J. Neal Schulman: Alongside Night (1979
. . . ‘features an agorist-anarchist underground that eventually supplants the state.’ (posting to anarchysf).
J.C. Shannon: ‘The Dream of Jacques the Anarchist’, in Who Shall Condemn? and Other Stories (1894)
‘Dream of future war similar to Griffith’s in which resentful slum anarchist moves amid aircraft and new explosives.’ (Suvin: 59)
George Bernard Shaw: Back to Methuselah (1921)
Shaw was familiar with anarchist literature – references to Godwin, Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Tucker, and Tolstoy abound in his work; among these he was on fairly close personal terms with Kropotkin and Tucker; and in the 1880s he was familiar with British anarchists such as Charlotte Wilson, Henry Seymour and Joseph Lane. Several times he contributed articles to anarchist publications, including The Anarchist (1885), Freedom (1890), and both the American and the British Liberty (1891 and 1894 respectively). But by 1891 he was clear that anarchism was not for him, dismissing it in his ‘The Impossibilities of Anarchism’.
Back to Methuselah is an episodic dream of human evolution from Genesis to the 32nd millennium; humanity by 31920 had outgrown corporeal life and exists on a spiritual plane only. It has been suggested that some of the Lamarckian ideas used here by Shaw may have been suggested by Kropotkin, who had published a number of articles on the inheritance of acquired characteristics in The Nineteenth Century and After in 1910 (Hulse). Woodcock considered that the theme Shaw chose for development in this play was Godwinian (Woodcock 1962: 86).
Robert Sheckley: ‘Skulking Permit’ (1954)
, ‘A Ticket to Tranai’ (1955), ‘The Resurrection Machine’ (1989), ‘Simul City’
(1990)
In ‘Skulking Permit’ a backwater planet is recontacted by Imperial Earth; the inhabitants attempt to revive old Earth customs – crime, police, etc. – but fail by misunderstanding the (lack of) Point Of It All; Earth abandons the attempt to conscript colonists. It is a splendid anarchic story: the colonists have lived without authority so long that there’s manifestly no need for it.
‘A Ticket to Tranai’ features an exotic utopia in a remote corner of the galaxy; an Earth visitor is suitably freaked out. Society on Tranai is minimal-statist or anarcho-capitalist, though in distinctive ways: government is restricted to minor matters like care of the aged and beautifying the landscape, and is financed by tax collectors who are literally robbers in black silk masks; government officials wear explosive badges which will be detonated on a majority vote in favour of assassination. Though the story has attractive elements, it is vitiated by sexism – married women are kept in a stasis-field purdah, a state which is subject to only token criticism.
The two stories of the 1980s include Bakunin as a character. (Dan Clore)
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, rev. 1831), The Last Man (1826))
In one respect Mary Shelley is the prime example of association between sf and anarchism: for the mother of science fiction was daughter to the father of anarchism, William Godwin, and wife to the Godwinian Percy B. Shelley. Critical opinions differ, however, as to how much Godwin's philosophy influenced her works, or for that matter P.B. Shelley's own brand of Godwinism. Frankenstein, now widely regarded as the first work of modern science fiction, is too well-known to need description here. On its appearance it bore a dedication to Godwin; and it is noteworthy that Shelley had been re-reading her father's great work Political Justice in 1817, whilst writing Frankenstein: one entry in her journal (1817-04-13) actually reads 'Correct Frankenstein; read Political Justice' (Shelley 1947: 78). Godwin himself praised Frankenstein in his letters to his daughter. On 1822-11-15 he described the novel as 'a fine thing; it was compressed, muscular, and firm; nothing relaxed and weak; no proud flesh.' (Marshall 1889: II.52) And by 1823-02-14 he could write that 'Frankenstein is universally known, and though it can never be a book for vulgar reading, is everywhere respected.' (ibid.: II.68).The Last Man, though historically important in sf as a very early post-catastrophe story, is overwhelmingly tedious, and was understandably out of print for over a century. The character of Lionel's father, as described in the novel's opening pages, has been seen as a portrait of William Godwin (Luke 1965: xii). In an 1824 letter from Godwin to the author he gave at best lukewarm opinions on the extracts she had sent him.
Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Assassins (1814)
'The isolated valley of the Assassins, who appear to be Godwinian anarcho-communists, receives its first visitor in centuries - the Wandering Jew. An unfinished fragment. William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson have also used the Assassins as libertarian forerunners.' (Dan Clore)
Lewis Shiner: Slam (1990)
Influenced by Bob Black's The Abolition of Work. 'Shiner says: 'In fact, I was at a cyberpunk conference in Leeds this summer and one of the participants gave a paper on my stuff. It was not a terribly theoretical paper; his point was that all my books involve anarchy to one degree or another. The anarchist is perceived as a positive force to reawaken a stagnant society. He found this in a great number of my works. I'll buy into that, particularly since the novel I'd already finished -- Slam, which he hadn't seen - is a blatant novel about anarchy. Genre distinctions or the presence or absence of certain tropes in a work is a very minor detail compared to the other stuff.''
John Shirley: Silicon Embrace
? (Dan Clore)
Gary G. Shriver: Cynia: An Original Utopia (1965 unpublished MA thesis, University of Wyoming)
Individualist anarchist eutopia. (Sargent: 141)
Alan Sillitoe: Travels in Nihilon (1971)
Satire on anarchism (nihilism). (Sargent: 153)
Robert Silverberg: ‘The Songs of Summer’ (1956), Hawksbill Station (1968)
In The Songs of Summer a man from the present is projected into a far-future post-holocaust world, and attempts to reinstate government. The community psychically isolates him in his own fantasy. The future society is very sparse and individualistic; this and the far-future setting imply no belief on Silverberg's part in either the practicality or the desirability of anarchism. Hawksbill Station is a penal colony for political dissidents from a future Syndicalist USA, located a billion years in the past. With a change of government, and the discovery of a method of sending people forward in time, it becomes possible for them to return. A couple of the dissidents were anarchists before their exile. One of these, the man who profoundly believed in individualism and the abolition of all political institutions (c. 7), has ironically been obliged to swallow his theory and acknowledge the value of team work. Anarchists are shown in a fairly positive light in the novel, but this appears to be despite their beliefs.
John Sladek: ‘Heavens Below: Fifteen Utopias’ (1975)
One of the fifteen is the one-page Utopia: A Financial Report, in which the four planned nations of Fascesia, Commund, Capitalia and Anarche are the subject of an experiment on the social institutions of Homo sapiens; it is successfully completed, Utopia closed, the inhabitants destroyed, and the experimenters move on to the social behaviour of armadillos. Anarche had not proved viable: it was found that Anarchers are evidently unstable, and frequently migrate to the other three nations.
Joan Sloncewski: A Door into Ocean (1986)
It has been suggested that this novel's hidden anarchism is very much in harmony with Murray Bookchin's social ecology (Sobstyl: 128).
Clark Ashton Smith.
‘He says: “One other observation: Communism, as practised in the insect world is a poor recommendation for its possible effect on humanity. Nothing sickens me more than to watch the mechanistic activities of ants, who have certainly achieved the ultimate in regimentization and co-operation. I guess I must be an anarchist myself; and I am sure I would be strictly non-assimilable in any sort of co-operative society, and would speedily end up in a concentration camp.”’ (Dan Clore)
L. Neil Smith: The Probability Broach (1980)
Parallel Earth story of an anarcho-capitalist society trying to influence our Earth, involving a Chandlerian cop. American free-market anarchism is integral to the work, involving informed discussion of the relative merits of minarchy and anarcho-capitalism. There are bizarre aspects to the alternate history: the list of Presidents of the North American Confederacy include Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker and Ayn Rand; the former king of the UK now has among his titles Anarch of the Commonwealth; Peter Kropotkin became a wealthy uranium miner in Antarctica (his alternate world widow is a principal character in the novel). The author seems obsessed with hardware - Lucy Kropotkin claims that 'freedom always calls for a little hardware' (del Rey edn: 98); this may have something to do with Smith being an ex-police reservist, gunsmith and self-defence consultant.
S.P. Somtow
(Based a tetralogy on the premise of Sturgeon’s “The Skills of Xanadu”.)
Norman Spinrad: Agent of Chaos (1967), ‘Heirloom’ (1972), Child of Fortune (1985), Greenhouse Summer
Agent of Chaos concerns an underground movement which ideologises entropy as leading to chaos, and fights against the total control of the Hegemony over the solar system. Said to have influenced young American radical-anarchists in the 1970s (Platt:70), though it is hard to see why. 'Heirloom' is a minor anarchistic story, wholly derivative of Russell's '. . . And Then There Were None.'' Spinrad says: 'Child of Fortune is another anarchist novel, because there's no government. (All right, so I'm an anarchist but I'm a syndicalist. You have to have organized anarchy, because otherwise it doesn't work.)' (Dan Clore) In Greenhouse Summer, capitalism falls and is replaced by anarcho-syndicalism. (Dan Clore)
Olaf Stapledon: Last and First Men (1930), Star Maker (1937)
One of the most important figures in the history of science fiction, Stapledon (like H.G. Wells) was a democratic socialist, who believed (also like Wells) that state socialism would and should develop into a stateless society. In Last and First Men and StarMaker this development is briefly portrayed. (Dan Clore)
Starhawk: The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994)
Raymond Stark: Crossroads to Nowhere (1956)
Thirty years after the holocaust, an Anarch from the west seeks law and order in (New) York; he finds totalitarianism not to his taste, but unintentionally puts the York government onto the Anarchs, who are promptly colonised. The Anarch and some friends retreat to a minimal statist village, there to plan the overthrow of the government. It is clear they will fail. Naive, with little merit.
Bruce Sterling: Islands in the Net (1989), 'Bicycle Repairman' (1996), Distraction (1999)
Islands in the Net was 'Influenced by Bob Black's The Abolition of Work.' (Dan Clore) It has been perceived as an anarchist/anti-capitalist utopia (mailing to anarchysf).
'Bicycle Repairman' takes place in an anarchist squatters' enclave.
In Distraction, early 21st century America is 'populated by large gangs of postmodern proletarian nomads.' 'Sterling's vision is, in fact, profoundly anarchistic. [...] Distraction updates pre-modern gift exchange for the postmodern age, and thus charts a radically non-hierarchical vision of the near future.' (Call, 2002)
Robert Louis Stevenson
Freedom in 1889 quoted from one of Stevenson's Samoan letters, in which he speaks of a certain fascination for the anarchists and compares them with the early Christians. The anonymous writer concluded that Stevenson was a man of an intensely reactionary mind, but he had the honesty, when he saw Anarchists in a truer, clearer light, to say so, and we respect him for it. (anon. 1899)
S.L.S. (pseudonym of John St Loe Strachey): The Great Bread Riots: or, What Came of Fair Trade (1885)
Following the abolition of free trade, the rioting of the unemployed is led by anarchical secret societies, based on violence, their organisation copied from those of Germany and Russia; the events are recounted as from 1934. It is a very slight work, of negligible interest for anarchists.
Theodore Sturgeon: ‘The Skills of Xanadu’ (1956)
S. Andrew Swann: Hostile takeover trilogy: Profiteer (1995), Partisan (1995), Revolutionary (1996).
‘Set on the planet Bakunin.’ (Dan Clore)
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels (1726/1735), 'A Modest Proposal' (1729)
Gulliver's Travels has the eponymous hero marooned amid various alien societies, for satirical ends. It has been suggested that some of Godwin's thinking originates here, especially in relation to the society of the Houyhnhnms, which can be seen as anarchistic (Woodcock 1962, Preu: 372, 382). A quotation from Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master will serve as an example of the similarity to Godwin's thinking: the Houyhnhnm, commenting on British society, expressed the opinion 'That our institutions of government and law were plainly owing to our gross defects in reason, and by consequence, in virtue; because reason alone is sufficient to govern a rational creature . . .' (Pt IV, c. VII). Godwin certainly admired Swift, whom he described as a man who 'appears to have had a more profound insight into the true principles of political justice than any preceding or contemporary author.' (Godwin 1798) 'For the stern and inflexible integrity of his principles, and the profound sagacity of his speculation, he will be honoured by a distant posterity.' (Godwin 1798: 443) Interestingly, Godwin's diaries record that he was reading Gulliver's Travels while he was writing Political Justice in just the same way as his daughter's diary records that she was reading Political Justice while writing Frankenstein (Preu: 372). An extract from the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms was printed in La Révolte in 1893. Preu claims that if Godwin is the father of anarchism, Swift, through his influence on Godwin, is certainly its grandfather. (Preu: Dean 69) The famous Modest Proposal is that starvation in Ireland could be cured by consuming the children of the poor. An extract was printed in La Révolte in 1893.