One of my first Mastodon posts was a request:
Looking for recommendations about speculative Fiction (SF/F, pref. short stories, but novels are fine) set in anarchist communities or dealing with anarchist themes (but not le Guin - I know and love all her work)
Here’s a quick list of the responses (so far):
- Albion - by Brenda Vale (my own contribution to the list, which I wrote about here, and obviously The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin, and I’d already specified that I was very familiar with le Guin’s work)
- A Half-Built Garden - by Ruthanna Emrys
- Walkaway - by Cory Doctorow
- The Culture novels - by Iain M. Banks
- The Red Mars trilogy - by Kim Stanley Robinson
- News From Nowhere - by William Morris
- The Inhabited Island - by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
- And Then There Were None - by Eric Frank Russell (also published as part of his novel The Great Explosion)
- The Green Child - by Herbert Read
- The Long Earth - by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
- The Six Cities - by Cyrus Bales
- The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion and A Country of Ghosts - by Margaret Killjoy
- The Last Girl Scout and the related short story collection Lead And Roses: Love Songs At The End Of The World - by Natalie Ironside
- The Commonweal novels - by Graydon Saunders
- Record Of A Spaceborn Few - by Becky Chambers
- The Fifth Sacred Thing - by Starhawk
- The Fall Revolution novels, in particular The Cassini Division and The Stone Canal - by Ken Macleod
- Woman on the Edge of Time - by Marge Piercy
- Parable of the Sower - by Octavia Butler
I’d already read and enjoyed a few of them (some of Banks’ Culture novels, Chambers’ Record Of A Spaceborn Few and sequels).
As a result of this list I’ve recently read — and can thoroughly recommend — A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys, and I’m now about halfway through Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, which I’m also finding very interesting.
Finally I also found this blog post — Anarchist Science Fiction: Essential Novels — from 2019 on the blog of anarchist publisher PM Press (on investigation it looks like it was reposted or syndicated from the See Sharp Press blog where it was originally published in 2013, so can be forgiven for missing out books from the past decade!)
Update: I have created an Anarchism in Fiction list on the fediverse at BookWyrm.social if you'd like to keep up to date with additional books I discover
