R.F. Nelson: Then Beggars Could Ride (1976)

. . . ‘depicts an ecological utopia of small, self-contained but interacting units’ . . . (Nicolls: 423)

Josef Nesvadba: ‘In the footsteps of the abominable snowman’ (1964)

Story of telepathic yetis, part of which is set in Spain during the Civil War. Speaks unusually warmly of the anarchists: one characters says ‘“They were men of courage and I remember them often. Naturally they had no idea that reason and intellect would get them nowhere.”’ (1979 NEL pb collection of the same title: 169)

Robert Nichols: Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai (1977–9)

Short tetralogy, set in a near-future alternate-world central Asian land. Strong on ecological and (unusually) traditional-religious values, the anarchist influence is explicitly acknowledged. Written in a fragmented, poetic and impressionistic style, it is an interesting and important modern utopia.

Larry Niven: ‘Cloak of Anarchy’ (1972)

In a future ‘Free Park’ anything goes, though automated ‘copseyes’ hover around ensuring there is no violence. Ron Cole decides to sabotage the copseyes and see what results, taking the opportunity to expound his theory of anarchism, which is actually anarcho-capitalism – ‘“After all, anarchy is only the last word in free enterprise.”’ Though maintaining that the Free Park experiment without copseyes (which results in chaos) is too short an experiment to pass judgement on anarchy, at the conclusion of the story he recants, and declares anarchy unworkable because unstable.

   The story is badly written and badly argued, deliberately playing on the ambiguity of anarchy as a form of polity and anarchy as chaos.

Available on-line at www.larryniven.org/stories/cloak_of_anarchy.htm

Alice Nunn: Illicit Passage (1992)

. . . ‘highly anarchist, workers / working class organizing & revolting – really really excellent & one of the most political science fiction novels I’ve read in a long time . . .’ (posting to anarchysf). Original and very readable, but less anarchist and more feminist than this quote suggests.