In my teens I was profoundly affected by a small number of books that I read. As a result of reading them I became intensely interested in the politics of pacifism and the strategies of conflict resolution and resistance. My introduction to science fiction was a suitcase full of books given to me by my dad’s best friend. I was at that stage in a Reading Child’s life where I’d have read baked bean cans, so I plowed through an eclectic selection of books.
The first two to really affect me were Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered (1977) and Brian Stableford’s The Florians (1976). In the first—a fix-up—an intergalactic agent, selected precisely because he is conflict averse, begins to crumble as a consequence of the pressures between his childhood Buddhist upbringing and the violence he has experienced and perpetrated in his job. In the second, a man who has lost his son to a pacifist movement discovers while on a mission the power of saying “No” when faced with the threat of violence.
These books led me to the Quakers. I started attending when I was 15 and joined in my mid-20s. I pursued a master’s degree in peace studies and eventually a doctorate in peace history. At the same time I was looking out for alternatives to conflict in science fiction. Orson Scott Cards’ Speaker for the Dead (1986), with its argument that Truth is a very powerful weapon, blew me away. Judith Moffett’s anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist Pennterra (1987) and Joan Slonczewski’s Still Forms on Foxfield (1980), with its refuseniks and the calm seeking of consensus which is a feature of both novels (even if Moffett’s Quakers achieve it amazingly quickly) taught me to slow down in my own decision making. Piers Anthony’s Golem in the Gears (1986) introduced me to the concept of game play in decision making and thinking through decision trees. And Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted (1987) taught me about the potential for mass civil disobedience, in its depiction of a pacifist population concluding that the civil contract is so broken that it no longer needs to adhere to its side of the bargain.
Not all resistance is direct. Some is about creating a new paradigm and taking the world along with you. Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue (1984) argues that if you change the language, you change the way people think and you change the world. In the book the revolution fails, but considerable changes in our world have been brought about this way, which may be why language has become a primary target for the American presidential administration. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) takes this even further; new language and a new mindset lead to a new religious order which remakes the world. Resistance can also be about living your life in an active mode of refusal; in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Ti-Jeanne and Gross-Jeane fight day by day to resist the world they live in, and to help others survive. In Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors (2023), resistance focuses on the power of religion as those who are not the chosen, whose prophecies do not come true, seek to shape a new way of living. Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire (2019) is about resistance to cultural imperialism on an inter-galactic scale, and Darcie Little Badger’s A Snake Falls to Earth (2021) operates at both a metaphysical and a local level.
A recent author to take on the topic of resistance is Naomi Kritzer in a trilogy of tales from 2023. The short story “Better Living Through Algorithms” exhorts workers to take control of their lives and collaborate in their leisure as an act of resistance to corporate wellness culture. “The Year Without Sunshine” is another story that emphasizes community resistance to external paradigms of sink-or-swim libertarianism, while Liberty’s Daughter sees the underclasses on a seastead—bonded laborers and the noncitizen children of citizens—use the disruption of a plague to raise their own value and force a redistribution of property. It is very utopian, but its core message is that our labor matters, solidarity is our strength, and that injustice is not inevitable; all important messages right now.
https://seattlein2025.org/2025/07/04/fantastic-fiction-resistance-2/
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