Joe Haldeman: Buying Time

? (Dan Clore)

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)

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.”’ (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.

M. John Harrison: The Centauri Device (1975)

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).

Robert A. Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

Heinlein was of the libertarian right, and has been treated harshly by anarchist critics. John Pilgrim saw him as ‘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 then if it were Heinlein they were reading. Heinlein’s later stories, especially, he described as paternalistic, xenophobic, misanthropic, and anti-libertarian.

   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. Like most revolutions the lunar one only results in a substitution at the top.

Theodor Hertzka: Freeland: A Social Anticipation (1893), A Visit to Freeland (1893)

Non-statist libertarian utopia.

James P. Hogan: Voyage from Yesteryear (1982)

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 planets social system is essentially anarchy, but details are not dwelt upon. 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.

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. Earths 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'. (19)

Lizzie M. Holmes. ‘World’s Exposition in the Year 2,000’ (1896)

‘A brief portrayal of an anarchist future. First published in The Rebel. Available online at www.alf.org/alfnews/alf72.html’. (Dan Clore)

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.

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932), After Many a Summer (1939), Ape and Essence (1948), Island 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.

   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).

   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). 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), Morrows Ants (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), Terrorist and Terrorism (1975), and his final work, unfinished at his death, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His Revolutionary Life, Mind and Works (1979).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 Morrows 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.