The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk

In the Anarchist Library

Where to start? This book is deeply affecting and touched on so many of my passions, it is difficult to know where to start.

First, it is another entry in the large (and still growing) list of what my friend Hobo Lee used to call Northern California Post-Apocalyptic fiction. Do we in Northern California have a cataclysm fetish? Or do we here in this beautiful and fragile place just wisely wish for an end to this society as we know it before it kills us all?

In any case, Starhawk has taken all that she knows from her work as a pagan, anarchist, activist, nonviolent organizer, and created a world that may be our near future.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin

In the Anarchist Library

This is an thoughtful and nuanced science fiction book that happens to take the idea of anarchism (a socialist-anarchist flavor) seriously enough to give us a whole planet.

What is a word for a utopia that isn't a utopia? Not a distopia either. Just a simple 'topia. A view of a world and how it might be. Things that work and things that don't. Excellent ideas and really bad ones. That's what this story is about. An anarchist society on the moon, that leaves all us Capitalists and propertarians down here on this troubled sphere to fend for ourselves.

If you've read The Fountainhead in the last ten years, this is the antidote. (Review by Wes)

311 pages 
Published July 1975 by Avon Books