An old Reddit post recommended the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson so I’m giving that a shot and I figured I’d ask c/Books if you had any suggestions.
I jumped in to recommend the Mars trilogy, but realise you already mentioned that lol.
Anything by LeGuin is great. The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are fantastic starting points, the latter being my favourite of hers.
I also find a lot of value in the discussions of power, class struggle and ecology in Herbert's Dune, but that is not overly 'Marxist'. Still great though.
It's been a few years since I read it, but I always saw Asimov's Foundation series as a thought experiment on historical materialism if it was an actual - tangible - science that guided social decisions. Might be off on that though, haven't read it since I was my teens/early 20s. Still, a great series and worth reading!
Im sure someone more well versed in sci fi could offer some more diverse and interesting suggestions, there are all pretty standard suggestions. Still, all great though and I would highly recommend them.
Asimov has denied that Seldon was based on Marx, but there's definitely a similarity between historical materialism and psychohistory
I'm writing an extremely communist fantasy novel I'm about halfway through if you want to help test read it
Liu Cixin does some great hard sci-fi with chinese characteristics, I just read 'The Wandering Earth' and it's got massive geoengineering and dunking on libertarians.
How's the netflix movie stack up against the book? Liu Cixin may do decent sci-fi but there's nothing terribly Marxist about his work.
Liu Cixin
I'm about a third through The Three-Body Problem and have been enjoying it so far.
three body problem is great and the sequel is somehow just as great! Gonna get around to the third book one of these months
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson is also really good! I haven't read the series yet but Culture series takes place in sort of a FALGSC setting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_on_the_Mountain_(Bisson_novel)
Fire on the Mountain is a 1988 novel by the American author Terry Bisson. It is an alternate history describing the world as it would have been had John Brown succeeded in his raid on Harper's Ferry and touched off a slave rebellion in 1859, as he intended.
everyone talks about kim stanley robinson, but what's easy to miss is how much he was influenced by philip k dick. while PKD is not marxist per se, KSR does argue in episode 40 of the antifada that PKD is "without being intensely theoretical [...] he's [...] instinctively anti-capitalist."
from wikipedia : "In 1982 Robinson earned a PhD in English from UC San Diego.[4] His initial PhD advisor was literary critic and Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson,[6] who told Robinson to read works by Philip K. Dick. Jameson described Dick to Robinson as "the greatest living American writer".[4] Robinson's doctoral thesis, The Novels of Philip K. Dick, was published in 1984 and a hardcover version was published by UMI Research Press."
I guess there's The Culture series - stories in an advanced civilization where fully automated luxury gay space communism under beneficient AIs has basically been implemented; they intervene in less advanced cultures to prevent genocides and the like.
And there's also the Takeshi Kovacs series, where you end up following an anarchist cell intent on toppling a multiplanetary oligarchy. They have a badass leader (Quell). The netflix adaptation sucks (at least for a fan of the book).
Neither is exactly Marxist, mind you. In both cases, I can send you epubs if you want.
I suspect you meant The Culture and not The Colony ? autocomplete glitch or something ? in any case, here is a link to all the Culture books, in epub, english language. You'll have to wait for a 100 sec timer due to the shitty filehost, my apologies.
Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, Asimov and Clarke are also pretty good. None of these including KSR are explicitly Marxist though.
Iain M Banks Culture series scratches the FALGSC itch pretty good, though it's more about how a post-need civilization creates a moral justification for its existence.
I thought it was more of a lul towards the end, but it was an enjoyable read over all.
It definitely lulls around the first half of the second book, and maybe again at the beginning of the third. I still think it is great overall though, and the deep dives on ecology, the intricacies of the actual work required to create a new - utopian - society etc become quite vital to the plot as it plays out. Maybe I am just a massive ecology nerd but I enjoyed those parts, haha. I would say the payoff in the 2nd half of Green Mars is worth the drudgery though. Red Mars itself though is probably one of my favourite books ever written, so if nothing else I would highly recommend that.
N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy isn't explicitly Marxist (though I read it before radicalizing, so I may have missed something)—but I think it fits thematically, with its focus on exploitation and climate catastrophe.
Agree to disagree I guess. She has a couple of writing tics that annoy me (so much clenching of jaws), but the fantastic worldbuilding sucked me right in.
A real weird one is this book Moderan by David R. Bunch. Basically a collection of short stories set in a super dystopian future where the world is covered in plastic and men are augmented into fortified hyper violent killing machines. Some Clive Barker body horror mixed with Clockwork Orange style slang narration and one of the bleakest views of Imperialist capitalism I've ever run across. But also very funny. https://www.nyrb.com/products/moderan?variant=6835859587124
