CLORE Dan
Anarchist and Libertarian Societies in Science Fiction
June 2001
Additions,corrections, and additional information are solicited and can be sent to .
Poul ANDERSON
The Last of the Deliverers (1957)
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.
The Winter of the World ( ). ?
No Truce with Kings (1963). ?
ANONYMOUS.
Visit Port Watson! (1985)
(http://www.sonsorol.org/port_watson.html) The editors (Rudy RUCKER, Peter Lamborn WILSON, and Robert Anton WILSON) of the Semiotext(e) SF issue were unable to obtain any works of "radical utopian vision" from their contributors, so they reprinted this piece from a magazine called Libertarian Horizons: A Journal for the Free Traveler. This is a fictional description of the (real) Pacific island Sonsorol combining ideas from libertarian socialism, libertarian capitalism, and the marginals milieu.
C.R. ASHBEE
The Building of Thelema (1910).
A utopian romance influenced by William MORRIS.
Iain M. BANKS
Culture series:
Consider Phlebas (1987),
Player Of Games (1988),
Use Of Weapons (1990),
Excession (1996),
Look To Windward (2000).
A socialist-anarchist society has been created through the use of nanotechnology to eliminate scarcity. BANKS is very popular at the moment.
L. Frank BAUM
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).
In the sequels Oz gradually evolves into a state-socialist utopia. The series is worth citing here because it reveals how conceptions of socialism have changed, as Oz has an interesting mix of authoritarian and libertarian features (BAUM was influence both by BELLAMY'S Looking Backward and by MORRIS'S News from Nowhere). In the sixth novel, The Emerald City of Oz (1910), BAUM writes: "There were no poor people in the Land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money, and all property belonged to the Ruler [the Fairy Queen Ozma]. The people were her children, and she cared for them. Each person was given freely by his neighbors whatever he required for his use, which is as much as any one may reasonably desire. Some tilled the lands and raised great crops of grain, which was divided equally among the entire population, so that all had enough. There were many tailors and dressmakers and shoemakers and the like, who made things that any who desired them might wear. Likewise, there were jewelers who made ornaments for the person, which pleased and beautified the people, and these ornaments also were free to those who asked for them. Each man and woman, no matter what he or she produced for the good of the community, was supplied by the neighbors with food and clothing and a house and furniture and ornaments and games. If by chance the supply ever ran short, more was taken from the great storehouses of the Ruler, which were afterward filled up again when there was more of an article than the people needed.
"Every one worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have something to do. There were no cruel overseers set to watch them, and no one to rebuke them or to find fault with them. So each one was proud to do all he could for his friends and neighbors, and was glad when they would accept the things he produced.
"You will know, by what I have told you here, the Land of Oz was a remarkable country. I do not suppose such an arrangement would be practical with us, but Dorothy assures me that it works finely with the Oz people."
In Oz, furthermore, there is no police force and the Royal Army of Oz has but a single soldier. (This soldier doubles as the Police Force of Oz when it becomes required in the eighth volume, though this has never been necessary before.) Oz is contrasted to contemporary America. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em never recover financially from the loss of their house in the first volume's cyclone, and by the sixth volume the bank forecloses on their farm. Fortunately Dorothy is able to convince Ozma to bring them to Oz to live.
Barrington J. BAYLEY
Annihilation Factor (1964)
Includes the character Castor KRAKHNO, based on Nestor MAKHNO.
Edward BELLAMY
Equality (1897)
This sequel to Bellamy's well-known authoritarian socialist utopia Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888) attempts to revise it in accord with libertarian, feminist, and other criticisms.
John Davis BERESFORD
What Dreams May Come … (1941).
Dream vision of a non-mechanical, religious utopia.
Louky BERSIANAK
The Euguellionne (1976) ?
Eando BINDER
Giants of Anarchy (1939) ?
Robert BLATCHFORD
The Sorcery Shop: An Impossible Romance (1907).
Fantasy novel influenced by News from Nowhere.
Edward BULWER-LYTTON.
The Coming Race; or, The New Utopia (1870).
The narrator discovers a society living in caverns deep underground in this satirical novel. This society is organized along lines that satirize Charles FOURIER and other libertarian socialists; work is assigned according to personal taste, for example, so that children - who of course love to smash things - are given the job of destroying the dangerous giant reptiles that inhabit the wilder regions of the underground world. Work is accomplished through the use of the Vril, a sort of sexual energy force, through which the Vril-ya (as they are known) can power machinery and fly. Any one of them could also use it to destroy any of the others, or even the entire race, so none of them can take power over the others.
William S. BURROUGHS.
While BURROUGHS' work is primarily dystopian, a few anarchistic utopian societies do show up.
In The Wild Boys (1969), 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 (1981) includes material about several attempts to found libertarian societies, including Libertalia (see under Daniel DEFOE) and a group of Rimbaud-reading, dope-smoking, homosexual Zen gunslingers in the Wild West. Ghost of Chance (1991) stars Captain Mission and his pirate utopia Libertalia.
CASSIUS MINOR
The Finding of Mercia (1909).
A. Bertram CHANDLER
The Anarch Lords (1981).
A former space pirate is punished by being made governor of the anarchist planet Liberia.
Alexander CHAYANOV
The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia (1920; translated 1976).
Libertarian socialist utopia set in 1984. The translation first appeared in the Journal of Peasant Studies.
Nikolai CHERNYSHEVSKY
What Is To Be Done? (1862; first book publication 1905).
Portrays a libertarian socialist utopia.
Ivan CHTCHEGLOV
Formulary for a New Urbanism (1953).
A brief, bizarre vision of a libertarian socialist city in which everyone will have his own cathedral and "There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love". Available in Ken KNABB'S Situationist International Anthology (1981).
Curt CLARK (pseudonym of Donald E. WESTLAKE)
Anarchaos (1967).
A sensationalistic account of a planet where anarchy is chaos, and everyone is your enemy.
Steve CULLEN
The Last Capitalist: A Dream of a New Utopia ( RU - 1996). ?
Cyrano DE BERGERAC.
Other Worlds: The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun (published posthumously in 1657, first unexpurgated edition 1920). ?
Daniel DEFOE (as Captain Charles JOHNSON).
A General History of the Pyrates (1724-28).
Includes an account of Libertalia or Libertatia, a pirate colony in Madagascar founded by one Captain Misson (or Mission) and run along libertarian socialist lines. It also describes a purely anarchistic breakaway colony. This account is most likely fictional, although the rest of the book is nonfiction (see Peter Lamborn WILSON'S Pirate Utopias).
Joseph DÉJACQUES
L'Humanisphère: utopie anarchique (The Humanisphere: An Anarchistic Utopia) (1858-61; first nexpurgated edition 1971).
A walk-through description of the world in the year 2858, after the abolition of the state, religion, property, and the family. (Has an English translation appeared?)
Samuel DELANY
(http://www.pcc.com/~jay/delany/).
Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia; or, Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus (1976).
Philip K. DICK.
The Last of the Masters (1954).
After two hundred years of anarchy, the Anarchist League fights off an attempt by the last surviving government robot to restore the state.
Denis DIDEROT.
Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (published posthumously in 1796).
A fictional depiction of the inhabitants of Tahiti as stateless, naked natives copulating under the sun.
Paul DIFILIPPO
Any Major Dude -in-New Worlds, n°1, 1991 ?
Jane DOE
Anarchist Farm (1995 - Canada 1996).
Sequel to George ORWELL'S Animal Farm.
J.G. ECCARIUS
We Should Have Killed the King (1990).
Greg EGAN
Distress (1995).
Portrays an anarcho-syndicalist society on the artificial island Stateless in the Pacific. The inhabitants mostly ignore anarchist thinkers like PROUDHON and BAKUNIN; they maintain a state of anarchy by educating children in sociobiology.
Chaff -in-Interzone #78, December 1993
Homer Eon FLINT
The Queen of Life (1919).
The feeble humanoid inhabitants of Venus have encased the planet in a glass sphere and live in a state of anarchy. (Available online: http://purple.home.texas.net/etexts/QueenOfLife/default.html)
Michael F. FLYNN. ?
Gabriel DE FOIGNY
A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis; or, The Southern World (1676).
The hermaphroditic inhabitants of Australia have no state, no property, no religion, and no family .
Charles FOURIER
Usually considered the founder of the libertarian wing of socialism, FOURIER deserves mention here because his writings often contain fantastic elements. Once FOURIER'S socialism is established, men will grow to seven feet tall and live 144 years. The moon will be replaced by five new satellites, each a different color, and some Saturn-like rings, which will allow it to once again copulate with the other planets, which will all move closer to the Earth in order to engage in this planetary orgy. The oceans will turn to lemonade. One idea frequently attributed to FOURIER, however - that men will grow prehensile tails with an eye and a finger on the end - is apparently really the invention of a satirist. FOURIER often uses a semi-fictional form to describe his ideal society.
George FOY
The Memory of Fire (2000).
Governments and corporations wage war against anarchist enclaves.
GANPAT (pseud: Martin Louis GOMPERTZ).
Harilek: A Romance of Modern Central Asia (1923). ?
Bert GARSKOF.
The Canbe Collective Builds a Be-Hive (1977). ?
Martin Louis GOMPERTZ. See under GANPAT
Rex GORDON
Utopia 239 (1955).
An anarchist utopia in a post-nuclear holocaust world.
Robert GRAVES
Seven Days in New Crete ( ). ?
George GRIFFITH
The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893).
An anarchist invents the airplane and puts this at the disposal of Terrorists. They bomb the existing governments out of existence, and maintain the world's new socialist-anarchist society by coming out of hiding in Aëria, their African stronghold. (Available online here:
http://www.ffutures.demon.co.uk/ff7/angel.htm and here:
http://www.blackmask.com/books29c/angelrevdex.htm)
In the sequel, Olga Romanoff; or, The Syren of the Skies (1894), which takes place in 2030, a hundred years after the events of the preceding novel, the descendant of the last Tsar manages to discover the secret behind advanced technology like airplanes and submarines. Just as she has nearly attained world domination, the Aërians receive news from Mars that a comet is about to strike earth. They go into hiding underground, and return to rebuild their anarchist society after the comet wipes out all life on the surface. (Available online here:
http://www.ffutures.demon.co.uk/ff7/olga.htm)
Joe HALDEMAN
Buying Time ( ). ?
Edmond 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".
Harry HARRISON.
The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted (1987 ).
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."
M. John HARRISON
(MOORCOCK mentions that he is a libertarian.)
The Centauri Device (1975).
Robert HEINLEIN
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966).
Portrays a society similar to anarcho-capitalism, the origin of the phrase "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" (TANSTAAFL) - which is very popular with those who pay for their lunches with the products of other people's labor.
James P. HOGAN
Voyage from Yesteryear (1982 )
Cecilia HOLLAND
Floating Worlds (1975).
A worldwide anarchist culture in the year 3000+.
Aldous HUXLEY
This author's Brave New World (1932) stands with Yevgeny ZAMIATIN'S We (1924) and George ORWELL'S 1984 (1949) as one of the three greatest dystopian works. (By some strange coincidence, all three of these are by authors sympathetic to libertarian socialism.) HUXLEY states that it "started out as a parody of H.G. WELLS' Men Like Gods, but gradually it got out of hand". In Brave New World Revisited (1958) he presents libertarian socialism as an antidote, mentioning anarcho-syndicalism as one possible model. Island (1962) presents Huxley's own anarchistic utopia.
Muriel JAEGER
The Question Mark (RU - 1926).
Libertarian socialist utopia.
Malcolm JAMESON
The Anarch (1944). ?
Captain Charles JOHNSON. See under Daniel Defoe.
James Patrick KELLY
Mr. Boy (ÉU -1990). ?
Rudyard KIPLING
As Easy as A.B.C. (1912).
Sequel to With the Night Mail (1905).
Cyril KORNBLUTH
The Syndic (1953) ?
Sterling F. LANIER
Menace under Marswood (1983).
The UN wages war against anarchist tribes on a terraformed Mars.
Ursula LEGUIN
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974).
An attempt to portray a socialist-anarchist society in full, with both its good and bad features readily apparent. Widely popular among anarchists today, but many pro-capitalists consider this an unambiguous dystopia. On Anarres, moon of the planet Urras, there is a society founded on the philosophy of Odonianism, a synthesis of Taoism and anarcho-syndicalism. (See the study guide here:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/dispossessed.html)
"The Day before the Revolution" (1974) concerns Odo, founder of Odonianism, the mix of anarcho-syndicalism and Taoism portrayed in The Dispossessed. Odo is, furthermore (according to LeGuin), one of "The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas" (1973) and refuse to benefit from a system in which some gain at another's expense. In her introduction to the story in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975) LeGuin says, "Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by SHELLEY and KROPOTKIN, GOLDMAN and GOODMAN. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories." LeGuin also states that "To embody [anarchism] in a novel, which had not been done before, was a long and hard job for me, and absorbed me totally for many months." This could be criticized on a couple of grounds: first, only one-half of her novel takes place on an anarchistic world; second, she was preceded by Joseph DÉJACQUES, William MORRIS, H.G. WELLS, and others. The story is dedicated to Paul GOODMAN'S memory.