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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)
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Joseph Déjacque:
L’Humanisphère: utopie anarchique (The Humanisphere: An Anarchistic Utopia)
(1858-61; first
unexpurgated edition 1971)
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Samuel Delany: Dhalgren (1974); Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia; or, Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus (1976; originally entitled Triton)
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.
Philip K. Dick: ‘The Last of the Masters’ (1954)
In this early story 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.
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.
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)
Vittorio Curtoni, writing in 1978, considered Camp Concentration to be "very fine".
'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.
Cory Doctorow: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), Little Brother (2008)
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'.
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. The sequel, Homeland, is scheduled for publication in February 2013.
Jane Doe: Anarchist Farm (1995)
Very entertaining animal fable sequel to Orwell’s Animal Farm; not actually sf.
Henry S. Drayton: In Oudemon: Reminiscences of an Unknown People by an Occasional Traveller (1901)
Egalitarian, anarchist utopia.
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L. Timmel Duchamp: The Marq’ssan Cycle – Alanya to Alanya (2005), Renegade (2006), Tsunami (2007), Blood in the Fruit (2007), Stretto (2007)Included in Killjoy’s list 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). 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.
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