Lists of 'Leftist' Horror and SciFi

1. Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956,
   
2. The Bad Seed 1956,
   
3. The Manchurian Candidate 1962,
   
4. Night of the Living Dead 1968,
   
5. Jack’s Wife 1972,
   
6. Last House on the Left 1972,
   
7. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974,
   
8. It’s Alive 1974,
   
9. Deathdream 1974,
   
10. The Crazies 1974,
    
11. Demon 1976,
    
12. Martin 1976,
    
13. The Confessional 1976,
    
14. The Hills Have Eyes 1977,
    
15. Alice, Sweet Alice 1977,
    
16. The Brood 1979,
    
17. Dead and Buried 1981,
    
18. The Stuff 1985,
    
19. The Stepfather 1985,
    
20. Day of the Dead 1985
    
21. Parents 1989.
    

Ken MacLeod
David Brin
Kim Stanley Robinson
John Brunner
(me)  
Norman Spinrad
Ursula LeGuin
Stephen Brust
Margaret Atwood
Iain M. Banks
Joanna Russ
China Mieville
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Octavia Butler
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Katherine Burdekine
Sheri Tepper
Eric Flint
Mack Reynolds
Michael Moorcock
...
I'm pretty sure that the following wouldn't object to being roped in either: Kameron Hurley, Liz Williams, Justina Robson, Jay Lake, M. John Harrison, Kim Newman ...

overland.org.a wrote:CHINA MIÉVILLE AND THE NEW WEIRD
Younger than Robinson, China Miéville burst onto the scene with his second novel, the sprawling, gothic fantasy Perdido Street Station. An active socialist and member of the British Socialist Workers Party who ran for parliament as a member of Socialist Alliance in 2001,10 he is widely considered a key figure in the ‘New Weird’, a movement emphasising the unity between science fiction and fantasy. Miéville too sees speculative fiction as particularly suited to radicalism.

CM: When you look at the strengths of the tradition of radical speculative fiction – people like Ursula K. Le Guin, and Michael Moorcock and Octavia Butler and Ken McLeod and Ian Banks – there’s clearly something there. It is to do with the aesthetic of radical estrangement, radical difference: the fact that the genre doesn’t take reality for granted.

My only caveat is that it would be dangerous for those of us who are on the Left of speculative fiction to feel like somehow it is innately our terrain. Because there have been plenty of writers who don’t come out of the Left, many of whom are very brilliant writers. There a sense of radical estrangement which we on the Left tend to think is innately our terrain, but that sort of estrangement and alienation from liberalism and modernity doesn’t necessarily have to be on the Left.

In other words, because conservatives also identify fundamental problems with liberal capitalism and the culture of commodification, some Right-wing writers can share particular sensibilities with the Left.

CM: I think, for example, of someone like Gene Wolfe. I think Gene Wolfe – The Shadow of the Torturer – is one of the outstanding writers of the twentieth century. He’s a completely amazing and brilliant writer and has an absolutely fantastic understanding of that strangeness of science fiction and fantasy and he’s also a Right-wing Catholic. You can easily understand how that might set him with an abrasive relationship with the everyday, just like us, but it doesn’t necessarily make it a Left relationship. But it does make for fantastic critical art. So because the best of speculative fiction does have a kind of radical, critical, questioning, alienated edge (in a good way), it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Left-wing, although the Left does have a strong tradition.

AGAINST THE CRUDE EQUATION: IN DEFENCE OF FANTASY

Debates about the New Weird aside, some would classify Miéville’s fiction as fantasy, a form often regarded as inherently conservative. In his introduction to the theoretical journal Historical Materialism‘s special issue on fantasy, Miéville defended the genre against its Left detractors, claiming that it shares the same “cognitive effect” as its science fiction sibling and that it is “good to think with”.

He explains:

There’s a very crude equation that’s sometimes made, which is that science fiction is the speculative fiction of a political upturn and fantasy is the speculative fiction of a political downturn. Although that’s very, very crude, there’s a small element of truth to it.

So the fact that a lot people want to immerse themselves in these fantasies of the ‘destiny of a kitchen-boy and a feudal landscape’ and so on does make me feel less than wholeheartedly comfortable. When I criticise the Left critique of fantasy, what I’m not doing is trying to defend all of those books. Because a lot of those books, I think, are escapist or at least attempt to be escapist. In fact, they’re deeply ideological, of course.

What I’m arguing is not that “there is no such thing as reactionary or escapist fantasy”, but that what those writers have done is to take the historical accident that a particular vein of fantasy [Tolkien/D&D/GoT] has come to define the field and used it to critique the whole field. In fact fantasy is much more various than that. It’s only kind of a historical quirk that in the last thirty years one particular kind of fantasy has come to define the whole field.

With Perdido Street Station, Miéville aimed to reverse the classic – and now deeply commodified – forms of fantasy fiction: “I … made a checklist of the kind of things Tolkien does and set out to invert them: so where his is a feudal world, mine is capitalist; his is rural, mine is urban; his is very Manichean in its morality, mine is all about shades of grey – and not even shades of grey, really, but genuinely insoluble moral and political conundrums, where there is no right answer.”

This was a shift of some significance, opening up a whole new realm for fantasy. The city – in Miéville and others such as Ian R. McLeod and Jeff Vandermeer – is an imaginary late nineteenth century space in flux. One only needs to think of the rapid shifts in urban culture during that period to get a sense of its potential: grubby urban ghettos, new counter-cultures, emerging and half-formed sciences.

Crucially, science and magic co-inhabit which, as Miéville notes, represents the assertion of a philosophical materialism. He relates this development in recent fantasy to the radical anti-capitalist movement of the late 1990s and start of the new century.

http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/%20issue-188/feature-rjurik-davidson/