science fiction recommendations of stories that describe societies without police, a thread (open to recommendations!). Largely these are anarchist societies because anarchism is my personal focus and it's an ideology that has long focused on antipolice and antiprison work.
but it needs to be said that indigenous practices from around the world have a lot more to teach us about society without police or prisons (science fiction author @WalidahImarisha for example gets at this in her nonfiction book Angels with Dirty Faces) than any fiction does
To start, of course: The Dispossessed, by Ursula k le Guin is a novel that explores an anarchist society and the tensions within it about social control and pressure.
The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk is a novel that explores a pluralistic, stateless society in San Francisco after the apocalypse.
A Country of Ghosts is a novella I wrote that explores an anarchist society. It was adapted to a film called Hron.
The House of Surrender is a short story by @PennyRed about a far-future anarchist society in which perpetrators of violence and other crime can choose to live in a voluntary prison and receive social work and care.
When the Rains Come Back by @CadwellTurnbull describes a panarchistic worldwide society and the tensions an anarchist society within that faces. It doesn't deal with policing directly but it describes a society without them.
The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson describes a pluralistic society without police that struggles for democracy (or anarchy, depending on the character) against corporate interests
Walkaway by Cory @doctorow describes not only a society without police but a US society in tension with the fragments of society that still have police.
the short story collection Metatropolis, edited by John @scalzi, includes a number of ad hoc utopian societies at war with the existent, such as in the story "In the Forest of Night" by Jay Lake.
The Parable of the Sower (and its sequel) by Octavia Butler are of course the most prescient books that have ever been written and they describe building a new society while the existent suffers a slow apocalypse.
Ever and Anon, a novella by Octavio Buenaventura, is a zine exploring an anarchist society and the occult.
