There's this series of books with a lot of political allegories that help us make sense of our current time of incivility politics. They were written by a female English socialist. It's called "Harry Potter", I think you lefties are going to like it.
Ya'll should really use the dedicated communities for stuff like this...
If we get bigger main will just drown out book content and !books@hexbear.net wil be dead and book content won't or will barely exist on this website. I think it's more complicated than just getting more users. People won't start using !books@hexbear.net if it isn't active so it needs some kind of spark to get the ball rolling.
Yeah if a community exists for a certain type of content, it should be banned from main. I'm sure devs are working on some features (like default subscriptions) to support that policy
Said this somewhere else, but gonna always recommend Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed to any leftist looking to read probably the best anarchist sci-fi out there
Also Takiji Kobayashi’s The Crab Cannery Ship if you want some good intense proletarian stories
And the rest of the Hainish Cycle is damn good too! It's not as in-your-face leftist, but still really good. There's a very anti-colonial book, there's a book set on a world where everyone is nonbinary, there's a book about how slavery is bad (that's also blatantly feminist, because even once the slaves get their freedom, the female ex-slaves are still very oppressed, and that's bad), there's a book about a guy with such advanced science compared to the world he's dropped into that he's basically a demigod/epic hero of a fantasy story, and a couple more which defy easy explanation. Basically, Ursula K LeGuin is awesome!
I would say that The Word for World is Forest is pretty leftist, in an environmentalist and anti-war sort of way
I agree. It doesn't literally have people discussing leftist philosophy while living in an anarchist commune, but it very clearly says colonialism is not good, which is a very leftist position.
I'm reading Albert Camus' The Plague right now, because I thought I'd be edgy and on-the-nose. I'm finding it to be incredibly insightful and thought-provoking, and helped me understand a lot of my feelings during this pandemic that I've been having a hard time articulating.
I’m reading Myth of Sisyphus for the first time and holy shit. I didn’t realize how much this book influenced other authors I grew up loving
Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin if you want theory
Ringworld by Larry Niven if you want good scifi
Any novel by Iain M Banks if you'd like some fully automated luxury gay space communism.
I listened to the first Culture novel on audiobook, and while I usually love that type of shit I just wasn't wowed by it. I'll still probably check out another one of those books at some point.
But if you're into that, you might be interested in the Star Carrier series by Ian Douglas (fucking Ians, right?). I'd describe it as a hybrid of fully automated luxury gay space communism and The Expanse.
They get better and worse, depending on what you're into. Each one should probably be judged individually simply because they can be telling a different type of story. I liked his culture series better than the one of his other space opera type works I tried.
Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5 are great antiwar satires which I have recently read. All Quiet on the Western Front is also great albeit incredibly depressing.
I read Catch-22 in high school and I actually read it twice. It's still one of the most impactful books I've ever read.
I was a very sheltered kid and hadn't thought much about the world, death, war, how awful humans can be, so the first time through, I laughed basically the whole way through. It was fucking hilarious and clearly just a fun romp through a crazy war, right? And then the last chapter happened and recontextualized the whole damn thing. I started it again pretty immediately, and this time, I wasn't laughing. This time the jokes that had been literally laugh out loud funny the first time just made me deeply sad.
Catch-22 is not an experience I'm likely to forget.
The Grapes of Wrath if you want theory presented as fiction.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, if you're just looking for some fluff. I just finished Wyrd Sisters the other night, and am now ready to smash the patriarchy with the dual powers of witchcraft and headology.
Steinbeck's books are also beautifully written. I'm normally a slow reader, but I cruised through East of Eden because it was so well done. I still haven't read Grapes of Wrath, but I'm super excited to.
In Dubious Battle is also theory-as-literature and will get your blood boiling.
The March North by Graydon Saunders. Military fantasy about the only Socialist Republic in a world of Insane Lovecraftian Mage-God-Kings that have turned the entire world into a monster ridden Death Planet.
I'm reading Big Farms Make Big Flu by Rob Wallace.
I'm interesting in polyculture farming and other sustainable forms of agriculture. I think community gardens are a great way to start our new left movement in the US.
Just finished Lindsay Ellis' debut sci-fi novel Axiom's End and I thought it was pretty good. It's kinda like Arrival mixed with E.T. and a little bit of other things too, the basic gist of it is there's a secret alien incursion in 2007 and one young woman gets caught up in it and the government conspiracy to keep first contact under wraps. I guess the best recommend I can say about it is after it ended I wanted it to keep going.
