Francis Bass

Reading

I am still slowly working my way through my utopia/dystopia reading list! This is a list I’ve put together of books which fit a very specific, but surprisingly populous, niche: science fiction books in which the main character travels between two or more realms governed by contrasting economic and political regimes. These are not books where the two realms are at war (not necessarily, at least), or where one regime must supplant the other. The protagonists are not leaders or warriors, they are travelers, diplomats, emissaries. Some of the books feature anarchism, some communism. All but one are by women. These are the books:

• Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley (1929) 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑
• Battle Hymn of China by Agnes Smedley (1943) 🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin (1974) 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗
• Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland (1976) 🚀
• Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany (1976)
• China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh (1992)
• Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu (2016)

I’m currently slowly picking away at Cecelia Holland’s Floating Worlds, which is set in a future solar system where anarchists live on Earth, capitalists control the rest of the inner solar system, and at the outer reaches lives an isolationist civlization of mutants. The main character, an anarchist from Earth, is sent to broker a peace deal between the mutants and the capitalists.

It seems the Earth society is actually some kind of anarcho-capitalist bullshit, where private property exists, but is not enforced or protected … ? I don’t know. Holland appears to have a vague, incurious understanding of anarchism, and is far more interested in the hyper-patriarchal mutant society. I think the book is serving me as a good reminder of the level of the discourse at the time, the context in which Le Guin and Delany were writing, but it’s basically just feminist sci-fi schlock. We’ll see.