P.M.: bolo’bolo (1985)  

This is an interesting speculative utopia, more an extended essay than a work of fiction - but certainly worth reading in this context.

   Dan Clore describes it as ‘A full-length attempt to design a libertarian socialist society with enough respect for the diversity of humanity’s desires that a community of cyberpunks who live online might be placed next to a community made up of bands of hunter-gatherers. Frequently whimsical but well thought-out; sometimes verges into semi-fictional form.’

Ken Macleod: The Star Fraction (1996), The Stone Canal 1997), The Cassini Division (1999), The Sky Road (1999)

Distinctive left-wing Scottish take on sf, displaying evidence of the author’s own activism.

‘Portrays a future that includes both a libertarian socialist society and a libertarian capitalist society.’ (Dan Clore)

Charles Eric Maine: The Isotope Man (1957), The Tide Went Out (1958), Count-Down (1959), Subterfuge (1959), The Darkest of Nights (1962)

Maine had a particular attraction for Freedom’s reviewers of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Although probably not even among the second tier of sf writers, one can see why: a persistent anti-authoritarian streak runs through his work.

G.A. Matiasz: End Time (1994)

A near future (2007) in which war and civil war rage across the former Soviet Union and much of the globe. Prosperous, competing regional capitalist blocs have been consolidated in Europe, North America and East Asia under transnational corporate leadership. The US is fighting a sophisticated, high-tech counterinsurgency war in southern Mexico, against a popular libertarian revolution claiming the tradition of Zapata. A military draft has been reinstated, and a strong antiwar movement flourishes on American streets. In a small town north of San Francisco a group of antiwar college students gains possession of enough bomb-grade riemanium to build a nuclear weapon, and Oakland rises in revolution to become the 21st century's Paris Commune.

   Described by Hakim Bey as 'a very smart meditation on the near-future of anarchism' (blurb), Randall Barnhart, reviewing the book on Amazon.com, commented: 'Yup, this is the greatest piece of anarchist agit-prop since . . . well, since forever. There is nothing better.' In the same place Britt A. Green summed it up as 'Well-thought out, anarchist, sci-fi.'

Judith Merril

‘(Moorcock mentions that she is a libertarian.)’ (Dan Clore)

John B. Middleton: The God of this World: A Story for the Times (1905)

Mostly on revolution. Creation of an anarchist, socialist, religious eutopia. (Sargent: 69)

J. Leslie Mitchell: Three Go Back (1932)

‘A transatlantic airship goes through a timewarp and crashes into a mountain of Atlantis. The three survivors are found by a tribe of Basque-speaking Cro-Magnons, whose society has no government, property, war, superstition, clothing, or other vices of civilization.’ (Dan Clore)

Michael Moorcock: The Black Corridor (1969), Breakfast in the Ruins. A Novel of Inhumanity (1971), The Warlord of the Air (1971), The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century. A Romance (1976), The Cornelius Chronicles (1977) , The Entropy Tango. A Comic Romance (1980), The Steel Tsar (1981), Byzantium Endures (1982), The Opium General and Other Stories (1984), The Dancers at the End of Time (1993 – originally publ. in three volumes, 1972–6)

Michael Moorcock, described by Vittorio Curtoni as a ‘bizarre beatnik figure’ (25), has been involved in politics for much of his life, having been first attracted, by his own account, by the anarchist movement of the 1950s (Moorcock 1983: 12). At that time he used to attend anarchist meetings in Brylcreemed hair, blazer, tie and flannels, rather than orthodox bohemian wear; contrariwise he would wear beatnik clothes to a church fete (ibid.: 75). He later joined successively Labour, Liberal, and Labour parties, finally reverting to anarchism.

   In 1978, at Stuart Christie’s request, he contributed ‘Starship Stormtroopers: Anarchist and Authoritarian Ideas in Science Fiction to the fourth issue of the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review; this article is one of the major sources on this theme.

   In 1983 Moorcock published his political testament, The Retreat from Liberty. He speaks knowledgeably of historical anarchism, referring to Proudhon, Kropotkin, Stirner, Berkman, and Voline (his 1982 novel The Brothel in Rosenstrasse, which is not sf, also mentions Bakunin). Among contemporaries he refers to the British anarchists Stuart Christie, Albert Meltzer, and Nicolas Walter, and to the American Noam Chomsky. With the then marginal state of the anarchist movement, he pinned his hopes for the future on the women's movement.

   In The Black Corridor, against the disintegration of British society, a businessman escapes into space; he is, however, progressively shown to be no better than the world he is escaping. A very bitter and pessimistic work, it does however insist on the individual's responsibility for the creation of a decent society, and the necessity for means to correspond to ends.

   Breakfast in the Ruins is a sequence of vignettes of Karl Glogauer at dates from 1871 to 1990 - key historical loci, from the Paris Commune to Vietnam, via Auschwitz. He is frequently shown, coldly, as perpetrator as well as victim of atrocities. Chapter 9 features Glogauer with the army of Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian anarchist of the 1920s. Makhno himself is shown as miserable but reckless and cruel. The novel is shockingly amoral in presentation, but presumably with the intention of forcing a reappraisal of the reader's moral stance.

   The Warlord of the Air is a quasi-Griffithian story of a time-traveller, airships, and a utopian community. Anarchists are prominent, but are not very favourably portrayed - they are the first, for example, to use the atomic bomb. The book slurs over the differences between socialism, communism, and anarchism, but as no more than a potboiler can't be expected to be good propaganda.

   The Cornelius Chronicles constitute some of Moorcock's best work, centring on the attempts of Jerry Cornelius, a sort of transcendental hippy James Bond, to relate to the late twentieth century world. Nestor Makhno's army is again encountered. On this occasion it is in wild alliance with an army of Scottish anarchists and their fleet of a hundred airships painted in black anarchist livery and St Andrew's crosses. The opportunist Cornelius, known as a Makhnovist sympathiser, winds up as governor in Kiev. Andrew Hedgecock, writing in Freedom, saw Cornelius as 'a template for Moorcock's ironic attacks on authoritarianism, racism and traditionally defined gender roles'; on this seminal tetralogy the author declines to editorialise, compelling enhanced reader participation - hence the 'narrative is consonant with the central notion that self discipline is a necessary condition for freedom.'

   In The Entropy Tango Makhno, following the success of his Ukrainian revolution, gallivants around the globe attempting insurrections in Ottawa, Yucatan, Somalia, Bohemia and Queensland, before finally being electrocuted by the Americans after looting San Francisco.

   'The Makhnovist uprising was also successful in the parallel universe of The Nomad of Time series; in The Steel Tsar (1981),Makhno once again appears as a character and engages in political arguments with Stalin. Byzantium Endures (1982) also features Nestor Makhno as one of its characters, though in this series the anarchist uprising was unsuccessful.' (Dan Clore)

   Nestor Makhno also appears in The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century. The Opium General and Other Stories includes a long Cornelius story and a few essays. Among the latter are the most accessible republication of 'Starship Stormtroopers', and a review of a book on Makhno, whom Moorcock describes as 'a martyr to a cause that can never be lost but which the world may never properly understand.'

   Of The Dancers at the End of Time a poster on anarchysf wrote: 'Theme is an anarchic society were all material needs have been met. There's only a few people but boy are they bored! Could be seen as an attempt to play around with a situationist scenario?'

Alan Moore & David Lloyd: V for Vendetta (198?)

Alan Moore first got involved in radical politics in the 1960s. Since his 20s he has seen himself as an anarchist: it seems to me that anarchy is the state that most naturally obtains when you’re talking about ordinary human beings living their lives in a natural way.' (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, 2007)

  Set in a near future London where a fascist state took over after the Bombs were dropped, with V the kind of Guy Fawkes style hero who starts blowing up monuments and bases of operation. He basically proclaims himself to be an anarchist in a rather touching scene involving a statue of Lady Justice, where he is lamenting about how she betrayed him and he has found a new lover now, Anarchy. It goes into the whole psychology of being a revolutionary terrorist and what brought him to this point, and they switch to a lot of different POVs. . . . In one part of the comic in a speech, V tells the people how he can only do what he can do to remove the State Apparatus but once they are free they must make their own decisions upon what to do, and if they want to repeat the mistakes of the past. It is pretty brilliant . . .'. (posting to anarchysf)

William Morris: News from Nowhere (1890; revised 1892) ; The Tables Turned; or, Nupkins Awakened: A Socialist Interlude (1887)

In 1886 Morris invited Kropotkin, whom he had recently met, and liked immediately, to write for his paper, The Commonweal, but he declined. It was probably through Morris's early contact with Kropotkin, though, that the Commonweal press facilities were used to print Freedom. That year, in a letter, he spoke of 'us semi-anarchists', which is really as close to anarchism as Morris ever admitted to (Mackail 11:149). In a letter the following year, he wrote: 'I distinctly disagree with the Anarchist principle, much as I sympathise with many of the anarchists personally, and although I have an Englishman's wholesome horror of government interference and centralisation . . .' (Morris 1951:5). In 'Socialism and Anarchism', a letter in Commonweal on 5th May 1889, Morris wrote: 'I will begin by saying that I call myself a Communist, and have no wish to qualify that word by joining any other to it.'

    He himself was always well-liked by anarchists. An anonymous commentator in Freedom in 1891 observed that 'Like other people, Anarchists admire his artistic genius, but, in addition, there is not an Anarchist worth his salt who, being acquainted with William Morris, does not respect him as a good comrade and an honest man.'

    News from Nowhere - 'A vision rather than a dream 'of a utopian future - was written as a libertarian response to Bellamy's Looking Backward. The polity is described as communist throughout, as one would expect, but the vision parallels closely many people's notions of an ideal anarchist society. No attempt to précis the book could possibly do it justice. Perhaps a single clue to its appeal might be found in Chapter XIII, 'Concerning Politics' - which is just twelve lines long, 'because we have none.'

    Anarchists have generally taken Morris's tale to their hearts. For an anonymous Freedom writer of 1891, 'Comrade Morris is not avowedly an Anarchist by conviction; but in character he is a born-Anarchist, and in very much of his writing - for instance, News from Nowhere - the most hypercritical of Anarchists would have to borrow a pair of spectacles to discover serious points of disagreement.' Peter Kropotkin, in his 1896 memorial to Morris, described News from Nowhere as 'perhaps the most thoroughly and deeply Anarchistic conception of future society that has ever been written. . . . his ideal society is undoubtedly the one which is most free of all our State and monastic traditions; the most imbued with the feelings of equality and humanitarian love; the most spontaneously growing out of a spirit of free understanding.'(109)Much later Jeff Cloves, in Freedom in 1968, summed up the feelings of many: 'I'm not bothered by jeers about the impracticality and implausibility of News from Nowhere. All that I know is that when I read it, I think . . . that's what I want, that's how life ought to be. With The Dispossessed, News from Nowhere ranks as one of the two essential texts in the context of this guide.

      In the satirical play The Tables Turned, ‘the sleeper who awakes in a libertarian-socialist society in Part II is the corrupt judge who presides over the farcical trial of socialists and anarchists in Part I. There, he has to face the Council of the Commune (the general assembly of the local population, or folk-mote), who refuse to waste chains by shackling him, or to take care of him in a prison (they have none, anyway), but instead teach him to do useful work farming so that he might become a self-employed individual like everyone else.’ (Dan Clore)