A Better Tomorrow.

“This is not a list of the ‘best’ fantasy or SF. There are huge numbers of superb works not on the list. Those below are chosen not just because of their quality – which though mostly good, is variable – but because the politics they embed (deliberately or not) are of particular interest to socialists.”

Sci-fi author China Mieville (Perdido Street Station, Iron Council, The City & The City) offers up his personal list of the 50 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read, including Octavia Butler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edward Bellamy, Iain Banks, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Mervyn Peake. “Ayn Rand—Atlas Shrugged (1957): Know your enemy. This panoply of portentous Nietzcheanism lite has had a huge influence on American SF. Rand was an obsessive ‘objectivist’ (libertarian pro-capitalist individualist) whose hatred of socialism and any form of ‘collectivism’ is visible in this important and influential – though vile and ponderous – novel.”

As y’all already know, I’m not a socialist — I’m a civic progressive. But I have more admiration for the old Party of Debs than I do, say, today’s New Dems. Also, the Iron Council-ish train above is by Arizona-based illustrator Chris Gall, whose colorful, social realist-inspired drawings and engravings are worth perusing.

Silicon Council.

Seen and taken from Cliopatria, Crooked Timber holds an online symposium on China Mieville and Iron Council, which includes informed essays by John Holbo, Belle Waring, Henry Farrell, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, John Quiggen, and most notably, Mieville himself. I haven’t gotten through all of these yet, but there’s some really good stuff here, including Mieville’s nuanced analysis of the great Tolkien-Moorcock divide in fantasy writing. (I for one think that, when it comes J.R.R.T., Moorcock is full of it, as is Phillip Pullman.) Of Mieville’s books, I most enjoyed Perdido Street Station and most admired The Scar. Iron Council was a good read in fine phantasmagoric Mieville form, but I ultimately thought it was too self-conscious in its historical agenda — At times I felt I was reading J. Anthony Lukas’s Big Trouble by way of Mervyn Peake. I appreciate what Mieville was trying to do…I just don’t think he quite pulled it off.

The Road to Hell.

“The redemptive power of suffering is, in my experience at least, vastly overrated.” Over this past weekend, I finally got the chance to read Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, and, while it becomes a dark journey indeed for Emilio Sandoz, our Jesuit protagonist, over the course of the novel, I heartily recommend it. In fact, it’s probably the best science-fiction book I’ve read since Perdido Street Station (although Russell’s book is much less phantasmagoric than Mieville’s more fantasy-tinged stuff.)

A former paleo-anthropologist and academic jack-of-all-trades, Russell has retold the standard First Contact type of story here with a blend of straight-up hard sci-fi, Columbian commentary, and devastating ruminations on the price of faith and the laws of unintended consequences. While the story here seemed self-contained, I’m now rather looking forward to picking up her sequel, Children of God (although the reading queue is pretty backed up right now.) At any rate, if you like your sci-fi literate, intelligent, and ultimately somewhat nightmarish, think about checking out The Sparrow. Update: You can read the first chapter here. Also, if you haven’t read The Sparrow, stay out of the comments, where the end of the book is being discussed.

Flights of Imagination.

The Science Fiction Book Club picks the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy books of the last 50 years, although after the top ten they’re listed alphabetically (Via Lots of Co.) I’d say I’ve read about half of these, and the choices seem pretty legit. No surprise who‘s at the top of the list, but otherwise it seems like the fantasy side got short shrift. I guess the Narnia books (and for that matter Animal Farm and 1984) are over 50-years-old. Speaking of which, I can’t say I’m a very big C.S. Lewis fan (particularly as compared to Tolkien), but nonetheless – the Narnia film site is now live.