Gary Raab: The White Knight in the City of Pirates (1996-99)

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Portrays a twenty-seventh century anarchistic pirate colony. (The first two chapters are available online at: www.antelope-ebooks.com/SF/WKOS2/city01.html) (Dan Clore)

François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-64).

‘The noble members of the Abbey of Thélème live by the motto “Do what thou wilt”.’ (Dan Clore

Ayn Rand: Anthem (1938; abridged 1946), Atlas Shrugged 1957)

Rand was far from being an anarchist, but her immense influence on the libertarian right and the anarcho-capitalists can’t be denied.

   Anthem is a dystopia set after a future war, in which the only crime punishable by death is the speaking of the word ‘I’; inevitably the hero rebels, and comes to regard the very word as a god. In its exaltation of egoism, and to some extent in its style, it is reminiscent of Stirner’s The Ego and His Own.

   Atlas Shrugged is Rand’s most influential book, a sustained diatribe against socialism, in which the great industrialists withdraw their ‘services’ to society as civilisation collapses, with a view to rebuilding capitalism on the ruins.

Herbert Read: The Green Child (1935)

Utopian fantasy, meriting inclusion by virtue of Read’s importance in the history of anarchism in Britain. George Woodcock found this novel to be ‘a parable illuminating the dialectic that runs through all of Read’s works: the necessary interplay between freedom and order, between reason and instinct, on which the organic reality of life as well as of art depends.’ (Woodcock 1972a:77)

John Hugh Reynaert: The Eldorado of Socialism, Communism and Anarchism; or A Trip to the Planet Jupiter (1907)

‘Christian socialism.’ (Sargent: 82)

Mack Reynolds: Commune 2000 A.D. (1974)

‘The government, through technocratic means, has eliminated the need for most individuals to work, and has instituted a Universal Guaranteed Income. Only those who come out on top when taking tests to determine their Ability Quotient are able to obtain jobs. More and more, jobless individuals join communes and pursue their own interests – there are communes for homosexuals, lesbians, artists, nudists, kids who hate everyone over thirty, swinging singles, and many others. A government official objects that “An increasing number of the communards don’t participate in even the civil elections. Most aren’t eligible to participate in the guild elections, because they hold no jobs, but they don’t bother to vote in the civil elections, either. To put it bluntly, they’re anarchists.” After the main character, who has been assigned to investigate the communes, discovers that the communards are in a conspiracy to institute anarchism by eliminating the political state and transferring democracy to the economic sphere, one member tells him that they prefer the term libertarians. Say anarchist to most people and they think in terms of bomb-throwing fanatics. (Reynolds was an activist with the syndicalist Socialist Labor Party.) (Dan Clore)

Wm Harrison Riley: 'A visitor from Luna' (1901)

Short but charming tale published in Freedom. The lunar visitor is disappointed with Earth, and moves on.

Adam Roberts: Salt (2000)

Two planetary colonist communities in ideological conflict, one of which is explicitly anarchistic in flavour. An intelligent and well-written debut novel. The author himself - a British academic - says:

I think I'm on safer ground when I mention the political and ideological issues that the book rehearses; questions of political affiliation, of the negotiations between cultural and personal difference, of the relationship to (patriarchal) authority and of the limits of control. That the book is also a self-conscious exercise in intertextuality is, I hope, equally clear: it draws on Herbert's Dune and on Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed as well as Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister and the poetry of Robert Browning. I hope, in saying this, that I am only saying what is obvious from the novel itself. It remains the bleakest of my books, but I continue to find an austere and strangely uplifting beauty in certain aspects of bleakness, so I say this with no suggestion of apology. (author's website)

Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy (1992-6)

‘From an on-line interview:

Faliol: Are you a libertarian anarchist?

KSRobinson: No, I am a green socialist, roughly. A utopian. I don’t like libertarianism as I understand it because it seems to keep private property, police, and other aspects of the current system, indeed it seems to keep capitalism.

Faliol: I myself agree with Chomsky’s ideas.

KSRobinson: I like Chomsky’s writing very much. He should be more represented in mainstream American press; it’s a sign of how bad they are that he isn’t. But I still don’t like libertarianism. Nor anarchism either, though at least that one has a nice idea at its heart.

Faliol: Have you read Bakunin?

KSRobinson: Yes, I have read Bakunin, maitre’d of anarchism.’ (Dan Clore)

The Mars trilogy represents 'Basically an anarchist revolution & construction of society' (posting to anarchysf). For Lewis Call the trilogy is 'Robinson's vision of an anarchistic Mars'; Robinson's gift economy is 'the most interesting anarchistic element of Robinson's meticulously detailed Martian society', 'the articulation of a way of thinking about politics and economics which is radically new, and yet also profoundly old.' (Call, 2002)

Joel Rosenberg)

'From a convention report online: Rosenberg said he and Mike McGarry are writing a novel, in which all the Earth's libertarians are dumped on an alien planet, and the history of the planet followed for the next 150 years. He described it as a thought experiment - but then couldn't resist telling us how it comes out: feudalism. Joel, if you've predetermined the conclusion (I remarked), it's not an experiment! One might also question the the wisdom of someone who knows so little about a subject writing a book about it. (Rosenberg was uncomprehending, even contemptuous of the distinction between the anarchist and the limited government libertarian. Most if not all of the Founding Fathers were libertarians in the latter sense.) (Has the novel mentioned above appeared?)' (Dan Clore)

Kim Stanley Robinson, ed.: Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (1994)

Rudy Rucker: Spacetime Donuts (1981), Software (1982))

Spacetime Donuts is a dystopian story involving the psychological liberation of a supercomputer leading to the breakdown of authoritarian society. Rucker is on record as saying 'What I wanted to do with that book was to make a strong anarchist statement' (Vernon: 25). There is a decent amount of hip talk of smashing the government, and the book is certainly good anarchic entertainment, but the whole is not very profound, and not as strong as Rucker evidently intended. In Software the main character, who gave robots free will, leading to their rebellion and creation of an anarchist society on the moon, is offered immortality by them, in the form of a replication of his software; he proves to be dependent on the computer for the use of his new hardware. The novel refreshingly overturns the Asimov priorities, and the robot anarchy is attractive, but it is worrying that the author suggests that robots with free will might evolve towards power-seeking.

Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)

Three parallel versions of the female experience and what it might be, from a radical feminist stance. Whileaway, which is apparently Russ's utopia, is decentralised, and perhaps without government as such, but the verdict of the Open Road critics was that 'The book's feminism is apparently not consistent with an anti-authoritarian structure' (13).

Bertrand Russell: 'Zahatopolk', 'Faith and Mountains', 'The Infra-redioscope' (publ. in The Collected Stories of Bertrand Russell 1972)

Russell wrote sympathetically of anarchism in his Roads to Freedom (1918), was familiar with its theorists, and knew personally Alexander Berkmann and Emma Goldman, worked alongside anarchists in various campaigns, and for decades exercised a libertarian and liberating influence on his contemporaries. Among his less earnest activities was the writing of a small body of fiction, some of which is sf or near-sf. These three stories have some (though only slight) interest to anarchists.

Eric Frank Russell: ‘Late Night Final’ (1948), Wasp (1957), The Great Explosion (1962)

'. . . Russell was motivated by a strong distrust of authority of all kinds, and his own political philosophy was close to anarchism.' (James: 155).The Great Explosion incorporates the novella '. . . And Then There Were None '(1948). The novel follows a Terran recolonising expedition as it encounters various societies, descended from criminals, health faddists, pacifists, etc. The concluding novella describes the encounter with a world of Gands, highly anti-authoritarian followers of Gandhi; virtually the entire expeditionary force deserts to them. It is probably fair to say that 'And Then There Were None' was the nearest sf work to an anarchist utopia prior to Le Guin's The Dispossessed, and was praised as such in the pages of Freedom and Anarchy at the time. (Uloth 1954, Pilgrim 1960, 1963, Eagle 1969). NB the work itself never uses the 'A' word. ‘According to James J. Martin’s Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908, the society of the gands is very similar to that advocated by American anarcho-individualists such as Josiah Warren. (‘And Then There Were None’ is available online at www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.htm .) Highly recommended.’ (Dan Clore)

In ‘Late Night Final’, ‘As the crew of an invading spaceship learn to communicate with the anarcho-communist natives, they defect one by one until no one but the captain is left onboard. Recommended.’ (Dan Clore)

Wasp features a one-man sabotage campaign against the Sirian Empire. It went down well at the time, but by 1986 was perceived as entertaining, but quaint and sexist. (Uloth 1969, DP 1986).