50 fantasy & science fiction works that socialists should read by China Miéville

[The Marquis de Leech]

i'd like to see the contrapositive list by an authoritarian capitalist.

Surely The Road to Serfdom counts as fantasy? ;)

[The Marquis de Leech]

A second irony is that Asimov, who was seriously anti-communist, imagines this as the future.

Do we know much about Asimov's politics? He certainly was no Heinlein, and did actually write a thinly-disguised satire of McCarthyism.

[sologdin]

Road to Serfdom counts as fantasy?

ayn rand, maybe. probably some overlap with dystopian writings in general. nietzschean wet-dreams, to borrow one of mieville's phrases, too?

know much about Asimov's politics?

yeah, the martian way mocks mccarthyism, no? i read asimov as a bertrand russell liberal in some ways.

[Datepalm]

I've not read much Asimov, but he seems like he's...I dunno, capable of lefty thinking in his premises? Like, whole Foundation thing about manipulating history and whatever assumes that people are social actors and so on, whatever he does with that nation. Ayn Rands and co simply deny that in favour of their alternate realities of rugged individuals standing on cliffs in magnificent isolation.

[Sci-2]

I'm scratching my head as to why he picked the Hawkmoon series as Moorcock's representative effort. Yes, Moorcock has a bit of fun making the British the villains (and in doing so, they're far more interesting than any of the heroes), but the series is fluff: Moorcock has said he wrote the books in a handful of days in order to pay the rent. The Oswald Bastable series would be a better bet.

There's sort of a challenge to the idea that Revolution leads to Chaos meme in the novels I recall reading. Like the true "Chaos" sneaks in via the depravity practiced in secret by those in [tyrannical] authority.

[sologdin]

I've not read much Asimov, but he seems like he's...I dunno, capable of lefty thinking in his premises? Like, whole Foundation thing about manipulating history and whatever assumes that people are social actors and so on, whatever he does with that nation. Ayn Rands and co simply deny that in favour of their alternate realities of rugged individuals standing on cliffs in magnificent isolation.

one of the recurrent ideas in the robot novels is that there might be laws of humanics, parallel to the laws of robotics. turns out that psychohistory allows one to predict the future with specificity. i don't recall dialectics mentioned specifically, but the parallel is made manifest in one of the epigone novels that came out after asimov died (brin or bear or whomever), wherein one of the robots reflects, with unintentional comedy, that 19th century earth featured a prophet named marx whose "crude incantations" were not at all--Not At All!--related to psychohistory.

[Darth Richard]

What, no Goodkind? *rimshot*

[Old-Growth]

In the fifties and sixties, there was such a thing as a liberal (in the US---social democrat for Europeans) who was also fervently anti-communist: Hubert Humphrey was a paradigm example, as was Jack Kennedy. Humphrey was a supporter of the US war in SE Asia, for example; this led to enthusiastic cries of "Dump the Hump" in the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. From some things I have read, I had the impression that Asimov's politics inclined towards the liberal anti-communist position. Maybe by the 1980's as he was finishing the Robot & Foundation Novels his political point of view started shifting leftwards.

[Old-Growth]

Well, my impressions are not quite correct so it doth seem. This is from the Wiki page on Asimov:

"Asimov became a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party during the New Deal, and thereafter remained a political liberal. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and in a television interview during the early 1970s he publicly endorsed George McGovern. He was unhappy about what he considered an "irrationalist" viewpoint taken by many radical political activists from the late 1960s and onwards. In his second volume of autobiography, In Joy Still Felt, Asimov recalled meeting the counterculture figure Abbie Hoffman; Asimov's impression was that the1960s' counterculture heroes had ridden an emotional wave which, in the end, left them stranded in a "no-man's land of the spirit" from which he wondered if they would ever return"

Unfortunately this does not help with the 1950's.

[Galactus]

I've not read much Asimov, but he seems like he's...I dunno, capable of lefty thinking in his premises? Like, whole Foundation thing about manipulating history and whatever assumes that people are social actors and so on, whatever he does with that nation. Ayn Rands and co simply deny that in favour of their alternate realities of rugged individuals standing on cliffs in magnificent isolation.

I seem to remember him (in the foreword to the swedish edition of Foundation) mentioning that his EDITOR was "Slighty to the right of Genghis Khan" and that this kind of warped most of his early production.

[Old-Growth]

I think I've read one of them but don't remember which :)

Anyway I think years of rice and salt is the really interesting ksr book

Well at least someone likes that besides me. For some reason the highlight for me was Ibrahim of Khaldun and Kang Tong-bi (spelling? I gave my copy away to an acquaintance who really liked Galileo's Dream). I assume that ksr's doctorate is in Asian History: he plainly knows a lot about it.

But you should read the Mars Trilogy and Galileo's Dream. Well worth the time spent.

BTW, does anyone know if Martin has commented on ksr's work and if so what he said?

[SkynJay]

I read five of them, quit on one of them. So, not many for me.

[Merentha]

I think I've read one of them but don't remember which :)

Anyway I think years of rice and salt is the really interesting ksr book

Red Mars is the first and the most standalone. It would make sense that you stopped there, if you did, since Green Mars doesn't even really end. It and Blue Mars feel like one very long, good book. I think they are easily KSR's best books.

[Datepalm]

No, I definitely read Red Mars, and either Blue or Green. (Vagaries of Jerusalem's library system.)

I started Gallileo's Dream once but really couldn't get into it. I was way more interested in one plot line than the other and it had that thing where I spent all the boring plot being annoyed that I wasn't reading interesting plot.

[Myshkin]

It's been a while, but is Atlas Shrugged SFF?

Also he says about The Master and Margarita:

a satire and critique of Stalinist Russia so cutting it is unbelievable that it got past the censors.

Um, it didn't.

[sologdin]

i thought that it was published posthumously with censorial redactions, whereas the full version had to wait until the end of the cold war?

[Myshkin]

i thought that it was published posthumously with censorial redactions, whereas the full version had to wait until the end of the cold war?

A censored version was published in the Soviet Union some 25-30 years after Bulgakov's death. Right around the same time an uncensored version was published in West Germany. Bulgakov agonized over the book, even burned the first draft, because he knew he would never get it published. Perhaps Mieville meant that it was unbelievable that any form of the novel got published at all, but I don't see how it could be said that it "got past the censors".