A Country of Ghosts

Born in an empire modelled after a 19th century European power, a journalist is embedded with colonizing troops. Instead of covering a campaign of subjugation of unorganized villages, he discovers an anarchist confederation of people and communities, and joins up their fight agains the invader.

Killjoy's utopia is of course not a blueprint, but a demonstration that it is possible to imagine how an anarchist society could work. Imagining utopias, showing anarchism in practice, is important. Kim Stanley Robinson (who provides a praise on the backcover) has written many times about how dystopias are all well and fine, but utopias are more relevant to our time of crises. How to act for a better world, if you've never encountered ideas of better worlds in media and litterature?

It's a short read, and you won't regret it.

it is still a story of war, but i like the attempt of showing how a "country" following anrchist principles might look like. this scenario, although fantasy, is much closer to us that the alien and very pragmatica annares (sorry, le guin, but that's true).

There's always been a problem with recommending theory like the Bread Book to get people interested in anarchism. It is very easy for someone who has never questioned The Way Things Are to go "that's a nice thought, but it would never work" even though it literally has worked in the past. More enjoyable worlds are possible. Worlds free of authority are possible. Fiction allows them to suspend their disbelief long enough to actually consider what we're trying to say.

"A Country of Ghosts" occasionally reads like it's an overly didactic story, but it's trying to present its characters as people responding to the ignorant questions of a person from another culture. It covers their living arrangements, their decision-making, how to maintain services, how they might make war. This is what we should be telling the curious to read. Theory can come later.

A well-constructed world with real though put into how societies could construct themselves differently, and how they would interact if they did.