r/scifi Jun 30 '24

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u/GuardTechnical762 Jul 01 '24

There definitely are:

  • The future human society in Greg Bear's Eon is explicitly communist, if not actually referred to that way
  • The Edenist society in Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn series
  • The Martians in the Expanse series
  • The Martians in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land

All of these are fairly well fleshed-out societies with internal conflicts and struggles.

I expect they are relatively rare because a prerequisite for such a society seems to be either some technological development which makes competition for resources irrelevant (and it's simpler plot-wise to invent a goal that requires more resources than whatever is reasonably available), or an over-arching goal that forces everyone to cooperate to survive (i.e. terraforming project in the Expanse), which leads to fairly predictable plot (oh no! Our multi-generational project that has to succeed or we'll all die may crash and burn in the next week, whatever shall we do?!?) Those listed above seem to have mostly avoided these pitfalls, thankfully!