); Star Maker (1937)

(1937)

One of the most important figures in the history of science fiction, Stapledon (like H.G. Wells) was a democratic socialist, who believed (also like Wells) that state socialism would and should develop into a stateless society. In Last and First Men and StarMaker this development is briefly portrayed. (Dan Clore)


Gene Roddenberry // Star Trek

(1966/1969)

"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."
 
Fred Bourgault-Christie, in Star Trek, Atheism, Anarchism and The Power of Vision, as an anarchist, but not an atheist, nevertheless applauds Roddenberry's atheism, and in general greatly admires the ethos of the show: "Star Trek shows us a future where people calmly discuss issues, where they grapple with ethical and scientific challenges with heart, where people cooperate. It shows us a world human beings would want to live in." He says further: "I do have some problems with the future in which Starfleet’s characters reside. I would prefer non-hierarchical organizations. [ . . . ] But the concepts of duty, respect (flowing both ways), and responsibility in Star Trek are still inspirational, even to me as an anarchist." "Anyone who wants to change the world or touch people should use Roddenberry as an inspiration. Anarchists must create a vision that makes people want to wake up in that world. [ . . . ] And if we on the Left want to make people engaged and hopeful, we need to tell stories like Star Trek that show people what the world can be like."
 
Reddit's DebateAnarchism has a thread on Anarchism and Star Trek, seeking the views of anarchists on whether a 'benevolent' government as depicted in Star Trek could really exist.
 
In 2016 the Anarres Project ran a programme of events in Oregon to mark the 50th anniversary of the show. For the same occasion (but also tied to the US presidential election) reason.com produced a 4-minute parody video Star Trek: The Libertarian Edition: "Their mission: to seek out new life and new civilizations, and leave them alone. Trade with them if they want, but to mostly leave them the hell alone." John J. Pierce, at reason.com, considers the early Star Trek "a reasonably intelligent—if not profound—series".
 
A corrective to the general warm response to the series is given in John Zerzan's Star Trek, written for Green Anarchy in 1994: "The vast popularity of this impossibly weak, artificial, repressive series [ . . . ] is a puzzling and sad symptom of an absence of both vitality and reflection." In particular, he finds "repulsive" "its predication on a strict, martial hierarchy." Beyond that, though, "What Star Trek conveys about technology is probably its most insidious contribution to domination." Specifically, Zerzan is no fan of Gene Roddenberry who, he reminds us, began his post-war working life working for the Los Angeles Police Department.
 
David Graeber, in his 2012 essay 'Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit' (in Graeber 2015) has a discussion on Star Trek (and its successor, The Next Generation), taking a different approach again:
 
"Or consider Star Trek, that quintessence of American mythology. Is not the Federation of Planets—with its high-minded idealism, strict military discipline, and apparent lack of both class differences and any real evidence of multiparty democracy—really just an Americanized vision of a kinder, gentler Soviet Union, and above all, one that actually "worked"?



"What I find remarkable about Star Trek, in particular, is that there is not only no real evidence of democracy, but that almost no one seems to notice its absence.
[ . . . ]



"The Federation, then, is Leninism brought to its full and absolute cosmic success—a society where secret police, reeducation camps, and show trials are not necessary because a happy conjuncture of material abundance and ideological conformity ensures the system can now run entirely by itself."


Gene Roddenberry // Star Trek: The Next Generation

(1987/1994)

The first sequel TV series, set nearly a century after the action of the original. Episode 18 of series 3, 'Allegiance', includes an alien described as an anarchist who rejects any kind of authority; the stereotype is the crudest, with the alien being essentially feral, wolf-like, and inclined to unprovoked violence.
 
Fred Bourgault-Christie, in Star Trek, Atheism, Anarchism and The Power of Vision, focuses mainly on TNG: "If I am feeling sad or despairing at the world, I watch an episode of Next Generation and feel a sense of hope."
 
A comment on Mike Gogulski's 2009 Are you really a libertarian/anarchist? says "Let's get to a technological state where anarchy is theoretically possible as fast as we can, and see what happens. I’m sure we’d all love to live in the Star Trek: The Next Generation universe." But another replies "Not me. Sure, the technology, and the apparent general environment of goodwill… but peek under that surface and it's either a fascist/socialist dystopia, or TV fiction. They left hints throughout the series of their wider socio-economic organization, and it's simply not possible without some very nasty stuff happening just off camera."
 
For one contributor to Reddit's DebateAnarchism thread on Anarchism and Star Trek, "The federation around the TNG era is one of the best examples of an anarchist/socialist society I have seen in fiction."
 
TNG is also referred to in Zerzan's 1994 Star Trek. He notes: "Sadly, Ursula LeGuin, considered by many a utopian/anarchist writer, seemed to see little else besides Star Trek's PC rating in her 'Appointment with the Enterprise: an Appreciation,' written for the May 14, 1994 TV Guide. She gushed over the late series [i.e. TNG] in the classic superficiality of the liberal, managing to see a marvellous morality play, and ignoring its worship of authority and a monstrous techno-future."


Rick Berman and Michael Piller // Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

(1993/1999)

Second sequel series, set roughly concurrently with TNG but on a space station rather than a starship. Viewed by SFE as "the best of the Star Trek series and one of the finest science fiction series of the last two decades."
 
There have been mixed responses to DS9. Obsolete's review of Manu Saadia's Trekonomics favours this as the best Star Trek series, saying: "I was pleased that Saadia spent plenty of time on the Ferengi . . . after all, they are us. The capitalists, the vice peddlers, the libertarian free-market worshippers." Voluntarysociety.org also cites the Ferengi as an example of agorism or anarcho-capitalism. But contributors to Reddit's DebateAnarchism thread on Anarchism and Star Trek have conflicting interpretations of the Ferengi, who are to be seen as "evil capitalists", or as showing that, by this date, capitalism has become impotent.


Jonathan Frakes // Star Trek: First Contact

(1996)

The crew of the 6th incarnation of the starship Enterprise travel back in time to the mid-21st century to stop the Borg from conquering Earth, by preventing the invention of the warp drive and so changing the past.
 
The film is the subject of an academic essay in the October 1999 issue of Anarchist Studies: Paul-F. Tremlett's 'Borg: A Critical Encounter' (Anarchist Studies 7 (1999): 171–183). His abstract says [text in square brackets is mine]:
 
"I begin by elaborating a critical anarchist hermeneutic that understands interpretation as praxis and meaning(s) as mutable and unstable. I suggest that the film can be understood as an effort to mediate a crisis in human relations with technology (a potential 'other'). I argue that the principal element or relation through which this crisis is posed and then resolved is that between Picard, Data and the Borg 'queen'. [. . . The hybridity of the Borg signifies a descent into disorder, and] Disorder, as the absence of any organising principle of knowledge or experience, is further linked to the post-structuralist critique of 'foundationalism' and the anarchist critique of government."



In his conclusion, he further says that the film suggests
 
"[ . . . ] that 'the real' must be preserved at all costs, and, if possible, through the continual redeployment of a single paradigmatic relationship. Ironically, this is not a father-son relation [Picard and Data], but that held to exist between man and woman [Picard/Data and the Borg queen], as elaborated in the Biblical account of the creation of the world. Technology, like Eve, is derivative of man, and should therefore serve man as an ally and a helpmate. In anarchist terms, this signifies the hegemony of a particular strand of Western philosophy that has been a dominant founding principle in the organisation of contemporary knowledge and experience. The critique of foundations and organising principles is the task of our times."


Nicholas Meyer // Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

(1982)

When the genetically engineered Khan escapes from a 15-year exile to pursue his adversary Admiral Kirk, like Ahab and the whale, the crew of the Enterprise must prevent him acquiring a terraforming device named Genesis. Closer to the spirit of the original TV series than the first movie of the series.
 
Seen  by one contributor to the libertarian film festival blog as one of the Star Trek films nearer to having a libertarian theme, "for having common people work together to beat a superman". But another found this doubtful: ". . . classic, but come on: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one? Says who?"


Leonard Nimoy // Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

(1986)

Summoned home to Earth to face trial for their actions in the previous film, the former crew of the USS Enterprise finds the planet under threat from an alien probe attempting to contact now-extinct humpback whales. The crew travel back to 20th century Earth returning with two humpbacks, whose presence satisfies the alien probe, which withdraws.
 
Margaret Killjoy, who reviewed the film for the Anarcho-Geek Review after viewing it again after Nimoy's death, said "I would suggest The Voyage Home best represents what the Star Trek universe has to offer: anti-capitalism, world citizenship, ecological stewardship, and the desire for peace."


Justin Lin // Star Trek Beyond

(2015)

Thirteenth film in the franchise, and really not very noteworthy: lots of action, but a token storyline, little character interest, and very little in the way of food for thought.
 
Featured in a podcast by Actual Anarchy.


George Lucas // Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope)

(1977)

The Rebel Alliance, led by Princess Leia, attempts to destroy the Galactic Empire's space station, the Death Star.
 
Although appreciative of the film, Jon Osborne (see bibliography) wrote that:
 
"Many libertarians like this film because the good guys here are explicitly trying to 'restore freedom to the galaxy.' [ . . . ] However, the concept of 'freedom' is left conveniently undefined and the only form of government mentioned on the side of good is a (presumably beneficent) monarchy. This is really just a war between relative virtue and certain evil, not a war of ideas."



Libertarian Movies also notes that "there's no overtly libertarian political message".
 
Stephen Carson concludes "That two generations have grown up with these films teaching them to hate the 'Empire' and it's plans to 'bring order to the galaxy' bodes well for our future."


Irvin Kershner // Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (formerly known as The Empire Strikes Back)

(--)

Second outing in the franchise.
 
According to Anarchist Without Content, this film was released just as "neoliberalism begin collapsing the distinctions between mass society, subculture, and the elite":
 
"If we look closely at The Empire Strikes Back, released in the watershed year of 1980, we can see this very move in action: first, the scoundrel and the princess suddenly cross class lines; next, trust evaporates as Lando Calrissian betrays Solo in Cloud City; and in the stunning finale, we find out that Darth Vader is Luke’s father. If this disorienting turn of events did not upset the moral certainty of audience at the time, nothing would."



A couple of contributors to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum in 2016 listed this film as among their candidates for 'best sci-fi ever committed to film'.


George Lucas // Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones

(2002)

In a Sunday Herald news item forwarded to the Anarchy-SF mailing list in 2003, it was reported that the Pentagon had contracted with a Glasgow firm to construct robot soldiers, and the company's CEO had said that "the technology had its nearest equivalent in the Star Wars movie Attack of the Clones."


J.J. Abrams // Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens

(2015)

The first instalment of the sequel trilogy; seen as a return to form.
 
Arun Gupta, of The Anarres Project, found the film "a fun ride, well-executed, and utterly unoriginal." But:
 
"While I did find the multi-culti trio a positive update, and Rey’s badassness and her rejection of a male rescuer to be especially satisfying, it feels like an idealized Hillary Clinton narrative, intentional or not. In other words, the narrative structure of endless war and evil is unchallenged; what changes is the gender and races in charge of the neo-imperial resistance, which represents the benevolent conquest of liberal democracy."


Starhawk // The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993); City of Refuge (2015)

(2015)

Starhawk describes The Fifth Sacred Thing as an [. . .] "epic tale, set in 2048, California. In a time of ecological collapse, when the hideously authoritarian and corporate-driven Stewards have taken control of most of the land and set up an apartheid state, one region has declared itself independent: the Bay Area and points north. Choosing life over guns, they have created a simple but rich ecotopia, where no one wants, nothing is wasted, culture and cooperation are uppermost, and the Four Sacred Things [earth, air, fire, and water] are valued unconditionally." (Starhawk's website).



The author is a neo-pagan activist. In terms of practical politics she describes herself as now "actually more of a progressive democrat" (Killjoy 2009; also here). For John P. Clark this is perhaps the only work of fiction "that has made a major contribution to anarchistic utopianism" since Le Guin's (Clark 2009: 22). Also recommended by Gelderloos.
 David Graeber's 2009 Direct Action. An Ethnography has five pages recounting a 2001 meeting with Starhawk. Initially suspicious of her as rather an anarchist celebrity, he writes "I don't know exactly what we were expecting, but at the very least one imagines an anarchist witch would be at least a little bit outré. Instead, what we encountered was one of the most pleasant, reasonable people imaginable. Everything about her was open, friendly, and completely down-to-earth."



City of Refuge is a very effective sequel, funded via Kickstarter. Its publication was announced on Facebook's Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, and Anarchist Solarpunks. Recommended by Yvonne Aburrow as a model for resistance in SF.



Raymond Stark // Crossroads to Nowhere

(1956)

Thirty years after the holocaust, an Anarch from the west seeks law and order in (New) York; he finds totalitarianism not to his taste, but unintentionally puts the York government onto the Anarchs, who are promptly colonised. The Anarch and some friends retreat to a minimal statist village, there to plan the overthrow of the government. It is clear they will fail. Naïve, with little merit.


Paul Verhoeven // Starship Troopers

(1997)

Intended as a satirical take on the original novel by Robert Heinlein, heavily emphasising the fascistic and militaristic nature of Heinlein's book, as satire the film fails completely, coming across as a deadpan B-movie glorifying the very qualities it's ostensibly sending up, all too faithful to Heinlein.
 
For Jon Osborne (see bibliography), who acknowledges that it could be seen as "a subtle satire of fascism", yet is clearly doubtful what interpretation to put on the film, "Much of the tone is over the top in an authoritarian kind of way, but otherwise it's not entirely offensive. Even libertarians would take up arms against invading insects." Libertarian Movies gets the satirical intent, finding Verhoeven's decision to "turn it up to eleven" as making for "a much more libertarian statement ultimately: "Fascism is bad, kids, mmkay?, even when it's us, and not the enemy"  . . . .
 


Katsuhiro Ōtomo // Steamboy

(2004)

Steampunk animation with a rather simplistic storyline, but loving attention to the technology. The film is discussed by Reddebrek at libcom.org, who comments that "neither government or capital come out of this film looking very good, they're both self interested and hypocritical."


Neal Stephenson // Snow Crash (1992); The Diamond Age (1995); Cryptonomicon (1999); The Baroque Cycle—Quicksilver (2003), The Confusion (2004), and System of the World (2004); Anathem (2008); Seveneves (2015)

(2015)

A form of anarcho-capitalism plays a major role in many of these entertaining novels. In Snow Crash, territory is primarily controlled by corporate franchises, termed "Franchise-Operated Quasi-National Entities" such as "Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong" and "Nova Sicilia," with privately-operated police and judicial systems, where the landscape has been turned into a patchwork quilt of franchise enclave communities, and the increasingly residual federal government is just one more competitor in a free market for sovereignty services.
 
"It's always been a mystery [ . . . ], but then, that's how the government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn't bother with, which means that there's probably no reason for it; you never know what they're doing or why." (ch. 63)



Its sequel, The Diamond Age, depicts a more mature anarcho-capitalist society where Common Law and other international private law conventions have evolved into a Common Economic Protocol to which all non-outlaw phyles and FOQNEs subscribe in their own legal systems.



'The Great Simoleon Caper' is an early story centred on cryptocurrency, as promoted by crypto-anarchists. Recommended on Reddit's Agorist fiction?, where it's described as Stephenson's "most explicitly agorist piece".
 
The Baroque Cycle is described by the Left Bank Books reviewer as "Kick-ass historical sci fi [ . . . ] Very funny and intelligent read." It also one of Mark Bould's selections in Red Planets. The final volume, The System of the World, won the 2005 Prometheus Award.
 
Cryptonomicon won the 2013 Libertarian Futurist Society's Hall of Fame Award.
 
Anathem is a long discursive novel set on an alternate Earth. Described by Zeke Teflon as "excellent", anarchist Clark at Popehat has this to say:
 
"Anathem has it all: deep history, parallel worlds, medieval monasteries, formal logic, quantum uncertainty, cross-polar chase scenes, orbital mechanics, starships. A lot of people say that they thought that Anathem was too wordy or too weird. I feel bad for them – they've admitted something very embarrassing about themselves in public."



I wouldn't say it's too weird, but it's definitely much too long, and plain dull: a worthy failure, I would say. I guess I've now embarrassed myself in public.
 
Seveneves is another doorstop of a book: the Moon is blown up in a cosmic collision, and most of humanity dies in the 5000 year pounding by lunar debris; a tiny colony survives in orbiting space habitats, and in the final third of the book it transpires that there have also been survivors on Earth, above and below the sea.
 
For Zeke Teflon, reviewing at Sharp and Pointed, the book is "all but unreadable," with way too much exposition, to the extent that he feels 2–300 pages could usefully have been cut; he was unable to recommend it. Nevertheless, the novel won the 2016 Prometheus Award.
 


Bruce Sterling // Islands in the Net (1989); 'Bicycle Repairman' (1996); Holy Fire (1996); Distraction (1999); Pirate Utopia (2016)

(2016)

Islands in the Net was "Influenced by Bob Black's The Abolition of Work." (Dan Clore) Black himself says "In Islands in the Net, Sterling extrapolates from several anti-work stances: the "avant-garde job enrichment" [ . . . ] of the laid back Rhizome multinational; the selective post-punk high-tech of Singapore's Anti-Labour Party, and the post-agricultural guerrilla nomadism of Tuareg insurgents in Africa. He incorporates a few of my phrases verbatim." (Black 2015) Islands has been perceived as an anarchist/anti-capitalist utopia (mailing to anarchysf). Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), who describes himself as a Cyberpunk fan, makes particular reference to this novel, as "based on the assumption that the decay of political systems will lead to a decentralized proliferation of experiments in living" . . .



'Bicycle Repairman' takes place in an anarchist squatters' enclave.



Holy Fire was strongly recommended by an anarchysf lister, describing it as "germane to this list because of its treatment of the dynamics of a post-plague society, and social conservativism among the very long-lived." A couple of minor characters are anarchists. Referenced by Sheehan (see bibliography), and by Emanuela Scucatto.  



In Distraction, early 21st century America is "populated by large gangs of postmodern proletarian nomads." "Sterling's vision is, in fact, profoundly anarchistic. [. . .] Distraction updates pre-modern gift exchange for the postmodern age, and thus charts a radically non-hierarchical vision of the near future." (Call, 2002) Distraction is also among works discussed in the last chapter of Call's 2002 Postmodern Anarchism.



In 2015 Sterling wrote the introduction to Bob Black's essay collection Instead of Work. While he says he "never became a Bob Black disciple", "Mostly I just admired and tried to emulate his conceptual freedom." (vi–vii)



Pirate Utopia is a dieselpunk alternate history centred on the curious story of the Free State of Fiume, in the aftermath of World War I. Anarcho-syndicalists are among the players, but it's an eclectic mix, also featuring fascists and futurists, Howard, Houdini, and Lovecraft.



Rian Johnson // Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi

(2017)

Maybe of interest to Star Wars fans, but not to me (though yes, I have seen it). Listed here only because of an enthusiastic review by
Alex McHugh at C4SS.


Rebecca Sugar // Steven Universe (TV series)

(2013/2019)

Comic cartoon superhero adventures, for children. Well received generally for its refreshingly inclusive take on gender and diversity.
 
Much enjoyed by Solarpunk Anarchists on Facebook. Perhaps more surprisingly, it comes with a recommendation from the Glasgow Anarchist Federation, noting its willingness to take on big issues, its positive presentation of alternate family arrangements, "with a good mix of race, gender and body-types all presented in a super-positive way." All in all, "If you are looking for a fun wee family friendly TV show to keep you entertained then I wouldn’t look much further than Steven Universe."
 
There is also a reddit page entitled Apparently the Anarchist Federation are Steven Universe fans…. Contributors are not quite clear what to make of the series: for one, "SU has a lot of subtle anarchist stuff going on", but another says "I'm still trying to work out why the anarchists chose SU to be their advertising campaign. It's about peace and love on the planet Earth, not anarchy", which gets the rejoinder "because anarchism is about peace and love on the planet Earth :)". One poster observes that S02E17, 'Sadie's Song,' depicts a small image of an anarcho-syndicalist black and red flag on the corkboard of the Big Donut breakroom.
 


Robert Louis Stevenson

(--)

Freedom in 1889 quoted from one of Stevenson's Samoan letters, in which he speaks of a certain fascination for the anarchists and compares them with the early Christians. The anonymous writer concluded that "Stevenson was a man of an intensely reactionary mind, but he had the honesty, when he saw Anarchists in a truer, clearer light, to say so, and we respect him for it." (anon. 1899)


George R. Stewart // Earth Abides

(1949)

Most of the population dies from disease; the hero leads his tiny new tribe into post-history. Earth Abides was reviewed anonymously in Anarchy in 1963, with a degree of reluctant respect: "The author writes with a Defoe-like verisimilitude, and a fascinating wealth of ecological detail"; though the survivors "start life afresh from zero: no government, nothing in the way of constraints and restraints", the story "does not end as anarchists would like it to end." This is clearly because after 21 years of Edenic anarchy the State is effectively re-established when the decision is taken to hang a stranger who drunkenly brags of his venereal diseases. Ish, the hero, reflects:
 
"Yet there was an irony. The State—it should be a kind of nourishing mother, protecting the individuals in their weakness, permitting a fuller life. And now the first act of the State, its originating function, had been to bring death. Well, who could say? Likely enough, in the dim past reaches of time, the State had always sprung from the need to crystallize power in some troublous time, and primitive power must often have expressed itself in death." (pt II, c. 8)



Despite this anarchist analysis, Ish falls for the old story that at least it's better than anarchy, "when there was no strong force to protect the individual against whatever might rise up against him."
 


S.L.S. (pseudonym of John St Loe Strachey) // The Great Bread Riots: or, What Came of Fair Trade

(1885)

Following the abolition of free trade, the rioting of the unemployed is led by anarchical secret societies, based on violence, their organisation copied from those of Germany and Russia; the events are recounted as from 1934. It is a very slight work, of negligible interest for anarchists.


Kathryn Bigelow // Strange Days

(1995)

Set in the last two days of the 20th century, the film follows the story of a dealer in illicit POV recordings of individuals' complete sensory input as, while investigating the murder of a prostitute, he uncovers the truth of the cop shooting of a black leader. Rather heavy-handed and over-long, and the story-line—apart from the technological fillip—pretty conventional, not to say old-fashioned.
 
Tom Jennings, in 2006, took a much more positive view:
 
"[ . . . ] Kathryn Bigelow's magnificent Strange Days experiments viscerally with the phenomenology of simulation offered by new media, gradually expanding the significance of their alienating distraction for confused thrill-seekers out into the seething public sphere of a chaotic neo-noir 1999 LA under brutal martial law. The troubled pairing of ex-vice squad porn merchant Ralph Fiennes and streetwise action heroine Angela Bassett tangle with corrupt entrepreneurs and lowlives in a decadent cross-fertilising cultural milieu of hip-hop punk, blundering into a conspiracy to assassinate a Black revolutionary leader which threatens to tip the civic millennium festivities over the brink into grass-roots insurrection. Through an unprecedented synthesis of film and psychoanalytic theory, exploitation of cinema traditions and bravura design, editing and photography, it is far more nuanced than Crash in tackling the subjective and social significance of race, as well as of gender and class. The film also works hard to specify its historical contingency in the best traditions of science fiction as speculation on the present (for example by Stanislaw Lem, William Burroughs or Philip K. Dick)—rather than hysterical inflation into universal values, or the fashionably subversive adolescent hype which passes for philosophical resonance in [ . . . ] V for Vendetta (as in The Matrix series). Strange Days even excuses its major flaws (such as a deliberately implausible, if arguably utopian, central relationship) by managing to render its politically ultra-conservative resolution as dystopian recuperation—a final knowing flourish on the role of mass entertainment in taming desire in labyrinths of repressive desublimation."
 
Included in libcom.org's Working class cinema: a video guide, where it is described as "enjoyable if flawed".
 


Charles Stross // Singularity Sky (2003); The Atrocity Archives (2004); Accelerando (2005); Iron Sunrise (2005); Glasshouse (2006); Neptune's Brood (2013)

(2013)

Singularity Sky is included in Killjoy's list of stories that explore anarchist societies, and is included in Zeke Teflon's list of his favourite anarchist SF novels.
 
The Atrocity Archives and Glasshouse are included in the Anarchist Studies Network's Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading List.
 
Accelerando was recommended by Mumkin on Ask MetaFilter, and is noted in the comments on Worldbuilding's 'How to make a fictional anarchist society believable to non-anarchists?'.
 
Iron Sunrise was recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction' at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009. It is also included in Teflon's list.
 
Glasshouse won the 2007 Prometheus Award. In Teflon's list it is described as "A brutal tale about gender roles and conformity."
 
According to Teflon, part of Neptune's Brood "is set in a sympathetically portrayed deep sea anarchist society of genetically modified humans." The author himself describes it as "a parable for our times about the banking crisis and the spiralling growth of debt that is rapidly enslaving us to a floating pool of transnational financial instruments that nobody really understands or owns." [Charlie's Diary] The novel was inspired by Stross's reading of Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years.


Arkady & Boris Strugatsky // Hard to be a God (1964); Roadside Picnic (1971)

(1971)

These two novels were recommended by Zeke Teflon in 2017 as entry points for readers new to the Strugatsky brothers. Both are included in Bould's Red Planets reading list.
 
Zakk Flash, on Facebook's Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, writes, of Roadside Picnic, that "Although not specifically anarchist, this looks interesting." On the same forum, Scott Rossi confirms it as "really interesting".
 


Theodore Sturgeon // More than Human (1953); 'The Skills of Xanadu' (1956); Venus Plus X (1960)

(1960)

More than Human tells of several individuals with different psychic powers coming together as a single being, 'homo gestalt'. It is briefly described in Vittorio Curtoni's 1978 article. For Evan Lampe the evolution to H. gestalt is reminiscent of Kropotkin's Mutual Aid.
 
Though the tenor of 'Xanadu' is appealing, its premise—a technology that renders human co-operation axiomatic and intuitive—is presented in fantastic terms.
 
Venus Plus X received a warm response from John Pilgrim in 1963, for the utopia of surgically-produced hermaphrodites it presents.


Daniel Suarez // Daemon (2006/2009); Freedom TM (2010); Influx (2014)

(2014)

Daemon and Freedom TM together constitute an impressive techno-thriller some have seen as of anarcho-capitalist interest. There's a good long web review by Kevin Carson of the P2P Foundation. Carson takes issue with what he sees as Suarez's naive assumption that corporate plutocracy can be defeated by restored constitutional government. And, though there are some interesting suggestions of an emergent society of "resilient local communities (holons) with micromanufacturing facilities, sustainable farming methods, and renewable energy sources", he concludes that "I’d prefer to see the triumph of resilient communities and darknets, and our delivery from global corporate tyranny, come about some other way than by a megalomaniac billionaire acting as deus ex machina from beyond the grave," which is in essence the premise of the whole narrative.



Influx has a really strong premise, namely that a rogue US government agency is deliberately conspiring to suppress major technological advances, considering the pace of progress too fast for society to handle. But the second half of the book runs out of steam as it morphs into an all-action techno-thriller. Nevertheless, it won the 2015 Prometheus award.



Terry Nation // Survivors (TV series)

(1975/1977)

Post-apocalyptic drama centring on a group of people who have survived an accidentally released virus that kills most of humankind: in the UK only about 7000 people survive.
 
The 2008 remake prompted a discussion at lib.com, on "survivors" vs. anarchism?. One contributor said he didn't think it likely that an anarchist society could arise in a catastrophic situation like near-extinction:
 
"libertarian communism will only come about with participation of a widespread social movement that creates the conditions through the actual praxis of that movement. With Survivors we have isolated scattered individuals coming together to form small groups where all social norms have been rendered obsolete, so any group that wishes to form on anarchist lines would need to arm themselves to defend against outside raiders etc, a situation which wouldn't be compatible with libertarian communism."



For another, the remake was definitely inferior:
 
"The 70's series took time to develop about the problems of setting up a community: growing things, getting things, settlement being destroyed by food poisoning. It also didn't hold back on its punches, in one episode (law and order) the main characters—who we had been shown as trying to maintain their humanity—are shown as losing that humanity when they voted to execute a character with learning disabilities who they falsely believe to have raped and killed another character."



The same poster acknowledged, however, that the original show had been too white and middle class, and objected that "the main ideological thrust is that there needs to be a leader."
 
Sharp and Pointed found the original series "extremely dark", but it was their favourite SF series from the 70s and 80s, and "way better than the at best so-so reboot".


S. Andrew Swann // The Hostile Takeover trilogy: Profiteer (1995), Partisan (1995), Revolutionary (1996)

(1996)

Really a single long novel, the setting is chiefly a planet named Bakunin, orbiting the star Kropotkin; the principal city is called Godwin (with a street called Vanzetti), and the spaceport Proudhon.
 
. . . "depicts a world called Bakunin that operates on anarcho-capitalist principles, and examines the particular problem of an anarcho-capitalist society defending itself against a statist aggressor when that aggressor hires so many of the Anarcho-capitalist society's own denizens as mercenary forces."  "Its portrayal of society on the planet Bakunin is arguably much more critical of the basic premise of anarchism than is typical of the genre, coming close to a libertarian dystopia." "While Swann's portrayal of anarchism falls far short of advocacy, it is clear in the text that his sympathy is with the anarchists and not with the state." [Wikipedia: anarcho-capitalist literature, Hostile Takeover trilogy]
 
This really over-eggs the cake. Apart from the name-checks, there is little that can be described as anarchist about the planet Bakunin, apart from the absence of a world government. It's not really even markedly anarcho-capitalist or libertarian, although there's perhaps a degree of warmth to a woolly notion of anarchy.


Michael Swanwick // Vacuum Flowers (1987); The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1994)

(1994)

Vacuum Flowers is included in the 56aInfoshop library. In the first chapter there are throwaway references to streets named Bakuninstrasse and Kropotkinkorridor, as well as a Berkmangallerie, but nothing further is made of these.



The Iron Dragon's Daughter was recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction' at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009. Also included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 


Jonathan Swift // Gulliver's Travels (1726/1735); 'A Modest Proposal' (1729)

(1729)

Gulliver's Travels has the eponymous hero marooned amid various alien societies, for satirical ends. It has been suggested that some of Godwin's thinking originates here, especially in relation to the society of the Houyhnhnms, which can be seen as anarchistic (Woodcock 1962, Preu: 372, 382). A quotation from Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master will serve as an example of the similarity to Godwin's thinking: the Houyhnhnm, commenting on British society, expressed the opinion "That our institutions of government and law were plainly owing to our gross defects in reason, and by consequence, in virtue; because reason alone is sufficient to govern a rational creature . . ." (Pt IV, c. VII). Godwin certainly admired Swift, whom he described as a man who "appears to have had a more profound insight into the true principles of political justice than any preceding or contemporary author." (Godwin 1798) "For the stern and inflexible integrity of his principles, and the profound sagacity of his speculation, he will be honoured by a distant posterity." (Godwin 1798: 443) Of Gulliver's Travels itself Godwin wrote that "It was unfortunate that a work of such inestimable wisdom failed at the period of its publication from the mere playfulness of its form, in communicating adequate instruction to mankind." Interestingly, Godwin's diaries record that he was reading Gulliver's Travels while he was writing Political Justice in just the same way as his daughter's diary records that she was reading Political Justice while writing Frankenstein (Preu: 372). An extract from the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms was printed in La Révolte in 1893. Preu claims that if Godwin is the father of anarchism, Swift, through his influence on Godwin, is certainly its grandfather. (Preu: Dean 69)
 
The famous Modest Proposal is that starvation in Ireland could be cured by consuming the children of the poor. An extract was printed in La Révolte in 1893.
 


t

Gabriel Tarde // Underground Man

(1905)

Underground Man is a stifling and unpleasant authoritarian utopia, set in the far future, after the sun has cooled. For Berneri it was "more concerned with the discussion of philosophical ideas than the presentation of any ideal commonwealth" (Berneri 1950: 293).
 


Zeke Teflon (pseud. for Chaz Bufe) // Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia

(2012)

A fast-paced journey through a series of isolated communities of political and religious extremists on a prison planet. One such, with which the author's sympathies clearly lie, is the anarchist community of New Harmony.
 


William Tenn // 'The Liberation of Earth'

(1953)

Vittorio Curtoni saw Tenn as an SF author who "satirizes the mechanics of repression" (Curtoni 1978: 24). This story is a fine example, in which Earth is repeatedly conquered and reconquered by rival galactic forces, in the course of which 'liberation' the planet is devastated. The tale just stops short of drawing an anarchist moral, in that Earth's indigenous governors are exempted from description as anything worse than stupid; nevertheless it is most appealing.


Elio Petri // The Tenth Victim (La decima vittima)

(1965)

Loose adaptation of Robert Sheckley's 'The Seventh Victim'. Legalised murder as a game with a $1 million payoff.
 
Seen as a "groovy" 60s movie by libertarian Carl Milsted, for whom it takes "libertarian logic to its logical conclusion".
 


Sherri Tepper // The Gate to Women's Country

(1988)

Included in the Think Galactic reading list.


Mike Hodges // The Terminal Man

(1974)

An experiment in mind control on an individual with brain damage, aimed at intercepting his potential violent behaviour while fitting, goes badly wrong.
 
Essentially a cyborg movie, this is ranked in second place at Goliath's 10 Obscure Sci-Fi Films Worth Seeking Out, a link shared on Facebook's Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum and on Sci-Fi Libertarian Socialist.
 


Tiffany Thayer // Doctor Arnoldi

(1934)

Doctor Arnoldi is an extreme black comedy, in which the premise is that not only do people stop dying, but they become unkillable, so that in very little time at all the world is covered in living corpses, society completely disintegrates, and the survivors enthusiastically embrace cannibalism, before others escape the planet by rocket.



Thayer—perhaps now best remembered as the founder of the Fortean Society—"was a self-styled anarchist, contrarian and atheist", according to Chris Mikul, who gleefully describes this as "one of the most grotesque and repulsive works of science fiction ever written". The novel is described as "notorious" in the 2014 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary.


John Carpenter // They Live

(1988)

B-movie-style satirical take on aliens controlling the world through broadcast media, exposed by a group with special sunglasses that reveal the aliens' true form and expose the ubiquitous subliminal commands to obey, consume, reproduce, and conform. Unsubtle, and too much action at the expense of developing the concept.
 
Recommended by a couple of contributors to the Anarchism SubReddit as a film advocating anti-capitalism. Also favoured by a number of contributors to the Facebook Anarchist Film Group.


William Cameron Menzies // Things to Come

(1936)

Screenplay by H.G. Wells, based on his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come. The first part sees the start of World War II in Poland, a global Future War that continues for decades; the second, set in 1970, deals with a post-war community reduced to tribalism until the arrival of a mysterious warlord who proclaims a new era of 'law and sanity' and quells the opposition with 'Peace Gas'; and the third takes place in a gleaming technocratic utopian 2036, and an attempt is being made to fire a manned projectile into space, using an electric gun. Considered by SFE "the last SF film of any importance until the 1950s" and "one of the most important films in the history of SF cinema for the boldness of its ambitions and for the ardour with which it projects the myth of space flight as the beginning of humankind's transcendence."
 
Richard Porton, in his Film and the Anarchist Imagination, writes
 
"One version of Wells's technological utopia, albeit a cartoonish, hyperbolic variant, can be disinterred from William Cameron Menzies's film Things to Come (1936). Although Wells thought that all of his reservations concerning supposedly benign dictatorships were excised from the script by Menzies, this fanciful version of scientism run amok is undoubtedly the pop culture version of the positivist priesthood postulated by thinkers like Comte."


D.M. Thomas // The White Hotel

(1981)

Pat Flanagan's 1982 featured Freedom review found the novel "a radical failure, as a novel, but the writing often very fine", and "Thomas is to be admired for the boldness and courage of his endeavour". Nicolas Walter, in a subsequent letter to Freedom, found the book "at the same time a fascinating and coherent work of fiction and a funny and convincing critique of psychiatric dogma." (N.W. 1982)


Sheree R. Thomas, ed. // Dark Matter. A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora

(2000)
This breakthrough anthology is recommended for those interested in the diversity of black utopianism. (Rhiannon Firth, in the afterword to Berneri 2019).

Brian Thompson // The Anarchists

(2000)
Confusing and barely readable tale of time travel and parallel realities. Has next to nothing to do with anarchism or anarchists, apart from one mention of the latter word on the final page, and the use, throughout, of the circle A as a section divider.

Avoid.

Amy Thomson // The Color of Distance

(1999)

Recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction' at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009. Describes first contact with a harmonious rainforest community on an alien planet.
 


Dave Thorpe // Doc Chaos: The Chernobyl Effect

(1988)

Described as an allegorical satire on the nuclear age, this was published by the anarchist Hooligan Press, and favourably reviewed in Freedom. (D.R. 1988)


Mike Jackson // Threads

(1984)

TV film depicting the impact of nuclear war, through the eyes of residents of Sheffield. Very much in the vein of the 1966 The War Game.



Recommended at the Facebook Anarchist Film Group page, with a good number of positive comments.



George Lucas // THX 1138

(1971)

In a dystopian future world below ground, where human activities are wholly controlled by android police officers, use of emotion-suppressing drugs is mandatory, and sex is prohibited, the human THX 1138 makes a bid for freedom, after his pregnant partner is 'consumed' and her own number reassigned to the fœtus. He is successful, only because the recovery operation is terminated after exceeding its budget.



Listed as a dystopian film at Black Flag Blog's Anarchism and film.



One of Michael Matthews's Top 10 Best Films for Anarchists. For Libertarian Movies, "all sci-fi fans, and libertarians, should have a look". Also included in the list by 'Incubus' on Libcom.org's 'Any good anarchist films?' page. Included in Starrychloe's list on Liberty.me's Good movies for libertarians and anarchists. Clay Richards, anarchist blogger, was "thoroughly impressed" by the film.



For Javier Sethness "the social control of workers in THX 1138 is attained through television, religion, the pharmaceutical suppression of Eros and emotion, and police brutality. In this way, the film shows human love, exile, and bricolage ('making do with what is on hand') to be important anti-authoritarian strategies for rebellion and survival."



Though this may not be a popular opinion, this is much the best of Lucas's science fiction films.


Nicholas Meyer // Time After Time

(1979)

H.G. Wells, having built a time machine, pursues Jack the Ripper into the future, finding 1979 not quite the socialist utopia he'd expected. Old-fashioned but still entertaining.
 
Included in Goliath's 10 Obscure Sci-Fi Films Worth Seeking Out, a link shared on Facebook's Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum.


George Pal // The Time Machine

(1960)

Dumbed down version of the Wells story.
 
Mark Bould, in his 2005 Socialist Review article, copied to the Anarchy-SF mailing list, says this adaptation "replaced Wells's melancholy with the lunk-headed machismo of pre-Vietnam US imperialism."
 


James Tiptree, Jr // 'The Women Men Don't See' (1973); 'Houston, Houston, Do You Read?' (1976); 'The Screwfly Solution' (1977, as by Racoona Sheldon); Brightness Falls from the Air (1985)

(1985)

Vittorio Curtoni in 1978 referred to the first two of these stories as "powerful metaphors of the female position in the world of today . . . "
 
In 'Houston, Houston . . . ' a solar flare sends a three-man space mission 300 years into the future to encounter a depopulated Earth, with all men wiped out by an epidemic, all survivors being clones; the men can't cope with an all-female society that has no need for them, and they are put down. The future society is communalised and libertarian, with no government as such, but, given the conclusion, surely not entirely benign. This story is also included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 
In 'The Women Men Don't See' a private plane crashes in the Yucatan; a mother and daughter, among the stranded, choose to be taken away by passing aliens, feeling that the male society they already live in couldn't be more alien anyway. More negative than 'Houston, Houston . . . ', with no more than a suggestion of what might be, it's also a more subtle story.
 
'The Screwfly Solution' is included in the Think Galactic reading list, as is Brightness Falls from the Air.


Russell T. Davies // Torchwood

(2006/2011, TV series)

Doctor Who spin-off, featuring a covert agency called Torchwood which investigates extraterrestrial and supernatural incidents on Earth.
 
Though the initial two series were seen as "a bit hit-and-miss" by Iain MacKay (writing as 'Anarcho'), at Anarchist Writers, the third series—a five-part story called 'Children of Earth'—was welcomed as "well worth watching"; MacKay especially appreciated the lead character, Captain Jack Harkness, using the Wobbly slogan, 'An injury to one is an injury to all'. The blogger was editor, in 2011, of Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader, and wrote that this story "played havoc with my editing down of System of Economical Contradictions"!
 
Harkness's pan-sexuality was warmly received by contributors to the 2015 Aljazeera discussion on 'Sci-fi for social change' in 2015.


Paul Verhoeven // Total Recall

(1990)

Loosely based on a Philip K. Dick story, the film tells of a man who, in the process of downloading false memories of a trip to Mars and his experiences as a secret agent there, exposes some real ones, and ends up leaving Earth and fighting with rebels against a totalitarian Martian establishment. As with Dick, it's hard to be sure which is the 'real' reality. Over the top entertainment, which suits Schwarzenegger in the lead role.
 
Included in libcom.org's Working class cinema: a video guide. Listed at Libertarian Movies, which says "there's quite a bit for libertarians to enjoy".
 
Also included in Osborne (see bibliography), for whom "If you're going to have a rebellion against a corrupt government, be sure 'Ahnold' is on your side."


Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman // The Toxic Avenger

(1984)

Superhero movie, in which a wimpy janitor falls into a barrel of toxic waste and mutates. Supposedly comedy horror, but truly dire and utterly humourless. In the words of SFE "The Toxic Avenger's deliberate tastelessness is uninteresting because pointless."
 
Bizarrely, Alex Peak gives this film an extended right-libertarian critique which is as humourless as the film. Troma films, the production company, is said by Logan Marie Glitterbomb, of C4SS, to have tackled, through the 'humor' of this film and others, "issues of racism, indigenous rights, animal welfare, queer rights, pollution, devil worshipping corporations, and GMO foods with all the blood and nudity one could ask for."


Charles Band // Trancers

(1984)

Criminal with obscure psychic powers travels back to 1985 intending to kill the ancestors of his political opponents in 2247, but is stopped by a detective using the same time-travel technique, namely invading the mind of an ancestor of his own.
 
In an interview copied to the Anarchy-SF mailing list in 2003, this was named by Ken Macleod as on his short list of great SF movies.


Steven Lisberger // Tron

(1982)

In its day a pioneering film for its use of computer graphics, but it's now of little more than antiquarian interest.
 
For Thomas Michaud, in his 'Science Fiction and Politics. Cyberpunk Science Fiction as Political Philosophy', in Tron, as in Gibson's Neuromancer,
 
. . . "the network is simple. It is an elementary structure without power, anarchistic. Hackers from the cyberpunk science fiction are anarchists struggling in anarchistic structures called networks. Anarchy is normality in networks of communication. Networks are anarchistic. The society of communication is anarchistic thanks to technology, and hackers are archetypes of the individual in this society."
 


Peter Weir // The Truman Show

(1998)

Truman Burbank has lived for thirty years as unwitting star of a reality TV show in a wholly fake world; gradually sensing wrongness he eventually breaks free. The film owes a debt to both Philip K. Dick and The Prisoner.
 
Recommended on the Anarchism subReddit as having anarchist/anti-work/anti-capitalist tendencies. Recommended as libertarian by Alex Peak. The Anarcho-Capitalism subReddit has a discussion specifically on The Truman Show; for one contributor, "If anything, the story is symbolic of the realities of the state. You are born into it, forced to abide by it, and insulted or threatened when you start to disagree."


George Turner // The Sea and Summer (1987, aka Drowning Towers); Genetic Soldier (1994)

(1994)

The Sea and Summer is set in Melbourne in the mid-21st century, with the full impact of global warming in evidence as the oceans rise. The novel is discussed at length in a three-part article by Zeke Teflon, who describes it as "the first, or at least the first major, novel to deal head on with climate change"; in another Sharp and Pointed review he calls it "a literary masterpiece," "the first, and probably best, climate-change-disaster novel."



In Genetic Soldier a starship sent to explore for habitable planets returns to find that the hundreds of years that have passed on Earth since its departure have taken the descendant generations on the home planet in a more ecologically harmonious direction in their absence, don't welcome their return, and quickly find them incompatible with a society determined by rigid genetic specialisation; the starship departs once more. Although
Teflon considers the novel "decidedly subpar," in his later more extended essay, he wrote:



"Interestingly, the one place in Turner’s sci-fi novels where he describes a functional, though small-scale, alternative political/social system–among the “genetics” in Genetic Soldier–that system is based upon distinctly anarchist concepts and practices: decentralization, lack of a central coercive authority (i.e., government), voluntary cooperation, and mutual aid. That Turner didn’t see these as attributes of anarchism doesn’t negate the fact that they are.



Viewed from a different angle, Genetic Soldier is distinctive for the centrality to the narrative of the descendants of the aboriginal population, who by the time of the novel have assumed the dominant position in Australian society.


Harry Turtledove // The Gladiator

(2007)

Tied for the 2008 Prometheus Award.
 


Mark Twain // A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

(1889)

Discussed in two entries in Lampe's blog: 1 and 2.



 


u

Arthur W. Uloth // Arthur W. Uloth

(--)

Arthur W. Uloth, who had been editor of the Anglo-American anarchist publication Man! in the mid-1950s, in succession to individualist anarchist S.E. Parker, contributed a number of reviews of works of science fiction to Freedom in the period 1954 to 1963. He also contributed a five-page article, on the Richard Jefferies novel After London, to the same 1963 issue of Anarchy in which John Pilgrim's noted article appeared.
 


v

James McTeigue // V for Vendetta

(2006)

Unsuccessful and politically sanitised adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel (q.v.).
 
The film outraged anarchists for its wholesale bowdlerisation of the anarchism of the original. Even before the film was released, it was previewed by Iain McKay, on the anarchysf mailing list, under the title "V for Very Annoying": a view he confirmed in 2013, saying "the politics are gutted". By the time the film premiered in New York, an ad hoc group of anarchists there had launched AforAnarchy.com, a website and education campaign designed to reinject anarchist politics into the film, and to radicalise its audiences. The website was well-received elsewhere in the US, and in Spain, Turkey, the UK, Australia, and Singapore. Steve McFarland, for afor@, defending against an accusation that this was a naïve response to the inevitability of Hollywood, said that they "simply saw the opportunity to hitch some anarchist propaganda to a rampaging hollywood juggernaut, and provide a gateway to the world of anarchism that is usually confined to the margins". Tom Jennings, in his April 2006 Freedom review, was unequivocally condemnatory, calling it a "hopelessly incoherent mish-mash of random elements from comic book superhero back catalogues [ . . . ] stitched together with the most superficial philosophical musings about freedom and justice", showing "utter contempt for its audience." The anarchist scholar David Graeber, at that time a professor at Yale, was unfazed by the film, however: '“It didn’t upset me much,” Graeber said. “I thought the message of anarchy got out in spite of Hollywood.”'
 
For Lewis Call,
 
"This film has been widely criticised, but critics overlook the film's valuable contributions. In the film, the face of Fawkes provides the basis for sophisticated representations of sexuality, mass media systems and anarchist political action. Through its visual iconography, the film thus provides mainstream cinema audiences with an effective introduction to the symbolic vocabulary of post modern anarchism."



Despite the general hostility, the movie, its director, and its screenplay all received special Prometheus Awards in 2007. In 2013 the film was one of three recommended for viewing as part of a Cornell University course on 'Histories of Anarchism'.
 
Richard Porton devotes two pages to this film in the second edition of Film and the Anarchist Imagination, saying of it that "while neglecting the explicitly anarchist content of its source material [ . . . it] nevertheless grappled with the quandaries posed by both anti-authoritarian direct action and terrorism in the post-9/11 era."


Jean-Christopher Valtat // Aurorarama (2010); Luminous Chaos (2013)

(2013)

Aurorarama is polished steampunk set in a 'New Venice' in the Arctic c. 1908. Some characters are anarchists, but of the 'propaganda by the deed' school in favour at the time (or in steampunk time): a trope acknowledged by the author as "clichéd", in an interview published as postscript to the novel. Valtat further says:



"The political elements of this book exist because, of course, New Venice is a utopia, which, like every utopia, is actually a dystopia waiting to happen. At some point anarchy is regarded as an alternative, but it is anarchy in a very special sense: people from different walks of life getting together under pressure from the outside and trying to fix the situation so that they can regain some control of this utopia."



Reviewed by anarchist FG, for whom it's hard to discern "whether he's selling anarchism to a crowd used to diluted fiction, or if he's selling dressed up fiction using anarchism. Either way, it was weird, imaginative, and constantly engaging." Margaret Killjoy found it "amazing".



Luminous Chaos is now the second part of what is to be a trilogy, The Mysteries of New Venice. It's a very entertaining steampunk tale of time travel to fin de siècle Paris, also with some anarchist minor characters.


A.E. Van Vogt // Slan (1946); null-A series (1948–1985); The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951); The Weapon Makers (1952); The Anarchistic Colossus (1977)

(1977)

Slan's "political message still rings loud and clear." . . . "entertaining as hell, and it leaves a philosophic aftertaste that lingers pleasantly." (Conger)



The null-A series is included in Killjoy's list of stories (see Mythmakers & Lawbreakers in bibliography) that explore anarchist societies.



The Weapon Shops of Isher won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 2005. This, and The Weapon Makers, are included in Art for Liberty's 'Libertarian Sci-Fi and Fantasy.'



In The Anarchistic Colossus a future Earth operates as a mixed anarchy controlled by computers; aliens perceive the conquest of Earth as the payoff to a wargame. The anarchist Earth society is an extraordinary hybrid of socialist, capitalist, and bohemian variants of anarchism; it had apparently been instigated by the rightists, who still control two thirds of the economy. 'Techs' had contributed the elimination of crime: sensors detect violent intent before the event, and intercept the attacker (all other actions are free from control). The 'Caps' and the 'Coops' are apparently able to work together, e.g. in fire-fighting (c. 17); they collaborate on universal military training, so that everyone has a basic understanding of "the ethics of an anarchistic state of war"—indeed "Anarchistic space warcraft" are programmed with anarchist war ethics (c. 31). Van Vogt even offers the most original solution yet to the problem of work: idlers are offered welfare food based on insect protein, whereupon most prefer to work.



Van Vogt in this work finds anarchism all-pervasive: it is not only the norm in Earth society, the human brain itself is a "colossal anarchistic complexity" (c . 35), and at the other end of the scale "The universe itself is in a colossal anarchistic condition" (c . 27). Typically Van Vogtian, this is one of the most bizarre visions of anarchism in all sf.



'John Andrews' article 'A.E. Van Vogt and the Sanity of Anarchy' may be found on the Internet here'. (Dan Clore)


Jack Vance // The Languages of Pao (1968, rev. 1979); Emphyrio (1969); Wyst: Alastor 1716 (1978)

(1978)

Mark Bould, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, notes that one point in The Languages of Pao Vance suggests that an anarchist planet's language "might reflect rather than cause their politics."



For Anders Monsen, Emphyrio depicts "how casual acts of rebellion have grave repercussions that can lead to more radical acts of rebellion." Wally Conger sums this old-school space opera as "one hell of a good freedom novel".



Dan Clore lists Wyst as "An 'egalist' dystopia." The society portrayed values leisure above all, and is energetically egalitarian. Though interesting and entertaining, there isn't really much for anarchists here.


Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds // Sisters of the Revolution. A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology

(2015)

A fine collection of stories, though only a minority are science fiction per se.
 
It was reviewed at some length by Kim Smith in 2016, in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory #29. Smith says the anthology "seeks to bolster a feminist archive of science fiction", and "is a solid introduction to some creative stories that engage the broad problematic of gender and patriarchy." However, the anthology spans fifty years of stories, and for Smith:
 
"This creates a bit of a challenge for the collection: feminist movements of all stripes have radically changed how gender and sexuality is conceptualized (and lived) over this period – and whose experiences are reflected in those movements – but these changes are not tracked in this collection. If speculative fiction always has something to say about the present moment, but the work was written forty years ago, how do we read it now? And how do we read a collection of works written at different historical moments, in relation to different feminisms?"


Jeff VanderMeer // Annihilation; Authority; Acceptance

(all 2014)

New Weird trilogy (assembled as Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy), telling of an anomalous and apparently alien 'Area X', somewhere in Florida. Later filmed as Annihilation (q.v.).



The first novel is the principal subject of one of the anarchySF podcasts.


John Varley // The Golden Globe

(1998)

Prometheus Award winner.
 


Yanis Varoufakis // Another Now. Dispatches from an Alternative Present

(2020)

Very effective science fictional utopia, not anarchist per se (Varoufakis describes himself as a libertarian Marxist), but presenting a well thought out post-capitalist near future (2025), with explicit nods in the direction of anarcho-syndicalism. Not a prescriptive utopia, either, but more ambiguous, like Le Guin's. See Varoufakis's
website
for a fuller account.



One contributor to the Facebook Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, in December 2020, found the book sufficiently interesting that he proposed setting up a discussion group, on this work and "possibly other democratic socialist, utopian visions".


Carrie Vaughn // Bannerless

(2017)

Pleasing YA novel: essentially a whodunnit set in a post-catastrophe California. The world 100 years hence is largely peaceful and agrarian, with an exchange economy and no power hierarchy, although rural communities have administrative committees, and there are specialist investigators who seek resolution in the rare cases of individual transgression (in this case a suspicious death). Not obviously anarchist, but one sort of society that might evolve in an anarchy.



Brian K. Vaughan // Y: The Last Man series

(2003–2008)

10-part dystopian comic book series (later re-released as five volumes), recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction' at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009.
 


Jules Verne // Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870); Magellania (written in 1897, 1st published in 1985); Jules Verne and Michel Verne: The Survivors of the Jonathan (1909 — trans. in 2 vols as The Masterless Man and The Unwilling Dictator)

(1909)

Opinions differ as to Verne's personal sympathies towards anarchism and the extent to which anarchist motifs feature in his novels. Non-anarchists have argued that, especially in later life, Verne leaned towards anarchism, or at least the libertarian end of liberalism. Certainly he knew anarchists—his friend Nadar became one, and he was friendly with Elisée Reclus (through whom he may have been supplied with geographical material for his novel Michael Strogoff by Peter Kropotkin, although William Butcher's 2006 Jules Verne. The Definitive Biography states that Verne's library contained "all of geographer Élisée Reclus's works" (Butcher: 271)); Butcher also suggests that in 1884 Verne may have attended an event in Algiers at which Reclus "proposed a toast to revolutionary Louise Michel and upset local society" (273). It's even been suggested that Verne knew Bakunin, or at least of him, through his publisher Hetzel (Chesneaux: 103–4). Anarchists—foremost among them Hem Day—have pointed to a few biographical data that suggest the contrary: his response to the Paris Commune ("a horrible and grotesque farce"—quoted in Costello: 114); his respectful seeking of an audience with Pope Leo XIII; his 16 years service as a Municipal Councillor in Amiens, during which on one occasion he congratulated the police on their heavy-handed restoration of order after a Council meeting had been disrupted by an anarchist. Day, indeed, considered that "the fact of being a candidate [in the Amiens elections] proves a fortiori that Jules Verne was not an anarchist" (Day 1967: 224) The critic Jean Chesneaux argued at length that "the tendency towards libertarian individualism is deeply embedded in Verne's writings" (103–4); Hem Day replied that "anarchist motives in Jules Verne are transitory" (Day 1967: 226), concluding that Chesneaux was projecting his own view onto Verne. There is certainly, though, a libertarian streak in much of Verne's work.



In Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea Professor Aronnax and his companions are held captive on board the Nautilus, the submarine of the mysterious avenger Captain Nemo, and are shown the wonders of the undersea world. There was at one time a curious story that the book was written, or at least originally conceived, by the Paris Communard Louise Michel (Girault:96, repeated in Planche: 208). Hem Day proved the tale to be completely without foundation, but perhaps, as Gillian Fleming suggested in 1982, the legend itself is significant; apparently unaware of Day, the legend was revived in 2009 by Santo Catanuto (Catanuto 23-31). Chesneaux described this novel as the very novel which, of all Verne's works, carries the clearest indication of anarchist ideas (98-100), which, excepting Magellania / The Survivors of the Jonathan, may be so; however, as Day wrote, "It requires much imagination to deduce such suppositions. . . . To extol the revolt of the individual doesn't imply that the revolt is anarchistic, rather the contrary." Nemo's anarchist ideology—following J. Chesneaux—remains in all respects contestable. (Day 1967: 223) Notwithstanding this, Day himself regarded Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea as "a magnificent work" (Day 1959: 29). Michael Moorcock, too, has described Nemo as one of Verne's "best characters" (Moorcock 1978: 42).



The Survivors of the Jonathan can only be described as SF by interpreting the term at its broadest—it is SF in the sense that all of Verne's voyages extraordinaires are, with much of the utopianist's pleasure in experimenting with political concepts in isolated situations. The story is straightforward: an anarchist, the Kaw-djer, willingly assists the survivors of a shipwreck when they set up a colony near Cape Horn, but refuses to govern or control them in any way; following their failure to organize themselves, he eventually feels constrained to abandon his principles and take absolute command; order being restored, he abdicates and withdraws to a neighbouring island, to nurse his individualism as a lighthouse-keeper. Anarchists are described by Verne—though apparently with some irony—as a "terrible sect" (Arco edn, I:13), "a heterogenous assortment of criminals and mystics. The former, gnawed by envy and hatred, are always prepared for violence and murder; the latter, real poets who dream of a chimerical humanity from whom evil might be banished for ever by the suppression of the laws devised to combat it" (I:17), the Kaw-djer being among the latter. The novel essentially demonstrates the failure of anarchy as a form of social organization, but the Kaw-djer is portrayed so sympathetically that it is hard to resist the conclusion that a form of romantic individualist anarchism was in fact deeply attractive to the writer. I say the writer advisedly, for it was argued—among anarchists by Hem Day—that this novel is actually the work of Verne's son, Michel. Other anarchist commentators, however, seem to have had no idea that its authorship might be open to question. One of Verne's biographers suggested that the figure of the Kaw-djer himself was modelled on Elisée Reclus (Costello: 210); the evidence seems purely conjectural. Michael Moorcock acknowledged that Verne had "put some pretty decent sentiments in the mouth of Kaw-djer the anarchist." The book was discussed at length in Freedom in 1978. John Drake wrote that "Insofar as these can be discovered from the book, Verne's philosophical preference was clearly for anarchism, though he had doubts about its political practicality. . . .Verne felt that anarchism underestimated the limitations imposed by human nature. . . . Verne conceived of anarchism as essentially a philosophy of individualism. He seems to have lacked an awareness of anarchism as a social phenomenon . . . . From the anarchist point of view it is very disappointing that Verne is unaware of the possibilities of libertarian communism, since he thus does not consider it as one of the possible solutions to the Kaw-djer's moral dilemma." Drake also argues that in fact Verne could not have been aware of communist and syndicalist variants of anarchism, and that therefore his singling out of individualist anarchism reinforces the case for that being an expression of Verne's personal inclinations.



In 1977 Verne's original manuscript of Magellania was rediscovered, and the text published in 1985; it was first published in English translation in 1998. It is now clear that The Survivors of the Jonathan was actually Michel Verne's complete re-write of Magellania, commissioned by his father's publisher, Hetzel. Five chapters were deleted from the original, with twenty added chapters by Michel, with a host of new characters. The Kaw-djer remains the central character, however, and the theme of the romantic anarchist giving way to pragmatism was central to Magellania too. According to Olivier Dumas, President of the Jules Verne Society, who wrote the preface to the newly published Magellania, the inspiration for the novel, and for the character of the Kaw-djer, was not an anarchist at all, but the Archduke Johann of Austria—Johann Salvator von Österreich-Toskana—who had renounced his title, taken the name Johann Orth, married a dancer, and been lost at sea in July 1890 while trying to pilot his own ship round Cape Horn. [See Orth Dead Many Times.]


David Cronenberg // Videodrome

(1983)

After the CEO of a small TV station stumbles upon a transmission featuring sadistic violence, layers of deception unfold as he tracks down the source of the signal and loses touch with reality in a series of increasingly surreal, violent, and organically messy hallucinations, featuring television and his own body.
 
Categorised by Glenn as subversive, in his 2015 'Film as Subversion', for whom it "questions the extent of corporate media's pandering and/or manufacturing our basest most deviant desires and how that influences our daily lives".
 
For SFE, "it may have been the most significant SF film of the 1980s, and is certainly—and very early on—the most cyberpunk".
 


Vernor Vinge // 'True Names' (1981); The Peace War (1984); 'The Ungoverned' (1985); Marooned in Realtime (1986); 'Conquest by Default' (1988); A Fire upon the Deep (1992); A Deepness in the Sky (1999)

(1999)

The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime were described, in a mailing to anarchysf, as an anarchist utopia. This is stretching a point. Governments are condemned, but everyone seems to like throwing their weight around.



A Fire upon the Deep features the galactic society of societies, some of which are anarchies and all of which exist in one. "For Vinge, an Anarcho-Capitalist with genuinely Anarchist views, anarchy is not so much a programme as a description of the existing state of affairs. We never emerge from the state of nature, and never can. There are in his world lots of statists, but no States, in the sense of authorities whose claim to legitimacy can be upheld or attacked." (Macleod)
 
'True Names' tied for the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 2007.
 
'The Ungoverned' depicts anarcho-capitalists defending against an invading government. It won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 2004.
 
'Conquest by Default' depicts an alien race in whose culture anything goes, except that an elite caste of 'Umpires' intervenes to break up trusts and prevent the formation of governments.
 
Marooned in Realtime and A Deepness in the Sky were Prometheus Award winners.
 


Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) // 'Micromégas' (1752; first English translation 1753)

(1752)

This work of proto-sf, a satire involving the experience of two alien giants who visit Earth, is referenced in Nettlau's Esbozo (see bibliography).



Kurt Vonnegut // Player Piano (1952); The Sirens of Titan (1959); 'Harrison Bergeron' (1961); Cat's Cradle (1963); Slaughterhouse-Five (1969); Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! (1976); Jailbird (1980); Galápagos (1985)

(1985)

Player Piano is a dystopia in which workers displaced by machines rise up against them, in the manner of the Luddites, but end up trying hard to repair them. Pilgrim found the end "depressing" — hardly surprisingly. "Like much anti-utopian and anarchist writing the problem is stated and analysed efficiently but no solution is found." (Pilgrim 1963: 366) The novel is described by Yanai Sened as prescient, in the way it talks about automation, in the 2021 anarchySF
podcast devoted to Vonnegut; in the same podcast Eden Kupermintz says the novel shows Vonnegut's breadth and versatility.



The Sirens of Titan was said by Arthur Maglin to depict "the construction of a society where no man takes advantage of any other", and to have a big vogue "in hippy-type circles".



'Harrison Bergeron' is a satire on authoritarian dystopias and perceptions of egalitarianism. Suggested at www.metafilter.com/89983/Anarchism-and-science-fiction.



Cat's Cradle centres on ice-nine, a supposed new crystalline structure of water which instantly solidifies any ordinary water with which it comes into context; whilst also featuring a deliberately and overtly bogus religion, Bokononism. Kupermintz, while noting that Bokononism sounds like bullshit, observes that it is based in powerful ideas such as comradeship, sticking together, and the self.



Slaughterhouse-Five is discussed in part of the anarchySF
podcast
on Vonnegut: Kupermintz considers it "extremely good", a "Nobel-level" book. It's included in Libcom.org's reading guide to working class literature.



The podcast also cites Galápagos, in which Sened comments that the author's foregrounding of meaninglessness becomes "a little bit annoying".



Slapstick and Jailbird are the only Vonnegut novels (tagged as sf) held by CIRA, the Centre International de Recherches sur l'Anarchisme. Jailbird is also listed in Libcom.org's reading guide to working class literature.



Vonnegut described himself as a pacifist, an anarchist, and a planetary citizen. (Vonnegut 1981, Granada pb edn: 124)  


w

Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland, eds // Sunvault. Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

(2017)

An attractive solarpunk anthology, predictably well-received by Facebook's Solarpunk Anarchist.


Andrew Stanton // Wall·E

(2008)

Delightful animated rom com, starring a trash-compacting robot, on an abandoned and contaminated Earth, who falls in love with a futuristic robot from a generation starship which had been sanctuary for Earth people until such time as their planet became habitable again; co-starring Wall·E's cockroach companion.
 
As the film also takes a satirical look at consumerism, corporatism, and the impact of the anthropocene, it's less surprising that one contributor to Reddit's list of top films advocating anti-capitalism should have appreciated it than that it was only one.
 


W. Grey Walter // Further Outlook; aka The Curve of the Snowflake

(1956)

The neurologist and pioneer of robotics Grey Walter, father to well-known British anarchist Nicolas Walter, was himself, according to his obituary in Freedom, "an anarchist fellow-traveller during the 1950s and 1960s". Further Outlook, his only novel, is there described as "expressing his utopian vision of a libertarian society" (A.F. 1977). It tells of the early stages in a space programme led by a handful of Britons; the narrative is interrupted for a 70 page account, supposedly written in 2056, of developments in the world, particularly social developments, up to that year. The society is a loosely structured arrangement described as "Statistical Syndicalism", apparently a kind of 21st century guild socialism. The weakness of the book's plot doesn't sustain this utopian digression, which is really of not very great interest.
 


Jo Walton // Ha'penny

(2007)

Tied for the 2008 Prometheus Award. First-class retro thriller set in an alternate Britain of the 1940s, with a plot to assassinate Hitler and the quisling British prime minister. Much understated resonance with the contemporary world.


Byron Haskin // The War of the Worlds

(1953)

Loosely based on the H.G. Wells novel, with quite a few liberties taken.
 
Mark Bould, in his 2005 Socialist Review article, copied to the Anarchy-SF mailing list, notes that "The shrill religiosity of the 1953 film version of War of the Worlds signalled the turn to consolation in the face of a nuclear cold war evident in the 1950s US Protestant revival."
 


Rex Warner // The Wild Goose Chase (1937); The Aerodrome (1941)

(1941)

The Aerodrome is a rather earnest farce concerning a sluggish rural village and a hyperefficient neighbouring aerodrome, examining the fascination of authoritarianism. George Woodcock found this political allegory "ultimately more satisfying than any of Kafka's." (Woodcock 1948)
 
The Wild Goose Chase is also discussed, noncommittally, in Woodcock 1948.
 


Elizabeth Waterhouse // The Island of Anarchy. A Fragment of History in the Twentieth Century

(1887)

Authoritarian governments unite in banishing political dissidents, including anarchists, to Meliora, a volcanic Pacific island (the British government went so far as physically to brand all anarchists with an 'O' for 'Outlaw' before their banishment). After initial strife, the dissidents are persuaded by a Russian prince to adopt "his scheme of a Christian Anarchy—a society of men set free from all outward law, set free, from the bondage of self and of evil desires, because the willing servants of a holy Lord" (p. 88, c. IV). The apostle Paul is quoted, on "the splendid anarchy of the slaves of Christ" (93, c. IV), and the anarchy which is established "was truly a Theocracy" (95, c. IV). These confused ideas of anarchism having been aired, the author has everybody except the prince killed off in a natural disaster.


Stanley G. Weinbaum // 'A Martian Odyssey' (1934); 'Valley of Dreams' (1934); 'The Ideal' (1935)

(1935)

Adam Roberts, in his 2016 2nd edition The History of Science Fiction, notes the '"well-realised anarchist Martians" of 'A Martian Odyssey', which was the first important SF story to treat aliens sympathetically. 'Valley of Dreams' is the sequel: in fact a revision of the first draft of that story, featuring the 'dream-beasts'. It explicitly identifies the Martian polity, or at least that of Tweel's people, as anarchy, and furthermore has one of the Earth explorers defending it as such, describing anarchy as "'the ideal form of government, if it works,'" and government as "'a primitive device'" and "'a confession of weakness'" (1977 Sphere pb edn of A Martian Odyssey and Other Stories, p. 56). Jarvis, anarchy's advocate in the story, does not however expect humans to be advanced enough for its realization on Earth for "'a good many centuries'" (57).
 
'The Ideal' centres on a machine for actualising people's ideals. The story includes a passage in which the machine's inventor proves that "anarchy is the best government"; this proposition, coupled with the inventor's apparent belief that anarchy is compatible with nations and warfare, rather casts doubt on Weinbaum's real understanding of the issue.
 


Andy Weir // The Martian

(2014)

Suspenseful story of an astronaut stranded on Mars, with meticulous scientific and technical detail. Zeke Teflon recommended it highly in his review, summing it up as "the best hard sci-fi novel in ages". Nick Mamatas in The BASTARD Chronicles 2015 commended it as hard SF not overwhelmed by religious allegory.


Ngozi Onwurah // Welcome II the Terrordome

(1995)

Racial conflict and human drama in a future black British mega-ghetto.
 
Included in Bould's Red Planets filmography.
 


H.G. Wells // 'The Stolen Bacillus' (1894); 'The Diamond Maker' (1895); The Island of Dr Moreau (1896); A Modern Utopia (1905); In the Days of the Comet (1906); The World Set Free (1914); Men Like Gods (1923); Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928); Star-Begotten: A Biological Fantasia (1937)

(1937)

Wells the political dabbler never understood the need for harmonising ends and means. Anarchism as a future dream he found attractive, but in the contemporary world he directed his activities to the globalization of the state.



His earliest reference to anarchism was in his 1896 review of Morris's The Well at the Worlds End, in which he recollected discussions at Kelmscott House in the 1880s in which the Chicago Anarchists were much featured. In The Future in America (1906) he recounts the tale of William MacQueen, an anarchist who received a five year sentence in 1902 for his involvement in the Paterson weavers strike, though he had done no more than speak. Wells met MacQueen while in the USA, and was quite taken with him, finding him "much my sort of man" (244). MacQueen, a Tolstoyan, had declined to speak on the same platform as Emma Goldman, whom Wells describes as "a mischievous and violent lady anarchist" (240). Socialism and the Family (1906) was reviewed in Freedom in 1907, the reviewer regretfully concluding that "in Mr Wells we have one more apostle of the State" (7). The conclusion was regretted because there is a notable passage in this book in which Wells speaks of anarchy as an ideal: "One's dreamland perfection is Anarchy . . . . All men who dream at all of noble things are Anarchists in their dreams. . . ." (467) In New Worlds for Old (1909), subtitled A Plain Account of Modern Socialism, Wells distinguishes two kinds of anarchism. One is the perfect ideal described above, which he finds exemplified in the utopias of Morris and Hudson; again, however, he emphasizes that the way to reach it is through education and discipline and law (257). The other is that of the historical anarchist movement, which he absolutely rejects; for him this anarchism is "as it were a final perversion of the Socialist stream, a last meandering of Socialist thought, released from vitalizing association with an active creative experience. Anarchism comes when the Socialist repudiation of property is dropped into the circles of thought of men habitually ruled and habitually irresponsible. . . . Anarchism, with its knife and bomb, is a miscarriage of Socialism, an acephalous birth from that fruitful mother." (253) His 1911 novel The New Machiavelli, not sf, refers to the Chicago anarchists, has a minor character with anarchistic leanings, and was reviewed in Mother Earth—"Wells is always at his best when the politician in him is silenced and the artist allowed to speak" (MB 1911: 215). His realist novel The World of William Clissold (1926) mentions Godwin and Proudhon, and was reviewed in Freedom, whose reviewer appreciated the work as provocative (MacF 1927). In The Open Conspiracy (1930) he took issue with Proudhon's assertion that property is robbery, finding it rather "the protection of things against promiscuous and mainly wasteful use" (76). He had earlier taken similar exception to Proudhon in Socialism and the Family, and did so in two works of 1934: in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind he considers anarchism as the next stage to representative democracy (618), and identifies it as the logical conclusion to the premises of pacifism; and in his Experiment in Autobiography he acknowledges Godwin and Shelley as influences on his own beliefs regarding women, love and marriage (422, 522). In the 1940s Wells was once persuaded to write a piece of prose fiction for George Woodcock's NOW magazine. The work, described by Woodcock as "sadly bumbling", was rejected (Woodcock 1982: 234).



In the early 'The Stolen Bacillus' an anarchist steals a tube of what he believes to be cholera bacillus but is actually a bacterium which makes monkeys come out in blue patches. It is light humour, but very much at the expense of the anarchist, whose portrayal is a classic caricature: he is "slender", "pale-faced" and "morbid", with a "limp white hand", his undiscriminating motive being apparently no more than the revenge of the little man against society.



In 'The Diamond Maker' the inventor of a process for the manufacture of diamonds finds it more a liability than an asset—he is taken for an anarchist, and before long the evening papers describe his den as "the Kentish-Town Bomb Factory."



In The Island of Dr Moreau Moreau, a notorious vivisector sets up his lab on a South Pacific island and attempts to surgically construct humans from animals; as they revert they turn upon and kill Moreau and his collaborator, only the castaway narrator surviving. Woodcock commented on the book a couple of times. He noted the obvious moral about the potential abuse of science, drawing attention to the similarities between this novel and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, not only in theme but in plot. Interestingly, in his 1947 article he viewed The Island of Dr Moreau as a precursor of the twentieth century dystopian novels, for, he says, "the significant and horrible thing in this book is not the physical vivisection by which animals are turned into the semblances of men, but the psychological conditioning by which their minds are made to work in the kind of mass pattern required by the ruler". (49)



A Modern Utopia is Wells's vision of a technologically-developed world state, ruled by an enlightened caste, the Samurai. It is, in his view, a realistic alternative to the too-perfect Nowhere of William Morris. Ethel Mannin found this work (as Wells of course intended) "as ethical and disciplinarian as Plato" (Mannin 1940: 38). For Berneri "Wells commits the faults of his forerunners by introducing a vast amount of legislation into his utopia"; she concluded that "Wells's conception of freedom turns out to be a very narrow one" (Berneri: 295). Woodcock found Wells's proposals "disappointingly unrevolutionary" (Woodcock 1973: 157) and his samurai elite "disturbing" (158). While it is easily the best-informed modern utopia, and a landmark of utopian literature, its political sympathies are not congenial.



In the Days of the Comet concerns a tortured romance before, followed by a happy foursome after, the Earth is brushed by a comet's tail; the whole world is magically transformed. Wells wrote of this novel that he had been "forced by the logic of his premises and even against his first intention to present not a Socialist State but a glorious anarchism as the outcome of that rejuvenescence of the world." (Wells 1909: 256). If so, it's an anarchism more curious than glorious, for the polity is in fact a world state, with written laws.



The World Set Free envisages a nuclear war in 1958, leading to a world state in its aftermath. The novel is included in Clore's Essential Science Fiction and Fantasy for Libertarians.



Men Like Gods is Wells's second utopia, set on a parallel Earth. Government as such withered away about 1000 years before, its place being taken by some discreet coordination of functions coupled with a perfected education. For George Woodcock this is the Godwinian society brought into line with the speculations of Edwardian scientists (Woodcock 1962: 86); but the parallel world treatment, he felt, displayed Wells's pessimism—Utopia can't really be part of our future (Woodcock 1973: 159). Marie-Louise Berneri saw this novel as "Wells's News from Nowhere, a Nowhere which would have been too scientific and streamlined for Morris's taste, but which gets rid of much of the bureaucracy, coercion and moral compulsion that pervade A Modern Utopia" (303). In reality it's the same utopia, but with the authoritarianism better concealed.



In the underrated Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island Blettsworthy spends several years on an island of cannibals, where megatheria still live—except that it all turns out to be his own psychotic delusions. Towards the end, Sacco and Vanzetti feature interestingly in Blettsworthy's relapse: they are transformed into missionaries to the benighted Rampole Island, and all the islanders symbolically share in the guilt of their executioners by partaking sacramentally of their flesh.



Star-Begotten is a very slight late work speculating on the possibility of Martians tampering with evolution on Earth. In c. 8 there is some speculation on a future in which the Martian-influenced homo superior will refuse to fight wars, manufacture armaments, and obey dictators, in which tyrannicide is the norm. This vision is specifically likened to anarchism, and Wells concludes that the Martian influence should be welcomed.



See also Ben Beck's short piece on 'H.G. Wells and anarchism', in Dana, ed.: AnarchoSF V.1.


Corey J. White // Repo Virtual

()

Credible neo-cyberpunk. Featured in an episode of the
anarchySF
podcast in May 2022.



Michael Crichton // Westworld

(1973)

In a near-future theme park based on the American Old West, androids malfunction and begin to kill visitors.
 
The film is discussed at some length by Roderick Long, who found it "a good movie", but with "no aspirations to the narrative complexity and thematic ambition of the HBO series" of 2016.


Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy // Westworld

(TV series 2016→)

Based on the 1973 film.
 
The series was reviewed by Martin van Staden for Being Libertarian. He takes exception to the presentation of the robot hosts as the good guys, when they exercise their newly-awakened consciousness by killing so many humans; and he makes the right-libertarian argument that the hosts, prior to consciousness, can't be regarded as rights-bearing individuals as they don't own themselves, but were simply property.
 


Colson Whitehead // The Intuitionist

(1999)

A bit on the periphery of SF but, as SFE puts it, it "hovers equipoisally between alternate history and fabulation". Included in the Red Planets reading list, where Mark Bould describes it as depicting an alternate America where "race relations are articulated through the science and art of elevator construction and maintenance." Also included in Nisi Shawl's A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction, which was linked to from the Facebook Anarchists and Science Fiction page in 2016.


Jack Gold // Who?; aka Roboman

(1974)

Adapted from the Algis Budrys novel. An American scientist—severely injured in a car accident—is captured by East German military, and has to have his skull replaced in its entirety, so that he seems like a cyborg. Back in the States, where he's needed for a crucial project, the story hinges on whether or not he can be accepted as who he claims to be.
 
Noted by Pierce as an example of a film so bad it disappeared without trace—though really it's watchable (if you can find it), and better than some.


Barry Shear // Wild in the Streets

(1968)

A pop teen idol builds a mass movement, gets the law changed, and winds up President of the USA at the age of 24, implementing the countercultural lifestyle of the era.
 
Included in Bould's Red Planets filmography. Described as "pure anarchy" in a comment at Movies about Anarchy, Rebellion, etc…, while for John J. Pierce at reason.com "the term 'mindless' seems almost too mild for exploitations of current fads like Wild in the Streets . . . ."
 


Oscar Wilde // The Picture of Dorian Gray

(1891)

Gray's portrait ages horribly, while its living subject enjoys an immoral life without aging. Not really sf, but close enough to be bear comparison with Stevenson's slightly earlier Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Agathe Brun, in her chapter 'Wilde and the Victorian Mould: The Artist's Individualism through Anarchy' (in Jeff Shantz, ed.: Literature and the Anarchist Imagination), says of this, Wilde's only novel, that "Wilde highlights the eternal weakness of men: going by appearances. Dorian's beauty and youth give him whatever he wants but his soul is lost and the stupidity of people around him is revealed." More relevantly to anarchism, the chapter considers in greater depth Wilde's non-fiction The Soul of Man under Socialism.


Kate Wilhelm // Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

(1976)

Included in the Think Galactic reading list.
 


Elvia Wilk // Oval

(2019)

In a near-future Berlin, a couple move into an eco-housing community on an artificial mountain. One of the partners invents a drug ('Oval') that promotes generosity, with a view to using it to counteract inequality. All doesn't quite go to plan.



A whole episode of the anarchySF podcast is devoted to this novel.



Jack Williamson // 'The Equalizer' (1947); 'With Folded Hands . . .' (1947)

(1947)

In 'The Equalizer' an interstellar task force returns to earth after 20 years in space, to find the world transformed by the discovery of a cheap and limitless power source—governments and nations have been rendered superfluous in what is, loosely, an anarchist utopia made possible by technology. There is an administration called the Brotherhood, however, subscribed to voluntarily, and with unpaid elected officers, whose functions are exclusively constructive—running schools, hospitals, libraries, &c.
 
Mentioned by Berneri, 'With Folded Hands . . .'—Williamson's classic story of over-protective humanoids making life not worth living could perhaps be read as anarchist if humanoids are taken as a metaphor for government. The story won the 2018 Prometheus Hall of Fame award.


Michael Z. Williamson // Freehold

(2004)

Features an independent planet operating on free market principles. Although there is an initial degree of interest in the society in question, it quickly descends into full-blown military fiction in which the 'free' society appears every bit as unpleasant as the Earth-based enemy. This appears not to be the author's intention, but although the book is well-enough written, and an easy read, the militarism and violence are really distasteful.
 


F. Paul Wilson // Healer (1976); Wheels Within Wheels (1979); An Enemy of the State (1980); Sims (2003)

(2003)

The eponymous Healer uses his gift in a future planetary federation. He becomes the Healer on a planet which had been colonised back in history by a large group of anarchists (actually anarcho-capitalists, but not so described). After a couple of generations the private police forces had got out of hand and tried to set up a feudal state; to prevent this happening again, the colonists had opted for a form of minimal state. There is, at the time of the book's action, no legislature, but a lot of executive, including jail for violent criminals, and even a scientific pillory which measures pain units. At the end the Healer is in a position to be installed as chief executive of the Federation. Happily he retains enough of the anarchist influence to spurn the reins of power.
 
In his 2005 foreword, Wilson says that at the time of writing An Enemy of the State he was "pursuing a personal radicalism based on the anarchocapitalist writings of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard and others." The novel features 'Kyfho', his own "staunchly individualistic, anarchocapitalist philosophy". One chapter has an epigraph from Lysander Spooner's No Treason. The book won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1990.
 
Wheels Within Wheels won the first ever Prometheus Award in 1979. Sims won the 2004 Prometheus Award.


Peter Lamborn Wilson // 'The Alchemy of Luddism'

(2006)

4-page poem/manifesto with SF elements, published in Fifth Estate #373, Fall 2006.
 


Robert Anton Wilson // Schrödinger's Cat

(1979–1981)

Each volume of Wilson's three-book farce is said by the author to take the form of a different interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is multiply-plotted around various political futures, disappearing scientists, the peregrinations of an amputated penis, orgasm research, plutonium-armed terrorists, and so on. Anarchism per se is not central, but there are numerous references to it. Anarchism is said to be similar to nihilism, both in the types it attracted and in its bad reputation, despite its basis in "materialism, skepticism and a fierce demand for social justice" (Vol. I, 1.1, 'The Home Craftsman'). Terrorists are said to be "much like governments in that their chief occupations were murder and extortion," the differences being that terrorist leaders were usually intellectuals, government leaders usually lawyers, that governments, unlike terrorists, printed their own currency, and that terrorists murdered on a small scale, governments on a huge (Vol. I, 1.2, 'Silent Snow, Secret Snow').
 


Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea // Illuminatus!

(1975)

The Illuminatus! trilogy has more to say about more varieties of anarchism than any other work of sf. It's a remarkable display of intersecting paranoid conspiracy theories, interwoven with elements of Verne, Rand and Lovecraft. A number of central characters are anarchists of one form or another. To select two: Simon Moon is a second-generation anarchist, son of an anarchist-pacifist devotee of Tolstoy and an anarcho-syndicalist Wobbly who follows Bakunin; he himself, child of the sixties, has become a Crazy, a yippie-type surrealist anarchist, for whom freedom will come not through love or force, as his parents argue, but through the imagination. He believes that anarchism is only meaningful if it tackles reality itself, holding that reality is "thermoplastic, not thermosetting, you know" (Sphere pb edn, Vol. 1:114) Hagbard Celine shares some common ground with Moon: when asked by Moon to name his game he replies "'Proving that government is a hallucination in the minds of governors'" (1:189); however, although he considers his group to be "'political non-Euclideans'" (1:87), the system he described in his Never Whistle While You're Pissing, often quoted approvingly in Illuminatus, is explicitly anarcho-capitalism; Celine also turns out to be an Illuminatus Primus, amongst other things. More exotically, gorillas and dolphins (one of whom is a character in the book) are all said to be anarchists (II: 29-30), as apparently were the ancient inhabitants of Atlantis (II: 245).



The definition of anarchism apparently favoured by the authors is quoted from Celine's Never Whistle as



"That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege. RIGHT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate. LEFT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete." (III: 72)



In a 1976 interview Wilson said that he and his wife were both convinced in 1961, by reading Kropotkin's article on anarchism in the Britannica. He then read the American libertarian Benjamin Tucker, then all the major anarchists, as well as every issue of Liberty and Mother Earth [Riggenbach]. (Wilson's individualist anarchist ideas were influenced by his friend Laurance Labadie, whose father Joseph Labadie worked with Tucker.) Asked, the same year, whether he leaned more to leftist or rightwing anarchism, he said:



"My trajectory is perpendicular to the left-right axis of terrestrial politics. I put some of my deepest idealism into both the Left anarchism of Simon Moon and the Right anarchism of Hagbard Celine in Illuminatus!, but I am detached from both on another level." (Robert Anton Wilson (1980, 1997) The Illuminati Papers: 67)



Substantial material was cut prior to publication. Wilson said:



"The portion of hard anarchist propaganda in what got cut is perhaps somewhat greater than in what got printed, but I do not attribute that to a government conspiracy. Editors always amputate the brain first and preserve a good-looking corpse. I knew that, and told Shea they'd do it, so we put in so damned much anarchist material that a lot would be left even after the ceremonial castration." (1976 interview)



In 2001 he said:



"I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.



"[. . . ] I tend to shy away from the word anarchist, because most people think it means bomb throwing. And a lot of people who consider themselves anarchists seem to think that too. But I can't use libertarian, because the people who got their grip on that word are even less rational by my standards. I guess "decentralist" is the word I'd have to pick out for myself. Decentralist grassroots Jeffersonian something or other." [Utopia USA interview]



Late in his life he gave his political views as follows:



"My early work is politically anarchist fiction, in that I was an anarchist for a long period of time. I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian. I suppose an anarchist would say, paraphrasing what Marx said about agnostics being "frightened atheists," that libertarians are simply frightened anarchists. Having just stated the case for the opposition, I will go along and agree with them: yes, I am frightened. I'm a libertarian because I don't trust the people as much as anarchists do. I want to see government limited as much as possible; I would like to see it reduced back to where it was in Jefferson's time, or even smaller. But I would not like to see it abolished. I think the average American, if left totally free, would act exactly like Idi Amin. I don't trust the people any more than I trust the government." [Starship]



See also RAW On Anarchism.



For Peter Lamborn Wilson, writing in Fifth Estate in 2007, "Certainly his works belong to the literature of anarchy, like say Alfred Jarry’s or Oscar Wilde’s, if not to the literature of anarchism."



Illuminatus! made quite a few ripples in the anarchist pond when it first appeared. Even Albert Meltzer enjoyed it as an anarchist in-joke, "a cult book for the cynical esotericist, a Gulliver's Travels of the acid age, or just for laughs"; and he generously commented that "Especially after this book, I am not sure one can deny that some at least of the agorists are anarchists; but they are clearly not what we mean by it." (Meltzer 1977:54), and it was jokily awarded the Cienfuegos Press Fiction Award for 1977. Moorcock—who might have been expected to enjoy the joke—responded more coolly, describing it as "a noisy compendium of rather conventional imaginative ideas" (Moorcock 1978: 44).



Co-author Robert Shea summed it up: "It is, among other things, a work of anarchist science fiction." (Shea 1980:20). Tied for the 1986 Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award. Included in Zeke Teflon's Favorite Anarchist Science Fiction Novels.
 


William Windsor // Loma, a Citizen of Venus

(1897)

Utopian novel in which a Venusian emissary convinces an American family of the superiority of his society's ways, as a first step towards the uplifting of Earth's population. The story is vitiated by wagon-loads of pseudo-science centring on magnetism and phrenology, of which the author was an exponent. But if you can get past the nonsense there are quite a few radical ideas there too, not least those centring on "sex and gender issues concerning women's emancipation, marriage, free love, sexuality, and voluntary motherhood", as well as some healthy disrespect for contemporary Christianity. The work is discussed by Brigitte Koenig in her chapter of Davis and Kinna, eds, Anarchism and Utopianism, where it is explicitly treated as an anarchist utopia. Koenig notes that the novel was advertised directly in the American anarchist and sex-reform journal Lucifer, the Light Bearer, in 1898.


Vojtěch Jasný // Wir

(1982)

A good adaptation of Zamyatin's We, made for German TV.
 


Monique Wittig // Les Guerillères

(1969; tr. 1971)

Les Guerillères is a poetic evocation of a band of women fighters for liberation from sexist oppression. It is quoted prominently, but without comment, in Open Road's 1978 article. In its emphasis on the necessary purgative power of destruction as a prerequisite for creation it is close to Bakunin's formula equating the two.
 


Bernard Wolfe // Limbo; aka Limbo 90

(1952, abridged 1961)

Black comedy set in a future in which disarmament is interpreted literally and amputeeism is exalted as the highest form of uncompromising pacifism. For John Pilgrim it is "a complex novel of the manner in which the world's most idealist government inevitably follows the laws of the nature of power." (Pilgrim 1963: 375).
 
The abridged version (Limbo 90) is better.


Jack Womack // Random Acts of Senseless Violence

(1993)

(Main entry is actually by Eden Kupermintz, and appears under Recommended Items, in the sidebar.)



The novel has recently received lengthy treatment by Samantha Bester, in her Freedom article,
Analysis of Law, Legitimacy, Violence and Solidarity in Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence
.


Brian Wood & Riccardo Burchielli // DMZ

(collected edition 2006–2010)

Graphic novel series, recommended by Common Action at the panel 'Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction' at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair in October 2009. Also included in the Think Galactic reading list. The DMZ is the no man's land of Manhattan in the second American civil war.
 


George Woodcock

(--)

Woodcock—best-known for his 1962 book Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, but later a prolific author and significant man of letters in his adopted country of Canada, was an anarchist throughout his life. Among his works were book-length biographical studies of Aldous Huxley (Dawn and the Darkest Hour, 1972) and George Orwell (The Crystal Spirit, 1966), not to mention his biography of William Godwin, Mary Shelley's father (William Godwin: A Biographical Study, 1989). Woodcock became a personal friend of Orwell's, and kept up a correspondence until the latter's death. They were both active members of the Freedom Defence Committee at the time of the 1945 prosecution of four editors of War Commentary for incitement to disaffection; Woodcock was secretary, Orwell vice-chairman.
 


Austin Tappan Wright // Islandia

(1942)

Neither SF nor anarchist, yet this extraordinarily rich utopian novel merits inclusion here, not least because of its discussion by Ursula K. Le Guin in her essay A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be. For Le Guin, "the hinge of the book’s plot and structure" is "to reject the concept of progress as a wrong direction . . ." She continues: "It is easy to dismiss Islandia as a mere fantasy of the Golden Age, naively escapist or regressive. I believe it is a mistake to do so, and that the options it offers are perhaps more realistic and more urgent than those of most utopias." While seeing it as "to some degree a Luddite book", she doesn't go as far as Bob Black (see bibliography), for whom it is a utopia "based on the complete rejection of machine technology."


John C. Wright // The Golden Age

(2002)

Densely written sf, that has been characterised as anarcho-capitalist. The far-future society, the Oecumene, is a sort of utopia for the immensely wealthy. In an interview published the same year as the novel, Wright said that what he was proposing was "a libertarian utopia, blissfully without public property." Asked if the Golden Age was indeed a utopia, he said:
 
"Only compared to our present age. My story has fraud and kidnapping and attempted murder, secrecy and deceptions and espionage and sabotage, as well as crimes for which we do not have names, such [as] mind-rape and mnemonic abductions. So it is not so utopian as to lack all drama.



"But there are no mass-murders, no death camps, no race bigotry, no hate-mongers, and, for that matter, no famine, no disease, no insanity, and no necessary limit to lifespan; I am proposing a government so unobtrusive and so honest that few citizens even realize it exists; the social organization in the Golden Age is entirely voluntary.



"Unlike the utopias of the socialist writers in the 1920's and 1960's, I assume that there is private property, rule of law, and individual freedom, and at least one soldier still ready to stand to arms to defend those freedoms, even if he is ignored and despised by an ungrateful society."



This is the first volume of a trilogy—the others being The Phoenix Exultant and The Golden Transcendence (both 2003).
 
In his blog in 2010 Wright said explicitly that he is not an anarchist.
 


S. Fowler Wright // Spiders' War

(1954)

"It is certainly no Utopia, but it fits fairly closely Fowler Wright's views about how life really ought to be lived. Like so many of his contemporaries, though, the author could not quite believe in his fellow men as fit creatures for an ideal world, and so these tribesmen are credited with telepathic powers, taking decisions by means of telepathic plebiscite. (There is no governmental structure in this Libertarian society, nor any bureaucracy or police force.)" (Stableford: 285)
 
A curiosity, with credible giant spiders and an almost sympathetic portrayal of human cannibalism. Lawless and vaguely libertarian, but impersonally amoral.


Philip Wylie // The Disappearance

(1951)

The disappearance is of males and females from each other's worlds, a sudden and inexplicable event which allows Wylie to examine conditioned sex roles and stereotyping with some degree of perception. For Pilgrim this brilliant book was "one of the most convincing diagnoses of the ills of human society with which I have met." (368).
 


John Wyndham // The Day of the Triffids (1951); The Kraken Wakes (1953); The Chrysalids (1955; vt Re-Birth

(1955)

The Day of The Triffids is a well-known disaster story centring on murderous plants. In The Kraken Wakes 4/5 of the world population dies from the onslaught of aliens who invade the ocean deeps. Both novels were named by D.R. in Freedom's 1958 review of Maine's The Tide Went Out, as earlier examples of the same genre.



The Chrysalids centres on the escape from persecution of a group of mutant telepaths. Zeke Teflon, in his list of Notable Atheist Science Fiction Novels, describes it as "A nicely written
early post-apocalyptic tale of religious ignorance, arrogance, and brutality, and escape from it."


x

Bryan Singer // X-Men

(2000)

A handful of mutants with superhuman powers are fearfully distrusted by normal humans. Two mutants are drawn into a conflict between two groups of mutants that have radically different approaches to bringing about the acceptance of mutant-kind.
 
Enthusiastically reviewed in Osborne's Guide (see bibliography). He finds three elements that libertarians will like: 1) the dominant social tolerance theme, 2) that "this is a terrific parable for the way government divides people"; and 3) Osborne's perceived parallel between the film's proposed registration of mutants, and the real world's registration of guns (once again the crazy American obsession with gun-ownership!).


Bryan Singer // X-Men: Days of Future Past

(2014)

The superhero Wolverine travels back in time to 1973 to change history and prevent an event that would, by 2023, enable an army of robotic 'sentinels' to eliminate all mutants from the face of the Earth.
 
Reviewed in 2014 by Margaret Killjoy, who found it "a really good movie", but "as pacifist as a nun in a Gandhi costume", which for Killjoy was disappointing: "I just don’t understand why killing is presented as always wrong".
 
 
 


y

Michael Elliott // The Year of the Sex Olympics

(1968)

A future in which lowest common denominator TV is used to distract the mass audience, the slogan being 'Watch, Not Do!' Wooden acting and clunky direction in a low-budget BBC production, only redeemed by its prescient anticipation of reality TV.
 
Included in Mark Bould's Red Planets filmography.
 


Michael Young // The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033: The New Elite of Our Social Revolution

(1958)

The Rise of the Meritocracy takes the form of a report on the subject written by a historical sociologist in 2033. The narrator fully supports the meritocratic system, the author tacitly does not; this results in the case for meritocracy being well-presented, the case against only as well supplied as the reader can imagine unaided. Thus as a dystopia (as which it is intended) it is perhaps over-subtle.
 
It was reviewed at some length in Freedom in 1959, raising for Norman Rush the question
 
"Under what conditions does natural excellence serve the species, and not rise into a hostile and dangerous agency? A human answer can only be elaborated out of libertarian devices—the division of labour in time, the mixture of species of work, territorial contraction of authority and rotation in office, new engines of democratic initiative and appeal, competition in excellence and benefit. Is there any course open to egalitarians other than beginning at once, outside politics, with serious demonstrations in work, education, and leisure of the possibilities of a free and reasonable life?"



Young had only recently died at the time Colin Ward and David Goodway's Talking Anarchy was first published. This prompted four pages on Young and his most famous work. Ward paraphrased Young as reflecting, in a 2001 Guardian article, that "Too much of what I predicted has become horribly true". The authors also drew attention to Young's other significant activity in Britain, as the initiator of organisations such as the Consumers' Association, the Advisory Centre for Education, and the Mutual Aid Society. Young's political beliefs were socialist, not anarchist, and in 1978 he accepted a life peerage.
 


z

Michael Campus // Z.P.G. (aka Zero Population Growth)

(1971)

In a smog-bound overpopulated future, the world's authorities proclaim a 30-year moratorium on procreation, breach of which constitutes a capital crime. Would-be parents are provided with animatronic surrogate offspring. A couple flouts the law.
 
Osborne (see bibliography), while finding the film dated and low-budget, considers it "nonetheless interesting thanks to an imaginative story."


Yevgeny Zamyatin // We (1920), The Dragon and Other Stories (1966)

(1966)

A reviewer in the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review in 1976 described Zamyatin as "one of the most important political satirists in modern times. One of the last thinking writers of any talent that Russia has produced."
 
We, the most original of the anti-utopias, describes a walled-in total-control One State of rationality which stringently excludes the human factor. The central character, D-503, the inventor of the Integral, discovers some atavistic tendencies in himself, wavers towards rebellious elements, but finally undergoes the operation for removal of his fantasy centre, and watches unmoved as his rebel mistress is vaporised. However it's not certain that the wider revolution doesn't finally succeed in overthrowing the state and transporting humanity rather than sterility to the stars via D-503's Integral.
 
Marie-Louise Berneri drew an optimistic conclusion from the book, in that it shows the weakness of totalitarianism, for "A thousand years of propaganda have not succeeded in transforming men into perfect machines; an operation on their brain is necessary to carry this out." (Berneri 1950: 316) Colin Ward and George Woodcock, among others, commented on the debts of Huxley and Orwell to Zamyatin, probably considerable in the case of Orwell. P.R. in 1977 described We as "a scathing futuristic satire on the emerging Bolshevik state"; but Zamyatin was imprisoned by the Tsarists before he was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, and the satire has a wider application (a similar mistake has often been made in respect of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four). Woodcock summed up Zamyatin's masterpiece as "the first novel of literary importance to present a relatively complete vision of the negative results of the realization of Utopia." (Woodcock 1966: 170). It won the Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1994. It has been suggested that We may have been an influence on Ayn Rand's Anthem, but the evidence is circumstantial at best [Saint-Andre]. Notably, Ursula K. Le Guin in 1973 described We as "the best single work of science fiction yet written" ('The Stalin in the Soul', in her essay collection The Language of the Night [1979]). The novel is recommended by Zeke Teflon, for whom it is "remarkably prescient", and "a great dystopian novel."
 
Zamyatin's 1966 collection was reviewed in Black Flag in 1975, and the review was reprinted in the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review in 1977. R.P. described these stories as "bitter jabs in the face of authority, orthodoxy and tradition". Of these stories, however, only one—'A Story about the Most Important Thing' (1927)—is regarded as SF.


George Zebrowski // Macrolife (1979; rev. 1990)

(1979)

Ambitious novel, set consecutively in (a then future) 2021, 3000, and a hundred billion years in the future: Stapledonian in scale.



Much admired by Wally Conger, for whom it was one of his Top Ten Sci-Fi Liberty Novels. He wrote:



"Macrolife suggests futures beyond this planet, beyond Old World cultures, beyond governments, beyond authoritarian institutions. It’s utopian but acknowledges the dangers of utopianism. For radical libertarians, freedom-seeking secessionists, and anarcho-transhumanists, it’s worth reading, studying, and seriously discussing."


Terry Gilliam // The Zero Theorem

(2013)

A reclusive computer geek is commissioned by 'The Management' to work on a formula which would prove that life has no meaning. Very much in the vein of Brazil. Eccentric, humorous, but darkly bleak.
 
Listed by Glenn, in the BASTARD chronicles, as a subversive film dealing with individual alienation. 
 


Misc.

Terry Gilliam // 12 Monkeys

(1995)

A time traveller sent back to 1996 to trace the source of a virus that had wiped out five billion people is haunted by his childhood memory of seeing the fatal shooting of his own adult self. A feature-length re-envisioning of Chris Marker's 1962 short La Jetée.



One contributor to the Anarchism and Science Fiction Forum, in November 2016, listed this film alone as his idea of the best SF ever committed to film.


Stuart Paton // 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

(1916)

Respected adaptation of the Verne novel, also incorporating elements from The Mysterious Island.



Described by Mark Bould, in Red Planets, as "The only adaptation of Jules Verne's novel to emphasise Nemo's anticolonialism."


Stanley Kubrick // 2001: A Space Odyssey

(1968)

Follows a voyage to Jupiter in a spacecraft under the control of the sentient computer HAL 9000, after the discovery of a mysterious black monolith that apparently nurtures human evolution. The best and most significant SF film yet made.



Schembrie's 'Science Fiction and Libertarianism' draws attention to the anti-government aspect, in that "the government so badly botches an attempt to contact extraterrestrials that the spaceship computer kills the crew."


Chandler Tuttle // 2081

(2009)

Excellent short adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron', featuring one individual's rebellion against a dystopian US reductio ad absurdum in which the drive for 'equality' has been so total that a 'handicapper general' ensures all physical and mental aptitudes are forcibly reduced to the lowest common denominator.
 
Reviewed enthusiastically by Alex Peak, for whom this is "a simply-breathtaking libertarian short film." Peak says the film is not about any authentic concept of equality: "Rather, this is an objectively authoritarian perversion of equality, the real aim of which is the subjugation by the state of its subjects, and the obliteration of individualism. Fortunately, the state turns out to be incapable of entirely destroying the extraordinary." This is a rather rose-tinted view, however, of the film's bleak ending.
 
 


Coded with verve using Jekyll, Tailwind CSS, and GitHub