LeftInSF book club

China Mieville, one of the leading contemporary Science Fiction/Fantasy writers, has a list of 50 Fantasy and Science Fiction Books Socialists should read. I don't agree with all of his choices, and I've only read about a third of the books, but some of his comments are right on:

Philip Pullman—Northern Lights (1995)

Pullman let us down. This book is here because it deals with moral/political complexities with unsentimental respect for its (young adult) readers and characters. Explores freedom and social agency, and the question of using ugly means for emanicipatory ends. It raises the biggest possible questions, and doesn’t patronise us that there are easy answers. The second in the trilogy, The Subtle Knife, is a perfectly good bridging volume… and then in book three, The Amber Spyglass, something goes wrong. It has excellent bits, it is streets ahead of its competition… but there’s sentimentality, a hesitation, a formalism, which lets us down. Ah well. Northern Lights is still a masterpiece.

Mieville's work is very politically informed (if occasionally overly baroquely written), and quite radical at its core.

There's a fan page here, and there is an extended discussion of his latest novel, Iron Council, here.