I've started getting some holiday gifts for my family and I'd like to pick my dad up some left-leaning novels.

He reads a lot, and is a left-leaning boomer but also really liked Obama (ewww cringe).

For his birthday I picked him up " Three Penny Novel " by Brecht, but I realised that I don't know of any other socialist fiction authors other than Brecht (everything else he wrote were plays, so not really reading-friendly).

Any of you able to recommend me some socialist-influenced works of fiction/novels that I could pick him up?

Thanks :fidel-salute:

  • Bobson_Dugnutt [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi is a sci-fi thriller about climate change and drought in the SW USA.

    Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod is a weird sci-fi story about cosmonauts that were abducted by aliens and dumped on a faraway planet. The author is either a trot or an anarchist and has an axe to grind about MLs, especially in the sequels. Dark Light is also good, the story centers around a revolution, and one of the main characters is trans (sort of, they're from a culture with unusual gender roles). Engine City isn't that great, I'd skip it unless you really want to finish the trilogy.

    Anything by Charles Stross is great, he writes mostly sci-fi/fantasy/horror, and there's some leftist themes in most of his novels, some more subtle than others (like the time that Lovecraftian horrors were unleashed by Thatcherite privatization). I'd recommend either The Merchant Princes series (fantasy/sci-fi/political thriller), The Laundry Files series (sci-fi/fantasy/Lovecraftian cosmic horror/thriller/comedy), or the standalone novel Glasshouse (sci-fi/FALGSC/body horror).

    Edit: There's also Saturn's Children about a society of intelligent robots living after humanity went extinct due to climate change, and Saturn's Children, a sequel about those societies colonizing space, and the weird financial systems they use to run an interstellar economy. Apparently it was inspired by Debt: the First 5,000 Years, and features a society of communist robot squids that engineered their own brains to think communally.