Anarchist and Libertarian Societies in Science Fiction

June 2001

In a world where the US and USSR have become decentralized, libertarian socialist townships, the last capitalist debates the last Communist, and everyone else is bored by their irrelevance.

(http://www.sonsorol.org/port_watson.html) The editors (Rudy RUCKER, Peter Lamborn WILSON, and Robert Anton WILSON) of the Semiotext(e) SF issue were unable to obtain any works of "radical utopian vision" from their contributors, so they reprinted this piece from a magazine called Libertarian Horizons: A Journal for the Free Traveler. This is a fictional description of the (real) Pacific island Sonsorol combining ideas from libertarian socialism, libertarian capitalism, and the marginals milieu.

A utopian romance influenced by William MORRIS.

Culture series:

A socialist-anarchist society has been created through the use of nanotechnology to eliminate scarcity. BANKS is very popular at the moment.

In the sequels Oz gradually evolves into a state-socialist utopia. The series is worth citing here because it reveals how conceptions of socialism have changed, as Oz has an interesting mix of authoritarian and libertarian features (BAUM was influence both by BELLAMY'S Looking Backward and by MORRIS'S News from Nowhere). In the sixth novel, The Emerald City of Oz (1910), BAUM writes: "There were no poor people in the Land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money, and all property belonged to the Ruler [the Fairy Queen Ozma]. The people were her children, and she cared for them. Each person was given freely by his neighbors whatever he required for his use, which is as much as any one may reasonably desire. Some tilled the lands and raised great crops of grain, which was divided equally among the entire population, so that all had enough. There were many tailors and dressmakers and shoemakers and the like, who made things that any who desired them might wear. Likewise, there were jewelers who made ornaments for the person, which pleased and beautified the people, and these ornaments also were free to those who asked for them. Each man and woman, no matter what he or she produced for the good of the community, was supplied by the neighbors with food and clothing and a house and furniture and ornaments and games. If by chance the supply ever ran short, more was taken from the great storehouses of the Ruler, which were afterward filled up again when there was more of an article than the people needed.

"Every one worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have something to do. There were no cruel overseers set to watch them, and no one to rebuke them or to find fault with them. So each one was proud to do all he could for his friends and neighbors, and was glad when they would accept the things he produced.

"You will know, by what I have told you here, the Land of Oz was a remarkable country. I do not suppose such an arrangement would be practical with us, but Dorothy assures me that it works finely with the Oz people."

In Oz, furthermore, there is no police force and the Royal Army of Oz has but a single soldier. (This soldier doubles as the Police Force of Oz when it becomes required in the eighth volume, though this has never been necessary before.) Oz is contrasted to contemporary America. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em never recover financially from the loss of their house in the first volume's cyclone, and by the sixth volume the bank forecloses on their farm. Fortunately Dorothy is able to convince Ozma to bring them to Oz to live.
Barrington J. BAYLEY

Annihilation Factor (1964)

Includes the character Castor KRAKHNO, based on Nestor MAKHNO.

This sequel to Bellamy's well-known authoritarian socialist utopia Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888) attempts to revise it in accord with libertarian, feminist, and other criticisms.

Dream vision of a non-mechanical, religious utopia.

Fantasy novel influenced by News from Nowhere.

The narrator discovers a society living in caverns deep underground in this satirical novel. This society is organized along lines that satirize Charles FOURIER and other libertarian socialists; work is assigned according to personal taste, for example, so that children - who of course love to smash things - are given the job of destroying the dangerous giant reptiles that inhabit the wilder regions of the underground world. Work is accomplished through the use of the Vril, a sort of sexual energy force, through which the Vril-ya (as they are known) can power machinery and fly. Any one of them could also use it to destroy any of the others, or even the entire race, so none of them can take power over the others.

While BURROUGHS' work is primarily dystopian, a few anarchistic utopian societies do show up.

In The Wild Boys (1969), for example, BURROUGHS portrays an anarchistic society that consists of roving gangs of dope-smoking, homosexual teenage boys who wear nothing but jockstraps and rollerskates. The trilogy that begins with Cities of the Red Night (1981) includes material about several attempts to found libertarian societies, including Libertalia (see under Daniel DEFOE) and a group of Rimbaud-reading, dope-smoking, homosexual Zen gunslingers in the Wild West. Ghost of Chance (1991) stars Captain Mission and his pirate utopia Libertalia.
CASSIUS MINOR

The Finding of Mercia (1909).
A. Bertram CHANDLER

The Anarch Lords (1981).

A former space pirate is punished by being made governor of the anarchist planet Liberia.

Libertarian socialist utopia set in 1984. The translation first appeared in the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Portrays a libertarian socialist utopia.

A brief, bizarre vision of a libertarian socialist city in which everyone will have his own cathedral and "There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love". Available in Ken KNABB'S Situationist International Anthology (1981).

A sensationalistic account of a planet where anarchy is chaos, and everyone is your enemy.

Includes an account of Libertalia or Libertatia, a pirate colony in Madagascar founded by one Captain Misson (or Mission) and run along libertarian socialist lines. It also describes a purely anarchistic breakaway colony. This account is most likely fictional, although the rest of the book is nonfiction (see Peter Lamborn WILSON'S Pirate Utopias).

A walk-through description of the world in the year 2858, after the abolition of the state, religion, property, and the family. (Has an English translation appeared?)

(http://www.pcc.com/~jay/delany/).

After two hundred years of anarchy, the Anarchist League fights off an attempt by the last surviving government robot to restore the state.

A fictional depiction of the inhabitants of Tahiti as stateless, naked natives copulating under the sun.

Sequel to George ORWELL'S Animal Farm.

Portrays an anarcho-syndicalist society on the artificial island Stateless in the Pacific. The inhabitants mostly ignore anarchist thinkers like PROUDHON and BAKUNIN; they maintain a state of anarchy by educating children in sociobiology.

The feeble humanoid inhabitants of Venus have encased the planet in a glass sphere and live in a state of anarchy. (Available online: http://purple.home.texas.net/etexts/QueenOfLife/default.html)

The hermaphroditic inhabitants of Australia have no state, no property, no religion, and no family .

Usually considered the founder of the libertarian wing of socialism, FOURIER deserves mention here because his writings often contain fantastic elements. Once FOURIER'S socialism is established, men will grow to seven feet tall and live 144 years. The moon will be replaced by five new satellites, each a different color, and some Saturn-like rings, which will allow it to once again copulate with the other planets, which will all move closer to the Earth in order to engage in this planetary orgy. The oceans will turn to lemonade. One idea frequently attributed to FOURIER, however - that men will grow prehensile tails with an eye and a finger on the end - is apparently really the invention of a satirist. FOURIER often uses a semi-fictional form to describe his ideal society.

Governments and corporations wage war against anarchist enclaves.

An anarchist utopia in a post-nuclear holocaust world.

An anarchist invents the airplane and puts this at the disposal of Terrorists. They bomb the existing governments out of existence, and maintain the world's new socialist-anarchist society by coming out of hiding in Aëria, their African stronghold. (Available online here:

http://www.ffutures.demon.co.uk/ff7/angel.htm and here:

http://www.blackmask.com/books29c/angelrevdex.htm)

In the sequel, Olga Romanoff; or, The Syren of the Skies (1894), which takes place in 2030, a hundred years after the events of the preceding novel, the descendant of the last Tsar manages to discover the secret behind advanced technology like airplanes and submarines. Just as she has nearly attained world domination, the Aërians receive news from Mars that a comet is about to strike earth. They go into hiding underground, and return to rebuild their anarchist society after the comet wipes out all life on the surface. (Available online here:

http://www.ffutures.demon.co.uk/ff7/olga.htm)
Joe HALDEMAN

Buying Time ( ). ?
Edmond HAMILTON

The Island of Unreason (1933).

Those who commit "breach of reason" - as, for example, by refusing the mate assigned to them by the Eugenic Board - are sentenced to spend time on the Island of Unreason, where there is "no form of government".

HARRISON says: "the evil guys invade the plant [sic] which had their own system of Government which is right out of the text book! It's anarchy. It has a bad name. But no one knows a thing about anarchism these days. That world is a world of hard working anarchy. Every single character there is right out of the Encyclopaedia Britannia. And not one person ever noticed. So much for saying you hate anarchy! This was just pure text book anarchism. So now you know more about anarchy."

(MOORCOCK mentions that he is a libertarian.)

Portrays a society similar to anarcho-capitalism, the origin of the phrase "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" (TANSTAAFL) - which is very popular with those who pay for their lunches with the products of other people's labor.

A worldwide anarchist culture in the year 3000+.

This author's Brave New World (1932) stands with Yevgeny ZAMIATIN'S We (1924) and George ORWELL'S 1984 (1949) as one of the three greatest dystopian works. (By some strange coincidence, all three of these are by authors sympathetic to libertarian socialism.) HUXLEY states that it "started out as a parody of H.G. WELLS' Men Like Gods, but gradually it got out of hand". In Brave New World Revisited (1958) he presents libertarian socialism as an antidote, mentioning anarcho-syndicalism as one possible model. Island (1962) presents Huxley's own anarchistic utopia.

Libertarian socialist utopia.

Captain Charles JOHNSON. See under Daniel Defoe.

Sequel to With the Night Mail (1905).

The UN wages war against anarchist tribes on a terraformed Mars.

An attempt to portray a socialist-anarchist society in full, with both its good and bad features readily apparent. Widely popular among anarchists today, but many pro-capitalists consider this an unambiguous dystopia. On Anarres, moon of the planet Urras, there is a society founded on the philosophy of Odonianism, a synthesis of Taoism and anarcho-syndicalism. (See the study guide here:

"The Day before the Revolution" (1974) concerns Odo, founder of Odonianism, the mix of anarcho-syndicalism and Taoism portrayed in The Dispossessed. Odo is, furthermore (according to LeGuin), one of "The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas" (1973) and refuse to benefit from a system in which some gain at another's expense. In her introduction to the story in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975) LeGuin says, "Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by SHELLEY and KROPOTKIN, GOLDMAN and GOODMAN. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories." LeGuin also states that "To embody [anarchism] in a novel, which had not been done before, was a long and hard job for me, and absorbed me totally for many months." This could be criticized on a couple of grounds: first, only one-half of her novel takes place on an anarchistic world; second, she was preceded by Joseph DÉJACQUES, William MORRIS, H.G. WELLS, and others. The story is dedicated to Paul GOODMAN'S memory.

"Sur" (1982).

Doris LESSING. ?
Stephen LISTER

Hail Bolonia! (1948). ?
Saab LOFTON

A.D. (1996 ou 1995 A.D.. Gualala, Calif., III Publishing)

An inhabitant of a dystopia ruled by the Nation of Islam and the White Aryan Resistance becomes a sleeper who wakes in a Libertarian Socialist Democracy, or LSD.

"The Mound (1929-30)

Several of Lovecraft's works - e.g. At the Mountains of Madness (1933) and The Shadow out of Time (1934-35) - feature extraterrestrial races with democratic socialist societies, which he somewhat idiosyncratically refers to as "a sort of fascistic socialism". These represent LOVECRAFT'S own ideal. In contrast, the decadent mound-dwellers' government is "a kind of communistic or semi-anarchical state; habit rather than law determining the daily order of things." Their society resembles a combination of BULWER-LYTTON'S coming race and the utopian schemes of SADE'S libertines. See S.T. JOSHI'S essay "LOVECRAFT'S Alien Civilizations: A Political Interpretation", included in his Selected Papers on LOVECRAFT.
Simon LOUVISH

The Resurrections: A Novel (1994).

A political thriller set in a parallel universe in which the libertarian Marxist Rosa Luxemburg has led a successful communist revolution.

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.

(http://www.webart.hr/nrnm/eng/about/kml.html)

Portrays a future that includes both a libertarian socialist society and a libertarian capitalist society.

(MOORCOCK mentions that she is a libertarian.)

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 Crô-Magnons, whose society has no government, property, war, superstition, clothing, or other vices of civilization.

The main character has a dream set in a far future libertarian socialist society very similar to Mediaeval Europe. It is worth noting that Morris was writing against the primary (statist) current in utopian fiction, and in particular against Edward BELLAMY'S Looking Backward. This is the best-known anarchistic utopia. Also, A Dream of John Ball (1886-87).

The "copseyes" that prevent violence in a Free Park are disabled, and the place immediately bursts out with rape, robbery, monopolization of resources, and murder. Once order is restored, the character who had formerly propounded anarchism recants, having learned the Error Of His Ways.

Semi-fictionalized account of the revolutionary process.

In the guise of presenting revolutionary leaders with advice on how to gain power, this book presents a number of scenarios in semi-fictional form showing how to prevent authoritarians from taking power in a revolutionary situation. One section, The Seizure of State Power, has been reprinted separately.

Yet another sleeper awakes, this time to be given a guided tour of Bear City in the Cat-River bioregion, an eco-anarchist utopia.

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

The noble members of the Abbey of Thélème live by the motto "Do what thou will".

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." (The about-the-author note in Commune 2000 A.D. mentions that REYNOLDS has set fiction in fascist, socialist, and anarchist worlds. Are there others?) (REYNOLDS was an activist with the syndicalist Socialist Labor Party.)

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 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?)

An anarchistic robot colony on the moon.

This is a fix-up novel incorporating "And then there were none" (1951). Portrays a society very similar to that advocated by the American anarcho-individualists of the nineteenth century. ("And Then There Were None" is available online here: http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.htm)

Includes Michael BAKUNIN as a character.

Includes BAKUNIN as a character.

The isolated valley of the Assassins, who appear to be Godwinian anarcho-communists, receives its first visitor in centuries - the Wandering Jew. William S. BURROUGHS and Robert Anton WILSON have also used the Assassins as libertarian forerunners.

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."

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.)" In Greenhouse Summer (1999), capitalism falls and is replaced by anarcho-syndicalism.

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 (1930) and Star Maker (1937) this development is briefly portrayed.

Influenced by Bob BLACK'S The Abolition of Work.

The planet BAKUNIN.

Describes a socialist-anarchist utopia called Delectaland.

An "egalist" dystopia.

An anarchistic society has been created on Venus. Only individuals made ready for anarchy through the practice of General Semantics are allowed to go there. In The Anarchistic Colossus (1977) the Earth has realized anarchism through a novel method: a network of computers constantly reads everyone's minds through their Kirlian auras, and zaps anyone about to do anything naughty with lasers. The Violent Man (1962), a study of the authoritarian personality type set in revolutionary China, is also of interest.

This author was friends with leading anarchists including Peter KROPOTKIN and Élisée RECLUS. A number of his works show some degree of sympathy to anarchism and libertarian socialism. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) the anarchist Captain Nemo is "first among equals" on the Nautilus, a submarine. The Survivors of the "Jonathan" (book publication 1909; translated in two volumes as The Masterless Man and The Unwilling Dictator) includes the anarchist character Kaw-Djer, who may have been modeled on KROPOTKIN.

The governments of the world declare anarchists outlaws and dump them all on a newly-arisen island in the Pacific.

Martians have the one system no one on earth has yet tried: anarchism. Sequel to "A Martian Odyssey" (1934).

That WELLS was a Fabian socialist is well known; it is not well known, however, that he believed that state socialism would and should develop into a stateless society (he novelized his experiences with those in the Fabian Society who disagreed about this in The New Machiavelli (1911)). In A Modern Utopia (1905) WELLS attempts to outline a practical plan that would eventually reach this goal; there he says that "Were we free to have our untrammelled desire, I suppose we should follow Morris to his Nowhere, we should change the nature of man and the nature of things together; we should make the whole race wise, tolerant, noble, perfect - wave our hands to a splendid anarchy, every man doing as it pleases him, and none pleased to do evil, in a world as good in its essential nature, as ripe and sunny, as the world before the Fall." Rule in this utopia will be a class self-chosen from among those ready for anarchism, which WELLS calls the Samurai. In The World Set Free (1914; also published as The Last War) an atomic war is followed by the worldwide adoption of socialism; eventually the World State only meets once a year to congratulate itself on how well things are going. In Men Like Gods (1923), some individuals from this earth visit a parallel universe where humanity is around three thousand years in advance of us; this society has reached a fully stateless state. In Star-Begotten: A Biological Fantasia (1937), a character hypothesizes that Martians ("Some of you may have read a book called The War of the Worlds - I forget who wrote it - Jules VERNE, Conan DOYLE, one of those fellows") are bombarding the Earth with cosmic rays in order to create beneficial mutations. It is further hypothesized that these newly Martianized humans will bring about a libertarian socialist society through assassination and sabotage. However, "It would be anarchism, I suppose; it would mean 'back to chaos,' if it were not true that all sane minds released from individual motives and individual obsessions move in the same direction towards practically the same conclusion."

WILDE'S vision of anarchism.

Portrays a tribe of Brazilian anarcho-communists.

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