Fantastic Fiction
To read: A selection of books from China Mieville’s list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read, which includes books by all kinds of writers, reactionary, conservative, bourgeois, marxist, anarchist, libertarian. The comments are my own.
Alexander Bogdanov — The Red Star (Красная звезда, 1908)
Bolshevik goes to Mars. Need I explain why I want to read this?
Emma Bull & Steven Brust — Freedom & Necessity (1997)
The Green Man Review has one word of warning: it is an epistolary novel. If I can live with the letter format, which I find more fun to write than to read, maybe I will like this tale “about love, Hegel, labor philosophy and the just-might-be occult conspiracy”, with - spoiler alert! - a cameo appearance by Friedrich Engels.
Mikhail Bulgakov — The Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита, 1938)
“It’s unbelieveable it got past the censors”, Mieville writes, and indeed it didn’t. It wasn’t officially published until 1966, in a censored version, but was circulated as samizdat long before that. It’s waiting for me on its bookshelf. *sigh* I’ve also seen a nice film version of his 1925 novel Heart of a Dog (Собачье сердце), reminiscent of the bizarre “monkey gland” craze of the 1920’s.
Claude Farrère — Useless Hands (Les Condamnes a Mort, 1920)
Mieville says: “Bleak Social Darwinism [...] The ‘useless hands’—workers—revolt is seen as pathetic before inexorable technology.” Farrère was a very popular writer in France, but today he seems to be almost forgotten, save for the fact that Guerlain still produces a perfume named after one of his heroines: Mitsouko (1919; from the novel La bataille)
Anatole France — The White Stone (Sur la Pierre Blanche, 1905)
Mieville only hits at the contents. It’s apparently a statement against racist “yellow peril” hysteria, focusing on the “white peril” and socialism. But is it pro or con? From Wikipedia: “France’s later works include L’Île des Pingouins (1908) which satirizes human nature by depicting the transformation of penguins into humans - after the animals have been baptized in error by the nearsighted Abbot Mael. La Revolte des Anges (1914) [...] tells the story of [angel] Arcade [...] who falls in love, joins the revolutionary movement of angels, and toward the end realizes that the overthrow of God is meaningless unless in ourselves and in ourselves alone we attack and destroy Ialdabaoth [the Demiurge, the malevolent supreme ruler]. In the 1920s France’s writings were put on the index of Libri prohibiti.” Cool!
Mary Gentle — Rats and Gargoyles (1990)
Gentle has also written the novel Grunts! about heroic (but still orcish) Orcs and racist Elves, which has been on my to-read-list for ages. This book is about an alternative 17th century England, social politics and alchemy.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman — “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)
I read this short story in English Literature at university. It is a seriously scary horror story about a woman trapped in marriage. It’s all in her head, yes - but that’s what really counts. In the end, the read is trapped, as well… “See also her feminist/socialistic utopias Moving the Mountain (1911) and Herland (1914)”, Mieville recommends.
Stefan Grabiński — The Dark Domain (English-language collection) (1918–22; trans. and collected 1993)
Train horror! Who can resist stories with names like “The Motion Demon”, “The Wandering Train”, “The Perpetual Passenger”? I love trains and train stations, the bustling, hectic activity and the desolate emptiness, the stress and the settling down, the small rituals around the tickets, everything that’s painfully ordinary but somehow a glorious collective effort.
George Griffith — The Angel of Revolution (1893)
Wikipedia: “Griffith’s epic fantasies of romantic anarchists in a future world of war dominated by airship battlefleets and grandiose engineering provided a template for steampunk novels a century before the term was coined.”
J. Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) — Gay Hunter (1934, reissued 1989)
Oh, those innocent days, when “gay” was an emotion, “ejaculation” an exclamation, and “lovemaking” acceptable in public. Scottish Marxist Mitchell’s novel is innocent in a different way. His archaeologist hero travels forward in time to witness mankind living as peaceful hunters and gatherers after the destruction of civilization as we know it. I’m not a fan of time travel, but utopias are always interesting, because they say more about the fears and dreams of the present…
Mervyn Peake—The Gormenghast Novels (1946–59)
I’ve read the first and second part, but according to Mieville, the third part is unfairly underrated. Strangely, the atmosphere reminds me of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Swiss crime novels, although the genres and the forms are completely different.
Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged (1957)
“Know your enemy”, says Mieville. I have no clue why Rand’s philosophy is so popular - anyone could come up with the idea that your own success goes first, and the devil take the hindmost. Claiming that egoism is an “objective good” is perhaps a bit novel, but basically uninteresting, since why would die-hard egoists need to justify their actions morally or scientifically anyway? (unless they feel bad about it somewhere deep inside…) A real entrepreneur wouldn’t flee from an oppressively altruistic (!) state and hide away like a religious recluse waiting for the evil world to collapse without his genius. Real entrepreneurs would continue business as usual and work their way around the rules, even bend them to their advantage. The way the individualistic elitists in Atlas Shrugged are acting, you are more reminded of misunderstood artists and intellectuals and emo teenagers who sniffle at an unfeeling world: “just wait and see, when I’m gone, you’ll all be sorry!!” In short, it’s utopian, and I’m sceptical of utopias, even though they can be fun to play with. I tried to read her earlier novel The Fountainhead once. A thousand pages are normally not a problem for me, but the characters were so cold, sleek and inhuman - a bit like Tamara de Lempicka’s deco portraits - that I lost interest.
Mary Shelley—Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
Mieville says: “Not a warning ‘not to mess with things that should be let alone’ (which would be a reactionary anti-rationalist message) but an insistence on the necessity of grappling with forces one unleashes and the fact that there is no ‘innate’ nature to people, but a socially-constructed one.” Hmm!
Norman Spinrad — The Iron Dream (1972)
I have started to read this some years ago, but never got around to finishing it. It’s very funny in a screwed-up way, though: what kind of a novel would Hitler produce, if he had emigrated to the USA in 1919 and become a sci-fi writer? Disturbingly, even though it’s blatantly over-the-top, the book has both been banned in West Germany and won some Neo-Nazi fans.
Eugene Sue — The Wandering Jew (Le Juif Errant, 1845)
Pandering to French jesuitophobia, Sue’s novel features a world-wide conspiracy, the Wandering Jew and his sister in sympathetic supporting roles, descendants of a dispersed family gathering together in Paris to learn a centuries-old family secret… All the while evil Jesuits are conspiring to get hold of a huge treasure, the inheritance of the family, and as evil as they are, they even conspire against each other in best adventure pulp tradition! Another unfinished read, which I wonder if Dan Brown has read. Take the myth of the Da Vinci Code (Jesus’ genes being the “lost family inheritance” with a French connection) and replace Opus Dei with the Society of Jesus… The ending is a bit surprising for a modern reader, though. (Spoilers in the Wikipedia article)
Michael Swanwick—The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993)
“Anti-fantasy”, they call it - a dark tale of a fantasy world with dragons, elves and changelings that slave in an industrial-militarist society. I don’t know much about Swanwick except that he seems to like the Finnish word “tusinafantasia” for some reason.
Alexei Tolstoi — Aelita (1923)
Yet another half-read! Bolshevik goes to Mars? Not really. Engineer Los is an incurable romantic, and his Sancho Panza, Red Army veteran Gusev, is heart-warmingly stereotypical comic relief with a revolutionary edge. The silent film version is quite different.
H.G. Wells — The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)
Connections abound to Bulgakov and Anatole France. Wells can’t really decide if he is progressive or conservative, and that makes for interesting reading.
E. L. White — “Lukundoo” (1927)
Heart of Darkness gone bizarre! It’s only 9 pages, so read it yourself.
Yevgeny Zamyatin — We (Мы, 1920)
I have actually finished this! A dystopia with a built-in utopian vision (many writers of dystopias aren’t very clear with what kind of society they would prefer instead of their horror visions, but usually you can estimate it by deductive logic). Indeed, Zamyatin was not by any means an economic liberal pro-capitalist. He was mainly concerned with the creative freedom of the artist and the system critic, the “heretic”. We was never published in the USSR, and Zamyatin emigrated to France in the 1930’s.
September 16th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Maybe I can add my comments about two more of the books in the list:
Ursula K. Le Guin — The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)
A story from a world where the earth is under capitalist rule, while the moon has been colonised by a anarcho-communist society. The main character, from the moon, ponders the problems in both systems, and the book ends with a call to tear down all fences, both outside and inside of ourselves.
I was so happy when I chanced upon this book as a teenager. Back then I didn’t think anyone besides me would have thought of writing anything like it, ha ha.
William Morris — News From Nowhere (1888)
I started reading it once, and soon lost interest. The little I remember of it just seemed like some kind of naïve men’s club fantasy.
I like Morris’s nonfiction writings, though.