# Is there any alternate-history fiction about democratic socialism winning and working? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 24, 2010, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176 "2010-01-24T00:06:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2010, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/21 "2010-01-25T21:55:10Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > I was merely refuting your assertion that socialists are “tedious”. You’re confused. I said nothing of the sort. > [@](#): > > As I thought I had made clear, what I’m looking for is AH fiction from the viewpoint of similar commitment (not necessarily written by a socialist, but by a writer who is willing to assume that viewpoint for purposes of the story). And the reason you aren’t going to find much is that the success of democratic socialism, as you’d likely define it, would be… well, it would be pretty much Scandinavia today, wouldn’t it? There’s really nothing “alternate” about it. It’s actually happening. And it’s not really a very exciting topic for a novel. “Alternate history” novels are popular because they enable to writer to frame new conflicts to wring stories out of. Time travelling Nazi South Africans with laser beams invading the USA! That’s got conflict, adventure, intrigue. Societies that are successful are generally boring. It’s the ones that aren’t doing well that are exctiing. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/22 "2010-01-27T03:38:11Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > And the reason you aren’t going to find much is that the success of democratic socialism, as you’d likely define it, would be… well, it would be pretty much Scandinavia today, wouldn’t it? No, that’s social democracy; not the same thing. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 3:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/23 "2010-01-27T03:50:27Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > I was merely refuting your assertion that socialists are “tedious”. Orwell (as many people who have read or heard of _1984_ or _Animal Farm_ are not aware) remained a committed socialist all his life, and, when writing **non** fiction, could be be very readable on the subject. See, e.g., [“The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part14) (1941): > [@](#): > > Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does NOT mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it DOES mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available at the moment. > > However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class system. Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money. > > \ > > I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of thing we need. The first three points deal with England’s internal policy, the other three with the Empire and the world: > > 1. Nationalisation of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries. > > 2. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one. > > 3. Reform of the educational system along democratic lines. > > 4. Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede when the war is over. > > 5. Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the coloured peoples are to be represented. > > 6. Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and all other victims of the Fascist powers. > > The general tendency of this programme is unmistakable. It aims quite frankly at turning this war into a revolutionary war and England into a Socialist democracy. I have deliberately included in it nothing that the simplest person could not understand and see the reason for. In the form in which I have put it, it could be printed on the front page of the DAILY MIRROR. But for the purposes of this book a certain amount of amplification is needed. > > 1. NATIONALISATION. One can “nationalise” industry by the stroke of a pen, but the actual process is slow and complicated. What is needed is that the ownership of all major industry shall be formally vested in the State, representing the common people. Once that is done it becomes possible to eliminate the class of mere OWNERS who live not by virtue of anything they produce but by the possession of title-deeds and share certificates. State-ownership implies, therefore, that nobody shall live without working. How sudden a change in the conduct of industry it implies is less certain. In a country like England we cannot rip down the whole structure and build again from the bottom, least of all in time of war. Inevitably the majority of industrial concerns will continue with much the same personnel as before, the one-time owners or managing directors carrying on with their jobs as State employees. There is reason to think that many of the smaller capitalists would actually welcome some such arrangement. The resistance will come from the big capitalists, the bankers, the landlords and the idle rich, roughly speaking the class with over £2,000 a year–and even if one counts in all their dependants there are not more than half a million of these people in England. Nationalisation of agricultural land implies cutting out the landlord and the tithe drawer, but not necessarily interfering with the farmer. It is difficult to imagine any reorganisation of English agriculture that would not retain most of the existing farms as units, at any rate at the beginning. The farmer, when he is competent, will continue as a salaried manager. He is virtually that already, with the added disadvantage of having to make a profit and being permanently in debt to the bank. With certain kinds of petty trading, and even the small-scale ownership of land, the State will probably not interfere at all. It would be a great mistake to start by victimising the smallholder class, for instance. These people are necessary, on the whole they are competent, and the amount of work they do depends on the feeling that they are “their own masters”. But the State will certainly impose an upward limit to the ownership of land (probably fifteen acres at the very most), and will never permit any ownership of land in town areas. > > From the moment that all productive goods have been declared the property of the State, the common people will feel, as they cannot feel now, that the State is THEMSELVES. They will be ready then to endure the sacrifices that are ahead of us, war or no war. And even if the face of England hardly seems to change, on the day that our main industries are formally nationalised the dominance of a single class will have been broken. From then onwards the emphasis will be shifted from ownership to management, from privilege to competence. It is quite possible that State-ownership will in itself bring about less social change than will be forced upon us by the common hardships of war. But it is the necessary first step without which any REAL reconstruction is impossible. > > 1. INCOMES. Limitation of incomes implies the fixing of a minimum wage, which implies a managed internal currency based simply on the amount of consumption goods available. And this again implies a stricter rationing scheme than is now in operation. It is no use at this stage of the world’s history to suggest that all human beings should have EXACTLY equal incomes. It has been shown over and over again that without some kind of money reward there is no incentive to undertake certain jobs. On the other hand the money reward need not be very large. In practice it is impossible that earnings should be limited quite as rigidly as I have suggested. There will always be anomalies and evasions. But there is no reason why ten to one should not be the maximum normal variation. And within those limits some sense of equality is possible. A man with £3 a week and a man with £1,500 a year can feel themselves fellow creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers on the Embankment benches cannot. > > 2. EDUCATION. In wartime, educational reform must necessarily be promise rather than performance. At the moment we are not in a position to raise the school-leaving age or increase the teaching staffs of the elementary schools. But there are certain immediate steps that we could take towards a democratic educational system. We could start by abolishing the autonomy of the public schools and the older universities and flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability. At present, public-school education is partly a training in class prejudice and partly a sort of tax that the middle classes pay to the upper class in return for the right to enter certain professions. It is true that that state of affairs is altering. The middle classes have begun to rebel against the expensiveness of education, and the war will bankrupt the majority of the public schools if it continues for another year or two. The evacuation is also producing certain minor changes. But there is a danger that some of the older schools, which will be able to weather the financial storm longest, will survive in some form or another as festering centres of snobbery. As for the 10,000 “private” schools that England possesses, the vast majority of them deserve nothing except suppression. They are simply commercial undertakings, and in many cases their educational level is actually lower than that of the elementary schools. They merely exist because of a widespread idea that there is something disgraceful in being educated by the public authorities. The State could quell this idea by declaring itself responsible for all education, even if at the start this were no more than a gesture. We need gestures as well as actions. It is all too obvious that our talk of “defending democracy” is nonsense while it is a mere accident of birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the education it deserves. > > \ > > Within a year, perhaps even within six months, if we are still unconquered, we shall see the rise of something that has never existed before, a specifically ENGLISH Socialist movement. Hitherto there has been only the Labour Party, which was the creation of the working class but did not aim at any fundamental change, and Marxism, which was a German theory interpreted by Russians and unsuccessfully transplanted to England. There was nothing that really touched the heart of the English people. Throughout its entire history the English Socialist movement has never produced a song with a catchy tune–nothing like LA MARSEILLAISE or LA CUCURACHA, for instance. When a Socialist movement native to England appears, the Marxists, like all others with a vested interest in the past, will be its bitter enemies. Inevitably they will denounce it as “Fascism”. Already it is customary among the more soft-boiled intellectuals of the Left to declare that if we fight against the Nazis we shall “go Nazi” ourselves. They might almost equally well say that if we fight against Negroes we shall turn black. To “go Nazi” we should have to have the history of Germany behind us. Nations do not escape from their past merely by making a revolution. An English Socialist government will transform the nation from top to bottom, but it will still bear all over it the unmistakable marks of our own civilisation, the peculiar civilisation which I discussed earlier in this book. > > It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the judge in his ridiculous horsehair wig and the lion and the unicorn on the soldier’s cap-buttons. It will not set up any explicit class dictatorship. It will group itself round the old Labour Party and its mass following will be in the trade unions, but it will draw into it most of the middle class and many of the younger sons of the bourgeoisie. Most of its directing brains will come from the new indeterminate class of skilled workers, technical experts, airmen, scientists, architects and journalists, the people who feel at home in the radio and ferro-concrete age. But it will never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word. Political parties with different names will still exist, revolutionary sects will still be publishing their newspapers and making as little impression as ever. It will disestablish the Church, but will not persecute religion. It will retain a vague reverence for the Christian moral code, and from time to time will refer to England as “a Christian country”. The Catholic Church will war against it, but the Nonconformist sects and the bulk of the Anglican Church will be able to come to terms with it. It will show a power of assimilating the past which will shock foreign observers and sometimes make them doubt whether any revolution has happened. > > But all the same it will have done the essential thing. It will have nationalised industry, scaled down incomes, set up a classless educational system. Its real nature will be apparent from the hatred which the surviving rich men of the world will feel for it. It will aim not at disintegrating the Empire but at turning it into a federation of Socialist states, freed not so much from the British flag as from the money-lender, the dividend-drawer and the woodenheaded British official. Its war strategy will be totally different from that of any property-ruled state, because it will not be afraid of the revolutionary after-effects when any existing régime is brought down. It will not have the smallest scruple about attacking hostile neutrals or stirring up native rebellion in enemy colonies. It will fight in such a way that even if it is beaten its memory will be dangerous to the victor, as the memory of the French Revolution was dangerous to Metternich’s Europe. The dictators will fear it as they could not fear the existing British régime, even if its military strength were ten times what it is. That’s what Orwell – **not a Marxist,** be it noted – meant by “socialism,” and it goes **way** beyond Scandinavian social democracy. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/24 "2010-01-27T04:23:26Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > I’ve read [_Back in the USSA,_](http://www.amazon.com/Francis-Parkman-Prize-Eric-Foner/dp/0965727017/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264288919&sr=8-2) by Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman, in which Eugene Debs leads a Socialist revolution in America in 1917, and then things go pretty much like they did in the Soviet Union (with Al Capone playing the role of Stalin, and J. Edgar Hoover (head of the Federal Bureay of Ideology) as Beria, and Alaska replacing Siberia as the place of exile for dissidents). And I’ve read [_The Gladiator,_](http://www.amazon.com/Gladiator-Crosstime-Traffic-Harry-Turtledove/dp/076531486X) by Harry Turtledove, where the USSR won the Cold War (with no nuclear exchange), and every country became more or less Stalinist. But I’ve never read an alternate-history story describing a world anything like what anti-totalitarian democratic socialists like George Orwell would tell you they had in mind. Have you? Heinlein’s early novels “Beyond this Horizon” and “For Us, The Living” feature a “Social Credit” ([Social credit - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit)) economy, where citizens receive a guarenteed income. Mack Reynolds wrote a lot of SF short stories featuring socialism in future societies (Ken McLeod does something of the same thing today). James Hogan (of all people) wrote a novel (The Proteus Operation) which featured in its background, an alternate non-Stalinist USSR. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Pacific Edge might also be the kind of thing you’re looking for ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/25 "2010-01-27T05:21:10Z")
> [@Andy\_L](#): > > Heinlein’s early novels “Beyond this Horizon” and “For Us, The Living” feature a “Social Credit” ([Social credit - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit)) economy, where citizens receive a guarenteed income. Mack Reynolds wrote a lot of SF short stories featuring socialism in future societies (Ken McLeod does something of the same thing today). James Hogan (of all people) wrote a novel (The Proteus Operation) which featured in its background, an alternate non-Stalinist USSR. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Pacific Edge might also be the kind of thing you’re looking for I’ve read _Pacific Edge_ – perhaps the most plausible utopia I’ve ever read (in the sense of being a society that plausibly could work as described and be as good as described, not in the sense of it being politically plausible we could get there from here). And _Beyond This Horizon_ (which I think may owe more to [Technocracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_Incorporated) than to anything usually thought of as socialism). But I’m looking for **alternate history,** you know, “What if history had gone differently?” fiction. (For more on AH, see [Uchronia.net.](http://www.uchronia.net/)) The only thing you’re listing that might qualify is the Hogan novel – I’ll have to check it out. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/26 "2010-01-27T05:32:36Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > “Alternate history” novels are popular because they enable to writer to frame new conflicts to wring stories out of. Time travelling Nazi South Africans with laser beams invading the USA! That’s got conflict, adventure, intrigue. Societies that are successful are generally boring. It’s the ones that aren’t doing well that are exctiing. That is true. But, as I noted above, the political left has attracted a **lot** of great literary talent in the past hundred years (far more of it than than the right has, IMO); and I think at least some of those writers should have been equal to the challenge of writing what I’m asking for and making it worth reading. Of course, I’m talking mainstream literary types like Hemingway, who rarely do anything that might be called SF of any kind (there are exceptions, of course; e.g., Jack London’s [_The Iron Heel,_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Heel) or, of course, Orwell’s _1984.)_ In the SF genre, there have been relatively few leftist genre-writers and relatively more . . . well, not old-style conservatives, but certainly libertarians. (Those few SF writers who can fairly be described as paleoconservatives are prominent in the “military SF” subgenre, e.g., Jerry Pournelle.) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 5:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/27 "2010-01-27T05:59:00Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > And _Beyond This Horizon_ (which I think may owe more to [Technocracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_Incorporated) than to anything usually thought of as socialism). BTW, I **have** read an AH story about Technocracy triumphant: "“You COULD Go Home Again,” by Howard Waldrop. (It’s mainly about Thomas Wolfe if he had lived longer.) You can find it in his 1998 collection, [_Going Home Again._](http://www.amazon.com/Going-Home-Again-Howard-Waldrop/dp/0312185898) Waldrop provides an afterword to the story which explains, among other things, technocracy: > [@](#): > > [Technocracy] was the brainchild of a guy named Howard Scott. His idea was simple: build up a database of all the transportation, industrial, electrical, shipping and social engineers in America. Get them ready. When Things Went Blooey (sometime in early 1933, when Hoover was re-elected, it looked like from the summer of 1932), move them in. Get everything back on a supply-need basis; move goods and services from areas of surplus to scarcity; take over vital functions; put people to work on the what-we-would-now-call infrastructure – in some kind of credit arrangement – of all the things that the Depression had knocked the blocks out from under. > > It took hold of the imaginations of all kinds of people, not just the poor. It seemed for the first time someone had pointed out that goods and food were still there, just like in 1929, but what was missing was the capital that moved them from one place to another. Replace the capital with brains; and somewhere in there get the exchange part on some other basis: either work credit, or some other funny-money. (One of their neat proposals was to divide the country into sectors by latitude and longitude. I used to write you from Austin, TX, Sector 9830.) > > The Technocrats planned and waited. Scott was everywhere that fall and winter. Then something went terribly, terribly wrong for Technocracy. The wheels didn’t come off America. The election came and went. FDR took office. His brain trust did a suck-job on some of the best Technocrat proposals. By early 1933 their time had come, and gone. > > There are some still around; they’re awfully old, but for a few minutes there they saw, like Wolfe, the shining, golden opportunity. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 7:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/28 "2010-01-27T07:06:45Z")
> [@Tom\_Tildrum](#): > > [China Mieville’s](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Mi%C3%A9ville) work might be worth exploring. What Alt-History has he written? All his work I know is either Fantasy with Steampunk overtones or Urban Fantasy. Yes, there’s a heavy Socialist theme, especially in _Iron Council_, but I don’t think it’s what the OP is looking for. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Piranha\_Brothers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/aca169/32.png) [@The\_Piranha\_Brothers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Piranha_Brothers)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 8:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/29 "2010-01-27T08:58:40Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > (…) But I’ve never read an alternate-history story describing a world anything like what anti-totalitarian democratic socialists like George Orwell would tell you they had in mind. Have you? How about this-history stories? Much of North West Europe is exactly that. Lots of Social Democrats there, monstly in multi-party systems. Those countries that have been stable for a long time. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/30 "2010-01-27T14:32:28Z")
> [@The\_Piranha\_Brothers](#): > > How about this-history stories? Much of North West Europe is exactly that. Lots of Social Democrats there, monstly in multi-party systems. Those countries that have been stable for a long time. See posts #22 and 23. ---
**Author:** ![Rrose\_Selavy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bcef8e/32.png) [@Rrose\_Selavy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rrose_Selavy)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/31 "2010-01-27T14:36:28Z")
deleted ---
**Author:** ![The\_Piranha\_Brothers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/aca169/32.png) [@The\_Piranha\_Brothers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Piranha_Brothers)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/32 "2010-01-27T15:30:32Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > See posts #22 and 23. Oh Democratic with a capital D. You know, compared to most other countries, the US Democrats aren’t that socialist at all. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/33 "2010-01-27T18:27:42Z")
> [@The\_Piranha\_Brothers](#): > > Oh Democratic with a capital D. > > You know, compared to most other countries, the US Democrats aren’t that socialist at all. I know. My point was, neither are the Scandinavian “Social Democrats,” compared to what “socialism” is in most countries understood to mean. Democratic socialism and social democracy are two different things. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2010, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176/34 "2010-01-30T01:36:12Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > I’ve read _Pacific Edge_ – perhaps the most plausible utopia I’ve ever read (in the sense of being a society that plausibly could work as described and be as good as described, not in the sense of it being politically plausible we could get there from here). And _Beyond This Horizon_ (which I think may owe more to [Technocracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_Incorporated) than to anything usually thought of as socialism). But I’m looking for **alternate history,** you know, “What if history had gone differently?” fiction. (For more on AH, see [Uchronia.net.](http://www.uchronia.net/)) The only thing you’re listing that might qualify is the Hogan novel – I’ll have to check it out. The Hogan novel is definitely alternate history, but the successful socialist state is only seen briefly. I was considering “Pacific Edge” to be quasi-alternate history because it’s part of a three book set, each of which takes the same location and analgous characters and places them in a possible future (“The Pacific Edge” is in an utopian future, “The Gold Coast” is in a future where California is dominated by the defense industry, malls and freeways (even more than today), and “The Wild Shore” is in a post-atomic war future. I don’t think Beyond this Horizon is about technocracy because Heinlein mocks that movement in “The Roads Must Roll” which he wrote between “For Us the Living” and “Beyond this Horizon” - “For Us the Living” is explicitly about the economic theories that Heinlein was pushing when he campaigned for Upton Sinclair. I was thinking of “For Us the Living” as alternate history just because he was predicting the near-future when the book was written, which turned out to be the past by the time the book was published. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-alternate-history-fiction-about-democratic-socialism-winning-and-working/526176.md?page=1)