I’ve been playing the Half Earth Socialism game again and was wondering about novels set in a world dealing with climate change and scarcity.
This is a big theme of a lot of Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction, especially his Mars trilogy and Ministry for the Future.
Mars trilogy is long and takes place pre and post revolution. Ministry for the Future doesn’t really fit the bill unless you really finagle the definition of revolution. 2312 seems to have some sort of communist mode of production going on in the rest of the solar system but I’m not sure how they got there. KSR isn’t a Marxist and how political change happens in his books reflect that. However, he does not dismiss violence.
There’s plenty of revolutionary stuff going on in Ministry, just not generally from our viewpoint characters.
I have written something that you might like. It’s a sci-fi story about a human going to an alien world and discovering it is very similar to our world. But there are planets that have had revolutions and they do very explicitly have to deal with the result of an allegory for climate change. I have only published 12 chapters so far, but it’s done, just needs final editing and I have been lazy.
Yes! My Space Corps trilogy takes place in the near future, where workers have succeeded in taking over the world and have begun to explore the galaxy. The whole thing is available on libgen. The third book in particular deals with climate change as well as future stages of the revolutionary struggle, where new generations arise to sweep the old aside. The first book was inspired by the Iliad; the second, by the Odyssey; the third, because I had run out of Greek epics, by Gilgamesh. No need to feel any guilt about reading it for free; just please tell others about it if you like it.
Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway might fit the bill. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin does for sure.
Well they’re not quite post-revolution, but The Windup Girl and The Water Knife are both pretty interesting near-future sci-fi books by Paolo Bacigalupi, set in the same timeline (I think) at different times.
The latter is basically Cyberpunk Chinatown, with corporate water assassins battling to control reservoir rights.
The former is Post-Oil Biopunk in Thailand, where the Calorie Companies are in a constant genetic tech race to beat the various super crop blights they used on each other, and scarcity of high ROE fuels led to development of mechanical energy storage and bioengineered work animals.
(But possibly a content warning for the Windup Girl - being a bioroid in a book about our oft-abusive relationships with our creations does not put her into a very pleasant situation)
Apologies for the triple-post!
