fiction

Our Temporary Supervisor - Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti is one of the greatest living authors of the Weird Tale. His take on the genre dominated by the right wing conservative HP Lovecraft takes a different approach. Referred to as "Corporate Horror" by some his more recent tales focus on the mind numbing horror of work in a capitalist society. Whilst never explicitly anti-capitalist, or even political, the horror here, whilst drenched in the supernatural, is found in the familiar. The familiar viewed from a slightly odd perspective, true, but familiar all the same.

Quote:
“When I first took this job at the factory it was not my intention to work there very long, for I once possessed higher hopes for my life, although the exact nature of these hopes remained rather vague in my youthful mind.

The Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson

The Mars trilogy is a series of award-winning science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson that chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars through the intensely personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning almost two centuries.

Woman on the Edge of Time

Woman on the Edge of Time is a novel by Marge Piercy. It is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic.

Voyage from Yesteryear

Praised as an "attractive and ... plausible depiction of a communist anarchy" by Ken Macleod, Voyage from Yesteryear is a 1982 science fiction novel by James P. Hogan

Hard times - Charles Dickens

Novel set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown criticising English society and aimed at highlighting the social and economic issues of the times.

Letters of insurgents - Fredy Perlman

1976 novel by Fredy Perlman, written as fictional letters between two Eastern European workers, Yarostan Vochek and Sophie Nachalo, who are separated after a failed revolution. Yarostan spends twelve years in statist jails, while Sophie escapes to the West. After twenty years without contact, they begin to write each other about their experiences, their lives, their hopes, and their memories of the past.

Yarostan’s first letter

Dear Sophia,

Parables of big brother - Robert Kurz

Robert Kurz discusses the “implicit” “subtexts” of the great dystopian literature of the 20th century and reveals the “internalized constraints” of “the anonymous, ‘reified’ character of [the] totalitarianism” of our time, in which “the Voice of Big Brother is the voice of the Anonymous World Market”, the “most totalitarian of all systems”, and “the subjective command centers are … the executive organs of an autonomized mechanism” ruled by “the irrational end-in-itself of the ‘interminable valorization of value’” whose “ideal is the self-surveillance and self-control of the individual entrepreneur ‘by way of his capitalist superego’”.

Parables of Big Brother – Robert Kurz

Petersburg - Andrei Bely

Andrei Bely's masterpiece, "Petersburg" is a vivid, striking story set at the heart of the 1905 Russian revolution. This "Penguin Classics" edition is translated from the Russian by David McDuff with an introduction by Adam Thirlwell. St Petersburg, 1905.

Standing fast: a novel - Harvey Swados

Harvey Swados' fictional story of a group of socialists and their lives from the dawn of USA's involvement in World War II to the Kennedy assasination. More or less based on the Worker's Party of Max Shachtman, C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Stan Weir.

Hocus pocus - Kurt Vonnegut

Superb satirical novel by Kurt Vonnegut. The fictional musings of a Vietnam war US Army officer turned teacher turned prisoner, looking themes of war, race and globalisation. Trigger warning: it contains mention of rape.