[Via News from Nowhere]. As a followup to the absurd list of harmful books, here’s one for John Quiggin, who’s a big fan, China Mieville’s list of the 50 Sf and Fantasy books Lefties should read.
33 Responses to “Lefty Fantasies”
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Unless the Dune series by Frank Herbert’s on the list, I’m not interested. Oh, fuck. This is going to degenerate into geekishness, isn’t it?
No it’s not, Liam, but I’d be interested to hear why you think Lefties should read it.
The Dune series in a sentence:
A set of novels exploring the theme of power, autocracy, drugs, social status and religion. The first couple of books are fantastic, the last couple are OK, the movies are pretty dodgy and the ‘prequels’ are frankly, a bunch of shit.
All lefties and righties should read the first novel—’Dune’. Preferably with their drug of choice plentifully on hand. Mine’s just chilling in the fridge, waiting for me to crack the screw top. Mmm… gotta go now
Yeah, I reread the original trilogy last year. I’m never inclined to look at any of the others again.
Where is Forever War?
Nic -
Of course, other works—by the same or other writers—could have been chosen: disagreement and alternative suggestions are welcomed. I change my own mind hour to hour on this anyway.
From the same website, I’d recommend this piece by my personal favourite sf/fantasy author, Michael Moorcock, on whether SF is subversive.
Given the title I’m a bit disappointed in the comments so far.
Point taken, Irant, but I’m sober tonight!
However, it looks from the BB live feed as if Lefty Tim might be about to enjoy the realisation of one of his fantasies with the vile Ra’y'ch in the Reward Room.
Lefty Tim is all talk and massage oil and no action. Ra’y'ch is down to her undies and Lefty Tim is delivering never ending orations. Onanistic orations, perhaps.
Back on topic, I’d want to add John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar to the list. And Dahlgren by Samuel R. Delany (another anarchist). And Fugue for a Darkening Island by Christopher Priest and Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch.
Agree totally with Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Dick and LeGuin, but the latter choice by Mieville leads me to observe that he could have included a lot more feminist sf. I’d have liked his list better if it had left off the 19th and early 20th century stuff and concentrated on more contemporary literature. Also, it’s very heavily weighted to sf as opposed to fantasy.
Im happy to say ive never watched one single minute of BB.
Me neither, Hermes.
Neither have I.
You’re missing out, buds. This season is awesome.
Agree with Liam and Nic. If Dune isn’t on it, the whole list is questionable. Same goes for The Forever War, and its polar opposite Starship Troopers. Bizarre that The Island of Dr. Moreau was chosen, and not The Time Machine. Stranger in Strange Land (Heinlein) probably deserves a spot, too.
To counter the somewhat dated nature of the list, I’d throw in Neuromancer (William Gibson) and Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson).
Interestingly, I just finished rereading The Dispossessed, an excellent item on the list.
As a counterpoint to Starship Troopers, I recommend Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison.
I love The Dispossessed. Just don’t lend your copy anyone because you’ll never get it bloody back.
And big brother is the bomb.
the trad. left and trad. right will be left behind like the dodo birds before long. what does sci-fi have to do with them?
try the libertarian-transhumanist sci-fi
here are some suggestions (I admit I have’t read all of them though I’ve read almost everything by Greg Egan who figures prominently)
http://www.nanotech-now.com/transhuman-books.htm
The Futurological Congress By Lem.
I am trying to think of a suitable J.G. Ballard novel. Maybe Hello America just for the robotic Las Vegas chapter. Otherwise, to be obvious, Crash, or perhaps the Atrocity Exhibition, for the big brother celebrity-worshipping freaks in the blogosphere. Come to think of it, Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell should be on that list, that qualifies as science fiction, even if most of it turned out to be true.
Good to see Octavia Butler on the list. She’s brilliant, subversive, intelligent — a black woman writing science fiction, and writing it inordinately well. Her ‘Parable’ books are really quite shattering.
I also think Atwood’s ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘Oryx and Crake’ are also very good and required reading for any lefty and or feminist.
And, here begins the true geekery, can any fantasy fan with bleeding heart leanings overlook Terry Pratchett? A true humanist with an incredible eye for absurdity. ‘Jingo’ is a bloody classic, looking at war and xenophobia and the absolute silliness of racism. ‘Monstrous Regiment’ is also a great book. And funny! Skewers all the nonsense that goes on in most fantasy novels.
Mievelle is a very good writer; not perfect, but I thought ‘Perdido St Station’ was brilliant. It’s a good list and I’d like to read more of the novels he mentions.
Very strange list – Mieville is entitled to his own opinions though. ‘Forever War’ is a huge omission, as is the original Dune series (all of the first six, not just the trilogy). Asimov was a socialist whose later Foundation series would appeal to social planners. More Spinrad I’d have thought. Heinlein’s ‘The moon is a harsh mistress’ could have featured – and ‘Job’. For completeness, of course, Mieville’s own New Crobuzon series is an instant classic. New scifi authors Alistair Reynolds and Richard Morgan will eventually, I think, make such lists. On the graphic novel side of things, Judge Dredd is worth reading.
nothing more annoying than when people mix up fantasy and science fiction.
“Asimov was a socialist whose later Foundation series would appeal to social planners. ”
On the other hand the hero of his Foundation series, Hari Seldon, was allegedly named after Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon, founders of the Institute for Economic Affairs think-tank. That’s what I heard anyway. Seems too much of a coincidence not to be true.
P. F. Hamilton would be a good recent inclusion. Id say 70s Larry Niven, but thats a bit right-ish – but in a good way IMO.
Mixing scifi and fantasy can be very irritating. Mieville, however, is such a talent I reckon he can do what he likes. I think the Dune series also verges towards fantasy.
Jason, I’ve never heard that story before – I’m just wondering about the timing. The IEA would have been largely unknown before the 1960s (or so), especially in the US. The Foundation series started as a short story (as I recall) published about 1940s/50s. You may be right, but I suspect more urban legend along the ‘Tinkerbell based on Marilyn Monroe’ genre.
I’d name check John Brunner too. Not just “Zanzibar” but “Shockwave Rider” too. If yer looking for female SF writers delving intelligently into socio-economic and power structures, I’d recommend James Tiptree Jr (yes, it’s a non de plume for a lady CIA analyst). Check out Ursula’s novella “The Word for World is Forest” – all about the damage exploitive colonisation does to all parties.
And John Wyndham, while not strictly speaking a women himself, often took the female viewpoint in many of his books. (Also I am the only person who thinks that “28 Days Later” is exactly the kind of screenplay Wyndham would write if he was writing now? Especially the Army officer’s solution to surviving the zombies.)
Bester, Pohl and Kornbulth penned a lot of highly imaginative satires about ultra-capitalist futures like “The Stars My Destination”, “Golem 1000″, “The Space Merchants”, “Gladiator-At-Law” and “The Syndic”. In recent times, Jack Womack has taken this approach to scarifying new levels in his Dryco novels, starting with “Ambient”.
Yes Spinrad too. He’s always had a keen eye for political and ideological stimuli in his work. Check out “The Men In The Jungle” and “Pictures At 11″, which deal in different ways with the nature of guerrilla war against power structures, and “Russian Spring”, written 14 years ago about a cold war between a superjingositic US and a decadent scheming Euroblock.
An accompanying volume to Robinson’s Mars trilogy is “The Martians”, a collection of stories and essays and ephemera that includes The Martian Constitution, based on a tricameral legislative, economic and ecological set-up, each with it’s own deliberative and executive arm, chosen by lot a la jury duty and with all votes conducted within the three houses through what he keeps calling the “The Australian Ballot” procedure, ie: secret votes always.
For my money, one of the best contemporary SF writers about the impact of new technologies on socio-economic-political systems is Bruce Sterling. From “Islands In The Net” where he postulates distributed, co-operative, for-profit corporations that chose their senior executives by vote, to “Holy Fire”, all about the medical-industrial-insurance complex meets 22nd century wonder Vogel, to “Distraction” where politics and biotech collide in a US that’s falling apart like the USSR did under economic pressures and a sclerotic Federal system. Not mention his Schismatrix world, a goddamn masterpiece of future human expansion into the solar system and beyond, constantly driven by economic and political imperatives towards a transhuman singularity.
Frankly, the more I read of stuff in this vein, the more I want to retire to Ballard’s peacefully and entopically entropic Vermillion Sands and cultivate my singing flowers.
“wonder Vogel”
Sorry, that should have “wandervogel”. Bloody machines correcting stuff without checking first.
“I hate this damn computer,
I wish that they would sell it it.
It never does what I want,
Only what I tell it.”
Jason, good call on Asimov. He always struck me as a ruthless centralist in red-white-and-blue clothing. I suspect it’s deliberate that the main holders of power in his work aren’t politicians, but owners of capital. The Foundation series is no exception—democracy enters here and there but it’s a marginal player.
On the other hand, his robot short stories read as obvious criticisms of American racial assumptions in the twentieth century.
What’s with all the “oohh, I hate it when people confuse science fiction and fantasy?” I think it’s a touch of “I ain’t no David Eddings fan!” coming out of the woodwork.
Frankly I think the sci-fi/fantasy divide is silly, but I’m not so hot on genres at all because it ghettoises good writers. It’s a tool for bookshops and the marketing departments of publishers, not a taxonomic guide to literature.
Really, all science fiction is speculative, as is fantasy, so if you want a better label it might be speculative fiction, which encompasses a range of different styles and sets of ideas.
I personally think there’s books worth reading and books that aren’t, and if people really need a ‘genre’ to swim around within, and get “annoyed” that people muddy the waters between them, that’s a big pity.
What Kate said.
Kate, my homie Bruce S, back in 1989 coined a good if tongue-in-cheek phrase about they way some elements of modern speculative fiction could be tagged.
“”Slipstream” – a kind of writing that simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.”
http://lib.ru/STERLINGB/catscan05.txt
Great link, Nabakov, interesting list too.
I’m a little surprised that neither Last and First Men nor Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon are on the list. One of Stapledon’s consistent themes is that anarcho-communism is the necessary societal basis for a fully human mental and spiritual community – and that Homo Sapiens as currently constituted is unlikely to be able to make such a society work.
Another one I’d recommend highly is Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy, in which we find the transhuman eco-socialism of the Edenists, the developmental-state communism of the human settlers of Mars, the postmaterial (indeed, post-economic) communism of the Kiint aliens, a lovely extrapolation of where the outsourcing and privatisation of security functions might lead us, and the ultimate revenge of the underclass.
Finally, I’d agree that Asimov is best characterised as a left-liberal rather than a socialist, based on my reading of his best book, The End Of Eternity.