How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism
▻https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/12/how-sci-fi-shaped-socialism
im Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, challenges the dominance of capitalist realism in the Global North by setting out a speculative future history in which collective action brings capitalism to an end and saves the world from climate change. In imagining an alternative to the status quo, Robinson continues a long, honourable tradition of left-wing science fiction authors writing utopian fiction.
The tradition stretches back at least to William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), which tells of a proletarian revolution leading to an ideal society without poverty or oppression. In their different ways, Robinson and Morris share a vision of humanity living through labour as a social activity that operates both in and against nature. All such works, and those of other famous socialist utopian novelists from H. G. Wells to Iain M. Banks, further the cause of socialism by providing readers with radical depictions of postcapitalist life that rarely exist elsewhere in the media.