China Mieville's 50 SF & F Socialists should read

Just saw this online: http://books.google.com/books?id=i8ROuvyzBpsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA187#v=onepage&q&f=false

If I had the time, I'd so do this.

This is what he says/the 50 Scifi and Fantasy books he thinks every Socialist should read:

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. Of course, other works—by the same or other writers—could have been chosen: disagreement and alternative suggestions are welcomed. I change my own mind hour to hour on this anyway.
Iain M. Banks—Use of Weapons (1990)Socialist SF discussing a post-scarcity society. The Culture are “goodies” in narrative and political terms, but here issues of cross-cultural guilt and manipulation complicate the story from being a simplistic utopia.
Edward Bellamy—Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888)A hugely influential, rather bureaucratic egalitarian/naïve communist utopia. Deals very well with the confusion of the “modern” (19^th Century) protagonist in a world he hasn’t helped create (see Bogdanov).
Alexander Bogdanov—The Red Star: A Utopia (1908; trans. 1984)This Bolshevik SF sends a revolutionary to socialist Mars. The book’s been criticized (with some justification) for being proto-Stalinist, but overall it’s been maligned. Deals well with the problem faced by someone trying to adjust to a new society s/he hasn’t helped create (see Bellamy).
Emma Bull & Steven Brust—Freedom & Necessity (1997)Bull is a left-liberal and Brust is a Trotskyist fantasy writer.F&Nis set in the 19th Century of the Chartists and class turmoil. It’s been described as “the first Marxist steampunk” or “a fantasy for Young Hegelians.”
Mikhail Bulgakov—The Master and Margarita (1938; trans. 1967)Astonishing fantasy set in ’30s Moscow, featuring the Devil, Pontius Pilate, The Wandering Jew, and a satire and critique of Stalinist Russia so cutting it is unbelievable that it got past the censors. Utterly brilliant.
Katherine Burdekin (aka “Murray Constantine”)—Swastika Night (1937)An excellent example of the “Hitler Wins” sub-genre of SF. It’s unusual in that it was published by the Left Book Club and it was written while Hitler was in power, so the fear of Nazi future was immediate.
Octavia Butler—Survivor (1978)Black American writer, now discovered by the mainstream after years of acclaim in the SF field.Kindredis her most overtly political novel, the Patternmaster series the most popular. Survivor brilliantly blends genre SF with issues of colonialism and racism.
Julio Cortázar—“House Taken Over” (1963?)A terrifying short story undermining the notion of the house as sanctity and refuge. A subtle destruction of the bourgeois oppositions between public/private and inside/outside.
Philip K. Dick—A Scanner Darkly (1977)Could have picked almost any of his books. Like all of them, this deals with identity, power, and betrayal, here tied in more directly to social structures than in some other works (though see Counter-Clock World and The Man in the High Castle). Incredibly moving.
Thomas Disch—The Priest (1994)Utterly savage work of anti-clericalism. A work of dark fantasy GBH against the Catholic Church (dedicated, among others, to the Pope…)
Gordon Eklund—All Times Possible(1974)Study of alternative worlds, including an examination of hypothetical Left-wing movements in alternative USAs.
Max Ernst—Une Semaine de Bonté (1934)The definitive Surrealist collage novel. A succession of images the reader is involved in decoding. A Whodunwhat, with characters from polite commercial catalogues engaged in a story of little deaths and high adventure.
Claude Farrère—Useless Hands (1920; trans. 1926)Bleak Social Darwinism, and a prototype of “farewell to the working class” arguments. The “useless hands”—workers—revolt is seen as pathetic before inexorable technology. A cold, reactionary, interesting book.
Anatole France—The White Stone (1905; trans. 1910)In part, a rebuttal to the racist “yellow peril” fever of the time—a book about “white peril” and the rise of socialism. Also interesting isThe Revolt of the Angels, which examines now well-worn socialist theme of Lucifer being in the right, rebelling against the despotic God.
Jane Gaskell—Strange Evil(1957)Written when Gaskell was 14, with the flaws that entails. Still, however, extraordinary. A savage fairytale, with fraught sexuality, meditations on Tom Paine and Marx, revolutionary upheaval depicted sympathetically, but without sentimentality; plus the most disturbing baddy in fiction.
Mary Gentle—Rats and Gargoyles (1990)Set in a city that undermines the “feudalism lite” of most genre fantasy. An untypical female protagonist has adventures in a cityscape complete with class struggle, corruption, and racial oppression.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman—“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)Towering work by this radical thinker. Terrifying short story showing how savage gender oppression can inhere in “caring” relationships just as easily as in more obviously abusive ones. See also her feminist/socialistic utopias “Moving the Mountain” (1911) andHerland(1914).
Lisa Goldstein—The Dream Years (1985)A time-slip oscillating between Paris in the 1920s, during the Surrealist movement, and in 1968, during the Uprising. Uses a popular fantastic mode to examine the relation between Surrealism as the fantastic modepar excellence and revolutionary movements (if nebulously conceived).
Stefan Grabiński—The Dark Domain (1918–22; trans. and collected 1993)Brilliant horror by this Polish writer. Unusually locates the uncanny and threatening within the very symbols of a modernizing industrialism in Poland: trains, electricity, etc. This awareness of the instability of the everyday marks him out from traditional, “nostalgic” ghost story writers.
George Griffith—The Angel of Revolution (1893)Rather dated, but unusual in that its heroes are revolutionary terrorists. Very different from the devious anarchist villains of (e.g.) Chesterton.
Imil Habibi—The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (1974; trans. 1982)The full title is much longer. Habiby was a member of the Palestinian Community Party, a veteran of the anti-British struggle of the 40s, and a member of the Knesset for several years. This amiable, surreal book is about the life of a Palestinian in Israel (with surreal bits, and aliens).
M. John Harrison—Viriconium Nights (1984)A stunning writer, who expresses the alienation of the modern everyday with terrible force. Fantasy that mercilessly uncovers the alienated nature of the longing for fantastic escape, and show how that fantasy will always remain out of reach. Punishes his readers and characters for their involvement with fantasy. See alsoThe Course of the Heart.
Ursula K. Le Guin—The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)The most overtly political of this anarchist writer’s excellent works. An examination of the relations between a rich, exploitive capitalist world and a poor, nearly barren (though high-tech) communist one.
Jack London—Iron Heel (1907)London’s masterpiece: scholars from a 27th Century socialist world find documents depicting a fascist oligarchy in the US and the revolt of the proletariat. Elsewhere, London’s undoubted socialism is undermined by the most appalling racism.
Ken MacLeod—The Star Fraction (1996)British Trotskyist (of strongly libertarian bent), all of whose (very good) works examine Left politics without sloganeering. The Stone Canal, for example, features arguments about distortions of Marxism. However, The Star Fraction is chosen here as it features Virtual Reality heroes of the left, by name—a roll call of genuine revolutionaries recast in digital form.
Gregory Maguire—Wicked (1995)Brilliant revisionist fantasy about how the winners write history. The loser whose side is here taken is the Wicked Witch of the West, a fighter for emancipatory politics in the despotic empire of Oz.
J. Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon)—Gay Hunter(1934, reissued 1989)By the Marxist writer of the classic work of vernacular Scots literatureA Scots Quair, andSpartacus, the novel that proves that propaganda can be art. This is great science fiction. Bit dewy-eyed about hunter-gatherers perhaps, but superb nonetheless. As an added bonus, it also has a title that sounds amusing today. Check out his short fiction, which includes a lot of SF/Fantasy work.
Michael Moorcock—Hawkmoon (1967–77, reprinted in one edition 1992)Moorcock is an erudite Left-anarchist and a giant of fantasy literature. Almost everything he’s written is of interest, but Hawkmoon is chosen here in honor of Moorcock having said about it: “In a spirit consciously at odds with the jingoism of the day, I chose a German for a hero and the British for villains.” There are also plenty of satirical references and gags about 1960s/70s politics for the reader to decode.
William Morris—News From Nowhere (1888)A socialist (though naively pastoral) utopia, written in response to Bellamy (above), that unusually doesn’t shy away from the hard political question of how we get the desired utopia-proletarian revolution. See alsoThe Well at the World’s Endand his other fantasies.
Toni Morrison—Beloved (1987)It’s well known thatBelovedis a superb book about race and slavery and guilt, but it’s less generally accepted that it’s a fantasy. It is. It’s a ghost story that wouldn’t have half the charge without the fantastic element.
Mervyn Peake—The Gormenghast Novels (1946–59)An austere depiction of dead ritualism and necessary transformation. Don’t believe those who say that the third book is disappointing.
Marge Piercy—Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)A Chicano woman trapped in an asylum makes contact with a messenger from a future utopia, born after a “full feminist revolution”.
Philip Pullman—Northern Lights (1995)Pullman let us down. This book is here because it deals with moral/political complexities with unsentimental respect for its (young adult) readers and characters. Explores freedom and social agency, and the question of using ugly means for emanicipatory ends. It raises the biggest possible questions, and doesn’t patronise us that there are easy answers. The second in the trilogy,The Subtle Knife, is a perfectly good bridging volume… and then in book three,The Amber Spyglass, something goes wrong. It has excellent bits, it is streets ahead of its competition… but there’s sentimentality, a hesitation, a formalism, which lets us down. Ah well.Northern Lightsis still a masterpiece.
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 an influential—though vile and ponderous—novel.
Mack Reynolds—Lagrange Five (1979)Reynolds was, for 25 years, an activist for the U.S. Socialist Labor Party. His radical perspective on political issues is reflected throughout his work. This book—examining a quasi-utopia without sentimentalism—is only one suggestion. Also of huge interest are Tomorrow Might Be Different (1960) and The Rival Rigelians (1960), which explicitly examine the relation between capitalism and Stalinism.
Keith Roberts—Pavane (1968)These linked stories take place in a present day where Elizabeth I was assassinated and Spain took over Britain. This examines life in a world where a militant feudal Catholicism acts as a fetter on social and productive functions. Though Roberts was no lefty at all, and you could probably power France on the energy from his spinning grave at being included in this list.
Kim Stanley Robinson—The Mars Trilogy (1992–96)Probably the most powerful center of gravity for Leftist SF in the 1990s. A sprawling and thoughtful examination of the variety of social relations feeding into and leading up to revolutionary change. (It’s also got some Gramsci jokes in it.)
Mary Shelley—Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)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.
Lucius Shepard—Life During Wartime (1987)Horrific vision of a future (thinly disguised Vietnam) war. Within the savage examinations of the truth of war and U.S. foreign policy, Shepard also investigates the relation between SF, fantasy, and “magic realism”, and uses their shared mode to look back at reality with passion.
Norman Spinrad—The Iron Dream (1972)A SF novel by Adolf Hitler… Spinrad’s funny, disturbing and savage indictment of the fascist aesthetics in much genre SF and fantasy. What if Hitler had become a pulp SF writer in New York? Not a book about that possibility but a book from it. “By the same author: Triumph of the Will and Lord of the Swastika.” Brave and nasty.
Eugene Sue—The Wandering Jew (1845)Huge book by radical socialist Sue, about the adventures of the family of the Wandering Jew of legend. Symbolic fantasy elements: the Jew is the dispossessed laborer and his partner is downtrodden woman. Marx hated Sue as a writer (not without reason—less, for Sue, is not in more) but hell, it’s an important book.
Michael Swanwick—The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993)Great work that completely destroys the sentimental aspects of genre fantasy. From within the genre—fairies, elves, and all—Swanwick examines the industrial revolution, the Vietnam War, racism and sexism, and the escapist dreams of genre fantasy. A truly great anti-fantasy.
Jonathan Swift—Gulliver’s Travels (1726)Savage attack on hypocrisy and cant that never dilutes its fantasy with its satire: the two elements feed off each other perfectly.
Alexei Tolstoy—Aelita (1922; trans. 1957)Distant relative of the other Tolstoy. The “revised” version is less good, written in the stern environment of Stalinism. A Red Army officer goes to Mars and foments a rebellion of native Martians. Good rousing stuff, but also interesting in terms of “exporting” revolution. See also the superb avant-garde film version from 1924.
Ian Watson—Slow Birds (1985)Left-wing author whose short story collection above includes a cold demolition of Thatcher and Thatcherism. His take on oppression—cognitive and political—informs all his rather austere, cerebral writing.
H.G. Wells—The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)Like a lot of Wells’s work, this is an uneasy mixture of progressive and reactionary notions. It makes for one of the great horror stories of all time. A fraught examination of colonialism, science, eugenics, repression, and religion: a kind of fantasy echo of Shakespeare’sThe Tempest.
E. L. White—“Lukundoo” (1927)One of the most utterly extraordinary (and almost certainly unconscious) expressions of colonial anxiety and guilt in the history of literature.
Oscar Wilde—The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888)Children’s fantasies by this romantic, socialist author. Marked by a sharp lack of sentimentality, a deeply subversive cynicism, which doesn’t blunt their ability to be intensely moving.
Gene Wolfe—The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972)Wolfe is a religious Republican, but his tragico-Catholic perspective leads to a deeply unglamorized and unsanitized awareness of social reality. This book is a very sad and extremely dense, complex meditation on colonialism, identity and oppression.
Yevgeny Zamyatin—We (1920; trans. 1924)A Bolshevik, who earned semi-official unease in the USSR even in the early 1920s, with this unsettling dystopian view of absolute totalitarianism. These days often retrospectively, ahistorically, and misleadingly judged to be a critique of Stalinism.

Thoughts on Arendt so far

So I only read Hannah Arendt's Imperialism section and have just started into Totalitarianism, skipped the first part. So these are what my questions are drawing on...

1) Ok so this totally might seem random but there is something interesting when Arendt says

"When, in the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and 'thought in continents,' these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs." (138)

What arrests me here is the arrangement of imperialism and the phrase "thinking in continents." It's said that Cecil Rhodes "thought in continents," in keeping with his "expansion is everything" (124), so I want to ask why continents? Even for Robert Young (who we read in Chris Connery's class a few weeks ago) wants to call postcolonial thought "tricontinental thought" because it was born out of the Tricontinental Conference in 1966. The irony of this is that it was held in Havana, in Cuba, an island, and we might suppose that islands feel so closely to one continent or another that they are subsumed with it. And we also might suppose that continents are the ones with superior power of any kind in comparison to islands. However, islands are a bit trickier than that and hard to claim or incorporate into any one territory.
Perhaps the mistake with imperialism and expansion was that they were thinking in continents and thus not sustainably, but with the "insanity" of unlimited expansion.  I still don't think we've gotten outta this mindset...

2) Was bothered by some statements made by Arendt and wasn't sure how to take them?

"Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans" (186)

"The word 'race' has a precise meaning only when and where peoples are confronted with such tribes of which they have no historical record and which do not know any history of their own. [. . .] races in this sense were found only in regions where nature was particularly hostile. What made them different from other human beings was not at all the color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality--compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, unreal and ghostlike. They were, as it were, 'natural' human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder." (192)

These are two examples of things that bothered me... what are Arendt's politics? From these two statements which at least appear to take things seriously and aren't trying to be ironic or anything, she casts judgement and apparently erases the indigenous from America and Australia, and then seems to call for civilized human vs. barbarian discourse. Some of her other statements seem helpful and profound, so a bit difficult to reconcile them....

3) Some of her interesting and useful stuff is here. For example, for racism Arendt says: "no matter whether racism appears as the natural result of a catastrophe or as the conscious instrument for bringing it about, it is always closely tied to contempt for labor, hatred of territorial limitation, general rootlessness, and an activistic faith in one's own divine chosenness" (197). I think this is really useful in thinking about the origins of racism and what the idea of another race threatens.
Then there's what Arendt says about human rights:

"From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an 'abstract' human being who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived in some kind of social order. If a tribal or other 'backward' community did not enjoy human rights, it was obviously because as a whole it had not yet reached that stage of civilization, the stage of popular and national sovereignty, but was opposed by foreign or native despots. The whole question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one's own people, seemed to be able to ensure them." (291)

"The calamity of the rightless is . . . that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever." (295) 

Again, there is this savage/barbarian and civilized dichotomy, but Arendt has a point about these human rights that are somehow unenforceable, which she says on page 293. Moreover, her discussion in the chapter talks about how certain ideas obscure the fact that we ignore groups of people and do not take responsibility for humanity as a whole, particularly by breaking ourselves up into smaller, divided groups. This a) seems related to China Mieville and his discussion on the failures of international law and self-determination and b) We just read Octavia Butler in my TAship and perhaps one solution to human rights or the universal human is NOT about each of us finding a complete and total sense of agency but seeing ourselves in mutual symbiosis with each other, mutually dependent, which we are anyway and what i'm sure green peace and the like have been saying all along. But it's more useful to think about it in the way that maybe we should switch our formulations and think not necessarily that the first step is self-determination or complete agency, but agency with compromises and mutual symbiosis.

the law

I'm not very familiar with law or writing about law, so I'm just going to share some of bits I got from this piece, in no necessarily coherent order.

Clarifying questions:
1) I'm sure we were going to do this anyway, but could we talk about Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and exactly what his argument is laying out for us? I think I'm getting the gist but sometimes he loses me. Important connections to Mieville that I see include natural/positive law and policing.

2) Page 136-7: could we possibly go over how China Mieville's Between Equal Rights connects law, violence  sovereignty, and self-help in this section? Not quite sure I'm getting it. What does "self-help" mean?

Some important quotes from that area are: "To understand, as Pashukanis clearly does, that robbery (non-consensual possession of another's commodity) goes hand-in-hand with trade (consensual trade of commodities), is to understand that violence is implicit in the commodity, and therefore legal, form." (134)
"Law and violence are inextricably linked as regulators of sovereign claims." (135)

Other questions:
3) In the quotes above and especially in talking about McDougal, Mieville makes the important observation that "Interpretation is not something we do to understand the law, it is the process that is law" (39). He also says that "Having dispensed with formalism, law must be part of the political process. This means that law itself is a political process, and the 'meanings' and applications of legal norms cannot be pre-determined. They are constituted in interpretation, contextually" (41). This makes a lot of sense to me and also brings up questions of translation--ultimately I think one of Mieville's main points is that law is translated into all these possibilities, both positive and negative, but because it is based on violence and capital/commodification, law is "fundamentally unreformable" (3)*. The end of law would mean global emancipation (318). But how do we imagine this end of law, and wouldn't there always be a problem of translation?

4) Random but related to what we've been talking about.... an excerpt from Naoki Sakai's "Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism":

the West is never content with what it is recognized as by its others; it is always urged to approach others in order to ceaselessly transform its self-image; it continually seeks itself in the midst of interaction with the Other; it would never be satisfied with being recognized but would wish to recognize others; it would rather be a supplier of recognition than a receiver thereof. In short, the West must represent the moment of the universal under which particulars are subsumed. Indeed, the West is particular in itself, but it also constitutes the universal point of reference in relation to which others recognize themselves as particularities. And, in this regard, the West thinks itself to be ubiquitous. (95)

particularism and universalism do not form an antimony but mutually reinforce each other. As a matter of fact, particularism has never been a truly disturbing enemy of universalism or vice versa. Precisely because both are closed off to the individual who can never be transformed into the subject or what infinitely transcends the universal, neither universalism nor particularism is able to come across the Other; otherness is always reduced to the Other, and thus repressed, excluded, and eliminated in them both. And after all, what we normally call universalism is a particularism thinking itself as universalism, and it is worthwhile doubting whether universalism could ever exist otherwise. (98)

I thought this could be a point in thinking about genocides and the Holocaust--if we say that the Holocaust cannot be compared, we are making it particular (or are we making it universal, as the thing every other genocide is compared to?), and this just gets us into the problem of never getting us out of this universalism/particularism loop. Just a side note..... I feel there's more to say about this but can't think right now.


*important quotes i want to point out but don't have time to contextualize:
"disputation and contestation is intrinsic to the commodity, in the fact that its private ownership implies the exclusion of others. Similarly, violence--coercion--is at the heart of the commodity form, and thus the contract. For a commodity meaningfully to be 'mine-not-yours'--which is, after all, central to the fact that it is a commodity to be exchanged--some forceful capabilites are implied. If there were nothing to defend its 'mine-ness', there would be nothing to stop it becoming 'yours', and then it would no longer be a commodity, as I would not be exchanging it. Coercion is implicit." (126)
International law "is the dialectical result of the very process of conflictual, expanding inter-polity interaction in an age of early state forms and mercantile colonialism. [. . .] International law embodies the violence of colonialism and the abstraction of commodity exchange. It is . . . that international law is colonialism" (169)
"Colonialism is in the very form, the structure of international law itself, predicated on global trade between inherently unequal polities, with unequal coercive violence implied in the very commodity form. This unequal coercion is what forces particular content into the legal form." (178)
sovereignty is a "theory of independence, not equality" (185)