Marxism and libertarianism have been the two great competing ideologies of social change over the last two centuries. In some ways the relationship is deeper than that of competitors. Seen from a certain perspective, Marxism is libertarianism's evil twin; consider that Karl Marx and Ayn Rand both took Prometheus as their ideal mythological hero, venerated the ancient Greeks, and viewed industrialization as heroic and liberatory. Ken MacLeod may be unique in being both a Marxist and a libertarian, but it's not always easy to tell the two apart, especially in fantastic settings where the familiar signposts of issues and party labels are unavailable.

Miéville's Marxist views are no secret to anyone who has read his nonfiction (much of which is available on the Web), but they're perhaps less obvious in his fictional worldbuilding. Most of The Scar takes place in Armada, a great floating city shaped from many ships fastened together. Armada partly recalls legends of the Sargasso Sea, partly the voluntary exile of Captain Nemo from the land, and partly the pirate utopia of Libertatia said to have existed on Madagascar between 1690 and 1694. Miéville shows the crew and passengers of a captured ship—including many Remade, victims of biomechanical reconstructive surgery imposed as a criminal penalty—being welcomed onto Armada as a community of equals. They join an economy sustained by trade with many disparate cultures and even species. And at the novel's ingenious climax, we see the emergence of a revolutionary movement more or less in the spirit of classical anarchism, aimed not at taking power but at withdrawing it. Libertarian readers will find things to appreciate in Miéville's story.

But Armada (like a grim parody of Galt's Gulch) exists in secret; its citizens do not join by choice and are not free to leave. Its formal equality coexists not only with vast differences of wealth but with interconvertibility of wealth and power. 1ts diverse governments are mostly harshly repressive. (The government of Dry Fall Ridings in particular, has the most nakedly honest scheme of taxation I've ever seen described in a work of fiction.) If New Crobuzon, the greatest city of Miéville's fictional world, is like a surrealistic London—less Victorian than Regency, with open corruption in place of moral earnestness—where industrial capitalism exists in the shell of aristocratic privilege. Armada is an equally surrealistic image of revolutionary capitalism, and equally lacking in any conception of individual rights. This image of formal equality and consent coexisting with real oppression and coercion exactly fits the more sophisticated Marxist conceptions of capitalist satiety.

Schroeder's Permanence portrays a future society that seemingly fits libertarian values very well: the worlds of the Cycler Compact, bodies mostly orbiting brown dwarfs linked together by sublight interstellar travel. The long travel periods require customs to maintain agreements over decades or centuries, so that a ship need not fear being stranded at any of the worlds on its circuit. Governments may not last that long or have sufficient commitment to their past bargains; ships of the Cycler Compact instead rely on a monastic order based on a religion called Permanence, the source of the book's title.

But the Cycler Compact is failing. The discovery of supraliminal travel makes it unnecessary for the worlds with access to faster-than-light ships; and the need for a high gravitational field makes the many worlds orbiting brown dwarfs unable to participate in the new trade network. The conflicts that result are the basis of Schroeder's plot.

The worlds of the new trade network have evolved a new legal and ideological system, the Rights Economy—and here is where the book takes a turn toward Marxism. Consider Schroeder's short summary of the Rights Economy from the viewpoint of Permanence:

"though they think they are bing moral, they are godless people, because they have made it appear that the essence of things is money—that a thing only really exists if it can be bought or sold. When you look at a rose, you no longer see the immense of the thing itself; all you see is a price."

The phrase "Rights Economy" probably sounds fairly Appealing to most libertarian ears, and Schroeder's making it the adversary probably sets off a few mental alarm bells. In fact, the rights in question are mainly intellectual property rights. and one possible reading of Permanence is as a comment on present-day legal controversies over various forms of intellectual property. Schroeder envisions a future where information is not free: every piece of information is owned, by its creator or by someone to whom some government has assigned ownership, and every use of that information must be paid for. Schroeder suggests that the costs of doing so are crippling—one passage envisions a warship unable to fight because it has run out of money to pay for its operating systems and they have automatically shut down! There are at least overtones of the idea that returns to capital are exploitative unearned income, though with a focus not on physical but on intellectual capital.

There's a second and quite different intellectual inspiration for other aspects of Schroeder's story: the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. At one point his heroine presents his hero with her mother's master idea for testing the worth of any possible religion—and it turns out to to Nietzsche's concept of Eternal Recurrence. A discussion of alien intelligence brings up the idea that most alien races, even those with advanced technology, have nothing comparable to human consciousness—because consciousness is a transitory phenomenon, a product of an organism's being out of equilibrium with its environment, and as races adapt to advanced technology they cease to need consciousness and evolve out of having it. Nietzsche didn't make this a central theme of his books. but it can certainly be found there, in a quite similar form. This still isn't libertarian, even though Nietzsche's radical individualism is sympathetic to some libertarians, but it's interesting and adds a philosophical depth to the book.

Regrettably, it's more a background to the action than an integral part of it. The overt plot is mostly melodramatic (conflict between characters) rather than dramatic (conflict within characters); the characters change, but their changes don't seem sufficiently motivated by the conflict in which they are engaged. And the form of that conflict is physical battle, with its parameters shaped by ingeniously envisioned advanced technology, but its strategies not obviously emerging out of the philosophical themes.

Both these books offer brilliantly envisioned imaginary worlds. Schroeder presents an interstellar future of plausible advanced technology mixed with a little traditional superscience; Miéville shows a quasi-steampunk alternate past combining real engineering, the visions of Victorian scientific romances, and ingeniously plausible sorcery, inhabited by chimera races (part human, part animal—which often means invertebrate) like images painted by Hieronymus Bosch. (One of the disappointments of Schroeder's novel is that while suggesting profoundly alien races, it doesn't really show that alienness through its characters' eyes.) And both are about issues that libertarian readers will find interesting. So there's much to recommend them as science fiction or fantasy. But they aren't libertarian science fiction or fantasy; they come from a different tradition.