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Political Futurists and 
Radical and Utopian SF Authors

Political Futurists

Bibliographies 

Film and TV

SF Groups

Political Models

SF and Futurist Syllabi 

SF and Futurist Magazines

Articles and Websites

Theories of Social Change

Space Colonization, SETI and the Politics of Space

CyberPolitics

Trans-Humanism

The Progenitors of Radical SF

William Morris, a Luddite socialist of the 19th century, and his pastoral socialist utopian novel News from Nowhere

Olaf Stapledon, a socialist and an early and expansive visionary of the future evolution of humanity, of which socialist world government was just a first step

Radical Authors of Classical SF and Horror

George Orwell, a socialist and author of the widely read critiques of Communism and Fascism, Animal Farm and 1984

Mack Reynolds, a science fiction author and democratic socialist, who campaigned for the Socialist Labor Party

Stanislaw Lem, a Polish science fiction writer whose philosophical novels sometimes reflected a rejection of the Cold War and authoritarian government

Contemporary Radical SF Authors

John Barnes, author of the classic ecological SF Mother of Storms

Terry Bisson, radical, author of Fire on the Mountain and many of other things

David Brin, self-styled "cheerful libertarian" and author of the provocative novels Earth and the Uplift series. His book The Transparent Society argues that absolute privacy may be undesirable.Brin co-founded the Reading for the Future organization.

John Brunner, a British socialist SF writer, author of the classic SF social commentaries, the overpopulation-themed Stand on Zanzibar, Shockwave Rider (the novel that proposed the idea of software worm as a terrorist weapon), and ecological The Sheep Look Up.

Emma Bull & Steven Brust -- Freedom & Necessity (1997)
"Bull is a left-liberal and Brust is a Trotskyist fantasy writer. F&N is set in the 19th Century of the Chartists and class turmoil. It's been described as "the first Marxist steampunk" or "a fantasy for Young Hegelians.'" (Abstract by China Mieville) 

Octavia Butler -- Survivor (1978)
"Black American writer, now discovered by the mainstream after years of acclaim in the SF field. Kindred is her most overtly political novel, the Patternmaster series the most popular. Survivor brilliantly blends genre SF with issues of colonialism and racism." (Abstract by China Mieville) 

Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman, authors of Back in the USSA, an alternative history in which American became a communist country, and 60s counter culture types are fighting for perestroika

Philip K. Dick -- A Scanner Darkly (1977)
Could have picked almost any of his books. Like all of them, this deals with identity, power, and betrayal, here tied in more directly to social structures than in some other works (though see Counter-Clock World and The Man in the High Castle). Incredibly moving.  (Abstract by China Mieville) 

Paul DiFilippo, author of the RiboFunk Manifesto and Ribofunk

Nicola Griffith, a lesbian science fiction writer (Ammonite, Slow River, The Blue Place) whose protagonists have been lesbians

Nancy Kress, author of the radical democratic reflection on genetics, the Beggar's Trilogy

Ursula LeGuin author of anarchist The Dispossessed, the gender-bending The Left Hand of Darkness, and the cautionary tale about wanting to change the world, The Lathe of Heaven

Doris Lessing, a South African expatriate, political radical, and author of the many novels including speculative fiction Canopus in Argos series

Simon Louvish author of The Resurrections, an alternate history, based on the premise that Rosa Luxemberg survived to lead a successful Communist revolution in Germany in 1923.

China Miéville, author of King Rat and Perdido Street Station

Marge Piercy, radical, feminist and author of the classic 70s dys/utopian novel, Woman on the Edge of Time

Joanna Russ, radical feminist and author of Female Man

Joan Slonczewski is a feminist Biology professor, who has portrayed radically egalitarian societies

Norman Spinrad, a leftist author of the classic Agent of Chaos, a reflection on democracy and totalitarianism, and the 1990s Russian Spring, an optimistic projection of a Russian renaissance

Michael Swanwick, author of the meditation on technology and fascism, Jack Faust, the ecological In the Drift, and the depiction of a completely collectivized Earth facing an individualistic space culture, Vacuum Flowers

Kurt Vonnegut, self-described socialist, author of many, hilarious novels with wry social commentary

Warren Wagar, socialist and author of A Short History of the Future

Political Futurists and Visionaries

Adrian Berry, author of The Next 500 Years : Life in the Coming Millennium

Howard Bloom, author of The Global Brain: The Evolution of the Mass Mind, on the emergence of supra-individual intelligence

Yorick Blumenfeld, author of 2099 : A Eutopia (Prospects for Tomorrow)

John Brockman, author of The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, on the turn towards scientism

Terry Boswell and Christopher Chase-Dunn, authors of The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism and the Future of the World-System.  

Richard Coren, author of The Evolutionary Trajectory: The Growth of Information in the History and Future of the Earth

Jim Dator, founder and director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, and author of numerous papers on the future of politics

Hilary French, author of Vanishing Borders : Protecting the Planet in the Age of Globalization, a Worldwatch perspective

Thomas Friedman, author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization

Anthony Giddens, author of The Future of the Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, and Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics

William Greider, author of One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism

Allen Hammond, author of Which World? Scenarios for the Twenty First Century

Robert Heilbroner, author of Visions of the Future

Kevin Hill, John Hughes, authors of Cyberpolitics : Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet

James Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg

Michio Kaku, author of Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21^st Century

Robert Kaplan, author of The Coming Anarchy, which sees Third World gangster regimes as the future of the world, and Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future, on North America

Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, a meditation on the application of biological and ecological models to the world

Paul Kennedy, author of Preparing for the Twenty-First Century

Gregory Paul and Earl Cox, authors of Beyond Humanity: Cyberevolution and Future Minds

Greg Stock, author of Metaman, a reflection on how the global technosystem is evolving into a super-organism, and the Book of Questions series

Alvin Toffler, author of The Third Wave

Immanuel Wallerstein, author of Utopistics: Or Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century, a projection of the coming unity of citizen's movements to counter global capitalism

Warren Wagar, author of A Short History of the Future, which projects the rise of global capitalism, its replacement by world government, and then the decentralization of society

Robert Wright, author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which argues that "world governance" is the culmination of human evolution

Political Futurists - Bibliographies - Film and TV - SF Groups - Political Models

SF and Futurist Syllabi  - SF and Futurist Magazines - Articles and Websites

Theories of Social Change - Space Colonization, SETI and the Politics of Space

CyberPolitics - Trans-Humanism