50 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read (by China Mieville)

I think Mieville was trying too hard to get 50 works; some of his choices are a bit, well, unusual.

Bellamy, for example; Mieville describes "Looking Backward" as a "naive communist utopia", albeit "bureaucratic", but I think Draper put it well:

"As in the case of the anarchists, Bellamy’s fanciful solution to the basic problem of social organization – how to resolve differences of ideas and interests among men – is the assumption that the elite will be superhumanly wise and incapable of injustice (essentially the same as the Stalinist-totalitarian myth of the infallibility of the Party), the point of the assumption being that it makes unnecessary any concern about democratic control from below. The latter is unthinkable for Bellamy because the masses, the workers, are simply a dangerous monster, the barbarian horde. The Bellamyite movement – which called itself “Nationalism” and originally set out to be both anti-socialist and anti-capitalist – was systematically organized on a middle-class appeal, like the Fabians."

It is also debatable whether "Looking Backward" qualifies as science fiction, as the progress of technology is not the focus of the work (probably the same things could be said of "Time Considered..." etc.).

And if "Looking Backward" qualifies, then surely "Voyage to Icaria" does as well, which I think would be more interesting to modern communists.

A lot of people like "The Dispossessed", but I've always found it, and other works in the Hainish cycle, to be a bit problematic politically. Particularly the use of psychiatric institutions (it always amused me that even in the seventies, people still assumed these institutions would exist in a socialist society by default) as de facto penal institutions, something associated more with the Soviet Union than anarchism. The idea seems to be that a "perfect society is impossible", which is either a truism or completely defeatist. It is a truism if the only thing that is meant is that there is still the possibility that comrades commissars for the tram system are going to bungle things and cause a traffic jam. But if what is meant is that we will never get rid of the crap of class society, including social coercion, it does raise the uncomfortable question of why we should fight.

I would also note that Eastern European authors are barely represented; what's more, they seem to have been chosen based on how critical they were of the Soviet Union, which is something I've noticed in a lot of Western works. It's as if the only way an Eastern European author could have any value is if he criticises the other side of the Cold War (Heinlein, in the meantime, is free to be the most apple-pie patriotic semi-militarist libertarian). No Efremov, that's a pity.

I would also include Cordwainer Smith, although his strength lay in short stories (his one novel was meh), and his Christian influences can be grating. Still, it's interesting to see the Civil Rights period reflected in, for example, "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell".