Leftist sci-fi

Any recomendations on good leftist sci-fi or good sci fi in general. I just finished reading starship troopers without knowing what i was getting in to and it's 100% ideology/propaganda. I need something to counterbalance my brain now.

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-The World Inside
if you look 70-80 futur asthetics

Neill Blomkamp does some good films.

...

aslo this youtube.com/watch?v=n-W0YhbmP4k

I don't know what that was but I liked it. Strangely catchy.

Iain M. Banks (RIP). Probably the best leftist sci-fi writer there is and one of the best recent sci-fi writers generally. The Culture series imagines a galaxy-sprawling post-scarcity anarcho-communist utopia and the way it interacts with other civilizations.

Ken MacLeod is another Scottish sci-fi author and was a friend of Banks'. Kind of a libertarian techno-socialist.

Also check out some translated Cuban sci-fi like "A Planet for Rent" by Yoss.

I have no idea what his exact political views were, but I really recommend Philip K Dick, just for how prescient his fiction was to what the future would look like. Not the best prose, not the best writer. It can be exaggerated, but the overall point to all his work is so accurate that it begs the question if he really was losing his mind late in life when he claimed to have psychic experiences.

UBIK, although it's about psychic connections in a virtual world, essentially predicted what the internet would turn into. It's basically a prediction of a social network.

Minority Report, and the idea in his various stories about the concept of precrime, knowing when someone would commit crime before they would do it, mirrors our current development of "AI" algorithms.

You can go on, and on, and on, about the predictions he made that came true.

Basically, he predicted in most of his fiction the future world would be a paranoid dystopia where the government would know what you would do before you did it, would know all your secrets, would pay attention to every person and know their innermost secrets, and this would shift into a universal counter culture through paranoia; it sounds Orwellian, but there is still a counter culture, one that is everywhere, a feeling that everyone knows the government and the economy is malicious, but exactly what can they do besides be scared?

What do they do? They run to escapism, they run to the virtual world, they run to drugs, they run to sex. They need to escape a world that is fundamentally unfair to them by being unfair to themselves, and emulating the government by constantly criticizing one another.

This shapes reality as we know it into a living hell, where all spirituality is gone, and the new religion is fear and pleasure.

Sounds familiar doesn't it

Other things Dick correctly predicted.

Facial recognition software that targeted advertisements specifically to you, and your habits.

3D Printing hardware.

Driverless cars.

The fact that the future would look suburban and unchanged, not futuristic.

The increasing war on drugs

Increasingly new dangerous drugs people will willingly take.

An increase in prescription drugs to counter act the universal depression future society will feel.

Rampant income inequality.

Software that recognizes pictures.

Social engineering becoming so pervasive that the question of what is real and what is fake, especially when everyone is on some kind of drug, becomes so hard to tell that we chase fabricated fantasy local to what social engineering we've been infected with

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.

Has nobody seriously mentioned Star Trek yet? It’s provably the best work of socialist media produced by the West ever, since it spread the ideals of the left without normies even noticing.

I always post this an nobody ever replies, but I'm posting it again, just in case. Here's a pretty comprehensive list of anarchist science-fiction:
benbeck.co.uk/anarchysf/main.htm
And the curator's personal recommendations:
benbeck.co.uk/anarchysf/hotlist.htm

The PDF is a book about the topic: Mythmakers & Lawbreakers. Anarchist writers on fiction.

Wait communism in Star Trek is founded after a nuclear war…

GENE RODDENBERRY IS POSADAS GANG

40k gave us the tau

Oh. Would recommend Paolo Bacigalupi's first novel The Windup Girl about capitalist ecodisaster & neoliberal feudalism.

Came here to post this. KSR writes some truly top-tier lefty sci-fi, great both for the politics and the science involved. If you like pages-long stories about formation of a particular area of Martian landscape as the protagonists march to sabotage a corporate outpost, or about detailed debates between different anarchist factions about the merits of terraforming technologies then you've found the right series.

I can't recommend it highly enough. I've already read it twice through and am long overdue for a third read.

KSR rules.

Starship troopers is pure ideology but i still think it's a worthwhile read, just because it portrays the whole military way of thinking pretty accurately. The move blows the book out of the water though, Verhoven is based

Also, read the Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. It shows what an anarchist society might be like

i can agree with you, but it barely feels like science fiction, it honestly feels like the author just put the bugs and power armor in the book as bait for the generic military story and ramblings you get.

The Culture by Iain M. Banks is set in a post-scarcity/post-capitalist universe.

Isn't 2312 set in the same universe?

I liked Solaris

Yeah pretty much. I mostly just like it in relation to heinlein's other work and stuff that was influenced by it. You should watch the movie if you haven't already, since it's basically a parody of the book

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It taskes place on earth in the distant future where the sun is a dim red. The main religion centers around a saviour restarting the sun and bringing life back to the dying planet. I wouldn't classify it as leftist but the author has such a broad understanding of history and society you'll find things to enjoy.
The Autarch was right

This is quite the big read but 11-22-63 is oddly leftist. Long story short dude tries very hard to prevent the assassination of John F Kennedy but when he succeeds everything's so fucked up in the future that it goes back and let it happen.

Highly recommended for anybody that likes time travel. The show sucked.

Isn't Gundam fairly leftist? It's clearly an imperialist war. I'm curious about some of the other versions too.

The Water Knife is also excellent.

adding on to this, I'd recommend Past Master by RA Lafferty (Gene Wolf's favorite book). It can be hard to find because some porky bought up publishing rights, but it's a first rate novel. Not really leftist per se, but it does deal with utopianism.

Honestly main thing sci fi is good for is escapism. Anything to escape the blights of modern capitalism. Anything.

link plox

PKD was involved with 60's/70's counterculture and was snooped on by the FBI for corresponding with a Communist scientist. He shifted his positions around a lot, but was mostly new-left, maybe with some socialist leanings.


King was a Republican until the Bush II years, then he switched to Democrat.