Asking for recommendations of fiction books with a communist setting. Ideally with a “show don’t tell” narrative structure. That is, communism exists and works fine but the author does not say “this is communism”. Just existing in the background like any other normal thing.
On a related note, does anyone have experience with BookWyrm?
These vary in explicitness: ‘what is to be done’ by chernyshevsky, ‘ecotopia’ by callenbach, ‘news from nowhere’ by morris, ‘utopia’ by more, and ‘parable of the sower’ by butler (this one is not about communism, but rather non-explicitly building socialism in a realistic dystopia. It’s a must read). The first four are utopian books because that is my current area of study.
Kim Stanley Robinson already got a mention in here, but his “Mars Trilogy” (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) is an interesting and often depressing look into how humanity of the 1990s-2000s might’ve handled international joint colonization of Mars by humanity. It’s still largely applicable now days, although the Russians in the book(s) were raised in the USSR.
It’s hard to explain the books beyond what I wrote, I think. I’d suggest just start reading Red Mars and if you aren’t hooked in the first chapter by the jaded, misanthropic-ish Frank Chalmers then you probably won’t like the series.
There’s probably a trove of Soviet fiction literature just waiting to be transcribed. Just sifting through the comments, it seems like a lot of the Western books are more anarchist-y/ utopic (not that the books aren’t worth reading, they’re probably v lovely reads). It would be nice to find a proper communist fiction book that doesn’t have any hint of being ashamed about communism and explores cool themes lol.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
It always gets brought up as a book specifically about an anarchist society, but I think that’s mostly just because of the more negative connotations of the word “communist” and that most people don’t understand anarchism and communism share the same end goal.
