8 Anti-Capitalist Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From Electric Lit:

Karl Marx may be famous for his thorough, analytic attack on capitalism (see: all three volumes and the 1000-plus pages of Das Kapital), but let’s be real: it’s not the most exciting to read. What if, just as a thought experiment, our works that reimagined current structures of power also had robots?

Speculative fiction immerses the reader in an alternate universe, hooking us in with a stirring narrative and intricate world-building—or the good stories do, anyways. Along the way, it can also challenge us to take a good look at our own reality, and question with an imaginative, open mind: how can we strive to create social structures that are not focused on white, patriarchal, cisgendered, and capitalist systems of inequity? 

As poet Lucille Clifton says, “We cannot create what we can’t imagine.” Imagination is an integral element to envisioning concrete change, one that goes hand-in-hand with hope. Although certain magical elements like talking griffins and time travel might be out of reach (at least for the present moment), fantasy and sci-fi novels allow us to imagine worlds that we can aspire towards. Whether through a satire that exposes the ridiculousness of banking or a steampunk rewriting of the Congo’s history, the authors below have found ways to critically examine capitalism—and its alternatives—in speculative fiction. 

Everfair by Nisi Shawl

A speculative fantasy set in neo-Victorian times, Shawl’s highly-acclaimed novel imagines “Everfair,” a safe haven in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Shawl’s version of the late 19th-century, the Fabian Socialists—a real-life British group—and African-American missionaries band together to purchase a region of the Congo from King Leopold II (whose statue was recently defaced and removed from Antwerp, as a part of the global protest against racism). This region, Everfair, is set aside for formerly enslaved people and refugees, who are fleeing from King Leopold II’s brutal, exploitative colonization of the Congo. The residents of Everfair band together to try and create an anti-colonial utopia. Told from a wide range of characters and backed up with meticulous research, Shawlcreates a kaleidoscopic, engrossing, and inclusive reimagination of what history could have been. “I had been confronted with the idea that steampunk valorized colonization and empire, and I really wanted to spit in its face for doing that,” Shawl statesthrough her rewritten history of the Congo, Shawl challenges systems of imperialism and capitalism. 

. . . .

Making Money by Terry Pratchett

If you stop to think about it, isn’t the concept of a credit card ridiculous? Pratchett’s characters would certainly agree. Pratchett’s Discworld series, as the Guardian noted, “started out as a very funny fantasy spoof [that] quickly became the finest satirical series running.” This installment follows con-man Moist von Lipwig (who first appeared in Pratchett’s spoof on the postal system, Going Postal), as he gets roped into the world of banking. The Discworld capital, Ankh-Morpork, is just being introduced to—you guessed it—paper money. However, citizens remain distrustful of the new system, opting for stamps as currency rather than use the Royal Mint. Cue the Financial Revolution, with Golem Trust miscommunications, a Chief Cashier that may be a vampire, and banking chaos. In his signature satirical style, Pratchett points out the absurdities of the modern financial system we take for granted.

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

PG has three immediate thoughts.

  1. Just about anything can serve as a theme for a fantasy novel and authors are perfectly free to riff on any topic they may choose.
  2. Das Kapital was a factual and logical mess, but an excellent pseudo-economic basis for gaining and keeping power in the hands of its foremost practitioners. The book was first published in 1867 by Verlag von Otto Meisner, which sounds a bit capitalist (and aristocratic) to PG.
  3. Each of the Anti-Capitalist books is published by a thoroughly-capitalist publisher and PG is almost completely certain that each of the authors received an advance against royalties for the book that would feed an impoverished African village for at least a few months.

5 thoughts on “8 Anti-Capitalist Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels”

  1. The author, Jae-Yeon Yoo, is an intern. If I could be Jae-Yeon’s mentor for a day I would facilitate a discussion of capitalism, and I would begin by quoting the wonderful Princess Bride character Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Comments are closed.