For this book, I interviewed a number of anarchist writers of fiction about what it means to be both an anarchist–concerned with social change on a fundamental level–and a fiction writer–weaving the stories that shape our ideas of who we are and what is possible. Includes interviews with Ursula le Guin, Alan Moore, Lewis Shiner, Cristy C Road, CrimethInc, and many others. Featuring an introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson.
I also collected detailed appendices including biographies of every anarchist fiction writer I was able to find, the overlap of many prominent authors with anarchism throughout history, and lists of books that deal directly with anarchist societies or characters.
“Anarchism suggests that the great majority of us would be far better off in a horizontal arrangement, an association of equals. Such a horizontality in the realm of power used to be derided as hopelessly naïve and unrealistic, but the more we learn about our human past and our primate ancestors, the more it becomes clear that this was the norm during the entirety of our evolution.”
–Kim Stanley Robinson, from the introduction“I may agree with Shelley that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but he didn’t mean they really get many laws enacted, and I guess I didn’t ever really look for definable, practical results of anything I wrote. My utopias are not blueprints. In fact, I distrust utopias that pretend to be blueprints. Fiction is not a good medium for preaching or for planning. It is really good, though, for what we used to call
consciousness-raising.”
–Ursula le Guin, from her interview in the book