We live in worrying times. Fascism is on the rise across Europe and America, according to the consensus of many commentators. In this post, I will highlight SF that has speculated on the rise and activities of fascism. In a later blog post, I’ll discuss science fiction that has thought about ways to resist.
Science fiction in the 1930s had its fair share of authoritarian dictators. Upton Sinclair’s It Can’t Happen Here is a famous warning novel that feels all too relevant. In Sinclair’s vision, a populist demagogue takes power on the promise to halt immigration and make America great once more. But there is a lesser-known standout work that tried to warn the world of what was to come. Published under the alias Murray Constantine, Swastika Night (1937) projects a future in which the Nazis and Japanese won and have divided the world. Jews have been eradicated, Christians live in reservations, women are reduced to a voiceless and a near-invisible drudge caste, and the world is ruled by Teutonic knights. One aspect of the book that jumps out is the degree to which women have collaborated in their own oppression—a scenario that looked ridiculous to me on first read, but isn’t as funny in a world of “trad wives.”
Immediately after the Second World War, in the UK, people were trying to envisage a better future. Others were pushing back. In Marghanita Laski’s Tory Heaven; or, Thunder on the Right (1948), the ultra-right wing launch a coup and re-create their “natural order.” On a desert island, five people have constructed a meritocracy. When they are rescued, protagonist James Leigh-Smith (think Jacob Rees-Mogg) prays, “God, let it be as it might have been. Alter the clock, fix the election, do it any way you please, but let me see the England of all decent Conservatives’ dreams.” He finds himself in a country in which everyone is assigned to their correct social class, with the aristocracy and gentry given fixed incomes and told what to think, what to enjoy, who to marry, etc. It doesn’t end well. James discovers that while he has been given a place, it is conditional on his absolute support. He isn’t, as he thought, one of the rulers.
After the war, there were a slew of alternative history novels warning that “it could have happened here,” of which my favorites are Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953) about a Confederate America, or Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle (1962), one of the works from the 1961-1962 era being celebrated in Seattle. However, these books are consolatory in that it didn’t happen here. I’m more interested in texts that say, “If this goes on, this is where we are heading.”
Recent examples of warning novels include Octavia Butler’s Parable (or Earthseed) series, where the second book tracks the rise of right-wing fundamentalist Christians. In the television series Babylon 5, the space station becomes one of the holdouts against a fascist earth, but the series neatly ignores that the station is not a democracy. It is at best a benevolent military meritocracy. Lucy Ferris’s The Misconceiver (1997) is told through the voice of an underground abortionist in a world in which the right has rolled back all freedoms for women, gay people, and non-whites. Most recent warning books are focused on race and sexual freedoms, but some take up fundamental and systemic issues that warn of rising facism. Ken MacLeod’s Corporation Wars series (2016-17) envisages bitter war around the fundamental ideological differences between fascism and humanism, a future divided between those who see only themselves as truly human and those who still feel humanity is (or should be) structured around collectivity and the acknowledgement of others’ realities.
Since the 2016 U.S. election, and the extreme behaviour of the (many) British prime ministers in the past decade, fascism has felt ever more threatening in the Anglosphere. Lorraine Wilson’s This Is Our Undoing (2021) is set in a fractured and fascist Europe and explores the interrelationship between the personal and the political. In Marisa Crane’s I Keep My Exoskeleton To Myself (2023) and Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023) by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, the carceral state has found new ways to abuse and exploit the underclass. In The Disinformation War (2023), SJ Groenwegen takes on the disinformation that has infected the landscape of social media. Claire North’s Notes from the Burning Age (2021) explores the rise of authoritarian nationalism in a post-collapse future after a time of rebuilding and prosperity.
We have been warned. This time round we know what’s coming.
With thanks to Facebook friends for suggestions.
Farah Mendlesohn is a con-runner, a retired history professor, a charity manager, co-editor of the Hugo Award-Winning Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, author of the Hugo-nominated The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, and is currently working on a short book about Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. Farah has chaired three Eastercons, has served in various capacities in Worldcons and Eastercons, and is part of the World Fantasy 2025 team. (Farah/they/she)