Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (a.k.a. Tiger! Tiger!) (1956)

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 . . .’ (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)

Eando Binder: Giants of Anarchy (1939)

? (Dan Clore)

Robert Blatchford: The Sorcery Shop: An Impossible Romance (1907)

Fantasy novel influenced by News from Nowhere. (Dan Clore)

James Blish: A Case of Conscience (1953); They Shall Have Stars (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. 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.

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 in two issues of Freedom.

John Brunner: Shockwave Rider (1975)

Brunner, interviewed in 1979, said that “if you had to classify me, you'd have to put me in some vague area like ‘fellow-travelling idealistic anarchist.”’ For Lessa, Takver & Alyx, writing in Open Road in 1978, the ‘anarchist city Precipice’ of this work ‘appears like a jewel in a sea of horror’. (13) Congenial and professedly anti-authoritarian as Precipice may be, it cannot fairly be described as anarchist, given that it supports sheriff, mayor, courts, lawyers, and a judicial code with mandatory sentences.

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.

Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1962); 1985 (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).

William S. Burroughs: The Wild Boys (1969), Cities of the Red Night (1981), Ghost of Chance (1991)

‘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)

Octavia E. Butler: Parable of the Sower (1994), Parable of the Talents (1999)

These two books chart the rise of a (religious) movement based on mutual aid amid an apocalypse in the United States.