Anarchist SF
Entry updated 27 April 2026. Tagged: Theme.
This encyclopedia's entry on Libertarian SF begins by defining libertarianism as a form of anarchism based on competition rather than cooperation, a tradition largely confined to the USA. This is true as far as it goes, but the wider tradition of anarchism, as understood throughout most of the world, is not adequately covered by the concept of libertarian sf. There is a notable anarchist strand in sf that needs acknowledgment.
The situation is a little muddied by the fact that earlier commentators did not really draw much distinction between these terms, for the principal reason that libertarianism as a concept only gained its more prominent role from the 1970s onwards. To this day, many anarchists do not regard American libertarianism as a legitimate outgrowth of the anarchist tradition. Indeed, there is a strand of libertarianism characterized as anarcho-capitalism, which most mainstream anarchists vehemently reject.
Following a number of acts of violence committed by anarchists in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, a popular stereotype of anarchists as bomb-throwing terrorists was commonly employed in genre fiction, sf being no exception. Examples include George Griffith's The Angel of the Revolution (1893) and Olga Romanoff (1894); E Douglas Fawcett's Hartmann the Anarchist (1893), as a classic of the kind, is so sensationalist that an edition was published in 2009 by the well-known British Class War anarchist Ian Bone, with tongue firmly in cheek. A later work that associates anarchists with bombs is G K Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). In reality the so-called "propaganda by the deed" was not widely employed after World War One.
From the twentieth century through to today a number of prominent sf authors have self-identified as anarchist. These include M John Harrison, Nick Mamatas, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore and Norman Spinrad. Ursula K Le Guin did not self-identify as anarchist, but was honoured to be classed as such by others. In Fandom, Leslie Fish was an anarchist activist, as well as authoring The Weight (1976-1979 Warped Space; in The Weight Collected and Other Stories anth 1988), a fan-published Star Trek novel in which Kirk, Spock, and the crew are anarchists.
The most direct engagement is probably in the form of Utopian sf. The first notable example of this is Joseph Déjacque's L'Humanisphère (1858-1861), explicitly described by the celebrated anarchist Peter Kropotkin as an anarchist-communist utopia. Set in the year 2858, the state, religion, property, and the family have all been abolished. Déjacque was himself the first person to use the term "libertarian". Much better remembered today is William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890; rev 1891), which was written in response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888). Though he never described himself as anarchist, Morris's utopia has been much loved by many anarchists up to the present day. Kropotkin, in his 1896 memorial to Morris, described News from Nowhere as "perhaps the most thoroughly and deeply Anarchistic conception of future society that has ever been written. [...] his ideal society is undoubtedly the one which is most free of all our State and monastic traditions; the most imbued with the feelings of equality and humanitarian love; the most spontaneously growing out of a spirit of free understanding."
Later anarchist utopias, or novels depicting future anarchist communities sympathetically portrayed, include Hans Widmer's bolo'bolo (1983) as by P.M., L Timmel Duchamp's Marq'ssan Cycle (2005-2008), Mike Gilliland's The Free (1986), and more recently D D Johnstone's Disnaeland (2022) and Gautam Bhatia's The Sentence (2024). Much the best known, however, remains Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), which is painstakingly honest about the imperfections still likely to exist even in an ideal anarchist society: hence its subtitle's description as an ambiguous utopia. Iain M Banks's Culture series (1987-2012) has sometime been seen as portraying an anarchist society at the interstellar level, but the role of AIs in the Culture, and the astronomic distances involved, make this rather questionable.
A contemporary example, with the potential to achieve similar popularity to Le Guin's among anarchists, is M E O'Brien's and Eman Abdelhadi's Everything for Everyone. An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 (2022).
George Orwell, author of the twentieth century's most famous Dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), had considerable knowledge of anarchism and anarchists, most notably from his period as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War. Though after 1939 he distanced himself from anarchist views (disagreeing with their wartime pacifism), he became a good friend to anarchists. During and after the Second World War he came into personal contact with the anarchist movement in Britain, mixing with them at Freedom Bookshop and in pubs, and developing friendships with well-known British anarchists of the day. In 1945, following the conviction of the anarchist publishers of War Commentary, Orwell became Vice-Chairman of the Freedom Defence Committee, and at this time he allowed a cache of anarchist pamphlets to be hidden at his house for safe keeping. In 1949, the very year of the publication of his celebrated dystopia, he donated a typewriter to the anarchist Freedom Press, also giving financial support to NOW, George Woodcock's anarchist publication. Anarchist activist and historian Nicolas Walter wrote that "At most, George Orwell may be said to have been an anarchist fellow-traveller; but he was one of the best there ever was."
Other notable works include Dennis Danvers's The Watch (2002), supposedly written in the first person by Peter Kropotkin, who has been plucked from his deathbed, Rejuvenated, into a future in which he has the opportunity to foster anarchism once more; and Brad Linaweaver's and J Kent Hastings's Anarquía (2004), in which the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s prevail, thanks to an alternate Wernher von Braun, who – with Hedy Lamarr – designs a Rocket-based Weapon which he puts in their hands.
Michael Moorcock, whose œuvre often makes references to anarchist history, especially to the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno, published the best-known anarchist critique of science fiction in "Starship Stormtroopers: Anarchist and Authoritarian Ideas in Science Fiction" (1978 Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review #4).
Probably because of production costs, anarchist sf film is in short supply. Perhaps the most popular example is Born in Flames (1983).
An extensive guide to anarchism and science fiction can be found at the anarchySF website [see under links below]. [BSB]
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