E.C. Large: Dawn in Andromeda (1956)

New society without priest or politician built from scratch on an uninhabited planet.

Ursula K. Le Guin: ‘The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas’ (1973), The Dispossessed. An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) , ‘The Day before the Revolution’ (1974), ‘Sur’ (1982), Always Coming Home (1985)

In a 2008 interview Ursula LeGuin stated that she does not consider herself an anarchist, because 'I entirely lack the activist element'. But when asked if she minded that a lot of anarchists claimed her, in approximately the same way they claimed Tolstoy, her response was 'Of course I don't mind! I am touched and feel unworthy.' (strangers, 2008)

  The Dispossessed concerns two worlds, one moon to the other, with vastly differing political systems. One of these is ‘Odonianism’, a form of Taoist anarchist communism. For Le Guin, anarchism ‘is the most idealist, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.’ (Le Guin, ‘Introduction’ to The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975). She is well-versed in the historical anarchist tradition (especially Kropotkin, Goodman, and Bookchin), and this shows. The utopia itself is ‘ambiguous’ because flawed and mutable. The novel succeeds in presenting the most believable, and perhaps the best, exploration of anarchism in a science fiction context, of any yet written. (A study guide is available online: www.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/dispossessed.html

   ‘The Day before the Revolution’ tells of Odo herself, the founder of Odonianism. Odo is also one of ‘The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas’, refusing to benefit from a system in which some gain at the expense of another.

    In Always Coming Home the Kesh, a far-flung future people are, in their absence of formal hierarchy, 'fundamentally anarchistic'; 'LeGuin offers a significant challenge to the outrageous (yet all too common) claim that capitalism represents the unalterable destiny of humanity.' (Call, 2002)

Brad Linaweaver: Moon of Ice (1988)

Alternate history in which Germany won World War II, and a daughter of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, has become a renowned revolutionary anarchist. Hilda Goebbels likens her own disillusionment with Germany with Emma Goldman's Disillusionment with Russia. Well-written, but the story-line is disappointing. The author is prone to suggesting that as an anarchist Goebbels should share his romantic view of the American dream.

Brad Linaweaver and Edward E. Kramer, eds: Free Space (1997)

‘An anthology of (mostly original) libertarian capitalist short stories.’ (Dan Clore)

Brad Linaweaver and J. Kent Hastings: Anarquía. An Alternate History of the Spanish Civil War (2004)

This is something genuinely new, and without real precedent that I know of. The premise is that, instead of being squeezed out of the equation, the Spanish anarchists prevail, thanks to an alternate Wernher von Braun, who - with Hedy Lamarr - designs a rocket-based weapon which he puts in their hands. Prominent in the novel, too, are George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Konrad Zuse, and an imaginary pulp science fiction writer. The book is so well-researched, and the mise-en-scène so comparatively unfamiliar, that it is easy to suspend disbelief, in uncertainty as to what relates to our history and what to the alternate history presented.

   In the course of the narrative there is much discussion of the various flavours of anarchism active in Spain of the 1930s, not to mention the agorism that hadn't yet been invented in our history.

   The book ends all too quickly - almost before it's really got going - but there is a suggestion of a sequel in the offing, which is definitely something to look forward to.

   Take a look at the official website, for more on this.

Stephen Lister: Hail Bolonia! (1948).

? (Dan Clore)

Saab Lofton: A.D. (1996)

An inhabitant of a dystopia ruled by the Nation of Islam and the White Aryan Resistance becomes a sleeper who wakes in a Libertarian Socialist Democracy (LSD). ‘What a libertarian socialist democracy means is that we have the social policies of a libertarian, the fiscal policies of a socialist, and everything is decided by direct democracy.’ (135)

Jack London: The Iron Heel (1907) 

London had knowledge of the anarchist movement of his time, writing sympathetically here of the Haymarket martyrs (‘ferocious and wanton judicial murder’ – Penguin edn: 163), greatly admiring Louise Michel, and encountering Emma Goldman in person in 1897 and 1909. Goldman wrote that ‘As the artist he did not fail to see the beauties of anarchism, even if he did insist that society would have to pass through socialism before reaching the higher stage of anarchism.’ (Goldman 1931: 468) He was asked to write a preface for Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, which he did, though it was then refused, as he had taken the opportunity to propound the superiority of his own views over those of the anarchists. The Iron Heel is written as a contemporary account of the abortive coming revolution and the oligarchy that suppresses it, with a commentary by a supposed historian 700 years hence, written after the triumph of socialism. It has attracted and irritated anarchist critics in roughly equal measure. Vigné dOcton, in 1922, for example, wrote that There are, one could say,pages of Jack London which could have been signed by Kropotkin, others which evoke the generous spirit, ardent and clairvoyant at the same time, of Reclus, of Bakunin, of Proudhon, of all those who, disgusted and indignant at the cruelties of capitalist and bourgeois society, engaged in the implacable struggle against the bosses and gods which are its incarnation. It was worth being read and re-read. (Vigné d'Octon 1922 II:57). That said, Certainly, The Iron Heel is a fine and powerful book, worthy in all respects of Jack London, but I prefer his others. (Vigné d'Octon 1924: 63)

Simon Louvish The Resurrections: A Novel (1994)

A political thriller set in a parallel universe in which the libertarian Marxist Rosa Luxemburg has led a successful communistrevolution. (Dan Clore)

H.P. Lovecraft: The Mound (1929-30)

Several of Lovecraft's works e.g. At the Mountains of Madness (1933) and The Shadow out of Time (1934-35) feature extraterrestrial races with democratic socialist societies, which he somewhat idiosyncratically refers to as a sort of fascistic socialism. These represent Lovecraft's own ideal. In contrast, the decadent mound-dwellers' government is a kind of communistic or semi-anarchical state; habit rather than law determining the daily order of things. Their society resembles a combination of Bulwer-Lytton's coming race and the utopian schemes of Sade's libertines. See S.T. Joshi's essay 'Lovecraft's Alien Civilizations: A Political Interpretation', included in his Selected Papers on Lovecraft. (Dan Clore)