I’ve been watching a few booktubers recently talking about Science Fiction, and this video came up on my YouTube feed. It’s ’17 Political SciFi Books to Hel[p Rethink Governments’ from the Secret Sauce of Storycraft channel on YouTube. While it’s obviously about Science Fiction, it’s brief study of political SF seemed very suitable for this channel with its focus on politics. SF as a genre has allowed writers to examine and critique various political ideologies and systems. I think one of the earliest British proto-SF novels dates from the 17th or 18th centuries. Set in the year 2000,, it predicts a dystopian future in which Britain is ruled by the Department of Plantations, the section of government dealing with the establishment of colonies.
In this video, the hostess briefly discusses 17 books examining the nature of politics and government and exploring various political systems. These include such classic warnings of the dangers of totalitarianism such as Zamyatin’s We, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. This last is particular chilling as Fordism, the dominating political ideology in the novel, rules not through military repression but pleasure. Then there’s anarchism/socialism/communism contrasted with capitalism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, about a scientist from an anarchist world travelling to its capitalist twin to complete his project of creating an ansible, a kind of telephone that can broadcast messages faster than the speed of light across the universe. Frank Herbert’s Dune is also there because of its vision of a feudal galactic empire and environmentalist concerns. Then there’s also Heinlein’s Starshiip Troopers. This is a military SF novel, but it’s also political as the future society depicted only grants citizenship to those who have served in the armed force. Other novels include a society in which the individual states have populations of only 100,000 people. This is somewhat like the demarchists in Alistair Reynolds’ SF novels, where internet technology allows every citizen to participate in a kind of direct democracy. As a result, citizens vote on the matters that are important to them. The various nations include a variety of political systems, including monarchies, and people move from one to another according to their political views. There are a number of other videos about political Science Fiction on YouTube. Apart from the novels and stories discussed in the video, some SF writers have produced non-fiction works about the political aspects of the genre. China Mieville, for example, brought out a book on SF and Marxism a few years ago. This is a good, short video for anyone interested in SF as a genre, not just of ideas, but of political ideas.
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