Everything for Everyone- PIW in Fiction Update

 

See here for essential background: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2023/12/piw-in-fiction.html.
Radical literature is not united behind China Miéville it seems. In recent years there is something of a fictional movement of utopian futuristic stories that quite openly speculate about what a post-capitalist world might be like. A good example is a book I've just read, Everything for Everyone- An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 to 2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. This might confuse you because the dates in the title are decades in the future; and the publication date for the book is August 2022, which makes more sense. In fact this is a novel which doubles up as a pseudo-historical textbook. It consists of a set of very vivid and believable dialogues with leaders of a predicted socialist revolution that takes place after an economic collapse and Third World War. Some of them were creators of the New York commune, a parallel government similar to the Paris Commune of 1871 or the Soviet network set up in Russia by the Bolsheviks. The latter eventually grew in power by attrition to the point where it overwhelmed the existing government. This fictional future revolution follows a similar path except it is far more successful. Instead of stopping at the borders of one nation, it spreads all over the world to the point where the only counter-revolution left is in Australia, the land of "real blokes"... where else? Some of the elements of this imaginary society are very woke and don't bear thinking about in my view; transgender children, brain implants and designer drugs. There are also a lot of anti-white and anti-Christian sentiments in the narrative. Despite this, the parallels that I describe in the background article to the very different Conspiraspherical equivalent remain. Some of the interviews are with people who spend their whole lives on party cruises around the Indian Ocean; others write memoirs about a war in Israel, some of the more mature ones are trying to heal environmental damage caused by the ancien regime. One of the best segments is the testimony of somebody trying to restore the salt marshes in the east coast of the former USA. This is vaguely reminiscent of the "League of the World Earth Healing Organization" in my Roswell trilogy. This book is actually part of a tradition that is older than you might think; it can be traced back to William Morris' News from Nowhere in the 1890's, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2017/03/news-from-nowhere-by-william-morris.html. It is praised by some established mainstream sci-fi authors like Kim Stanley Robinson of whom I am a big fan, despite not sharing his leftist politics. Another contemporary author who seems to fit into this institution is Cory Doctorow; and it is to him I will be turning next in my research. Source: https://craphound.com. What an amusing name for a website!