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I suppose one obvious point of omission in Eric S. Raymond's "A Political History of SF" is that he does not say anything about Womens' Science Fiction. Womens' Science Fiction is sometimes classified as "Fantasy," because it is organized around "magic," rather than hard science. However, "magic" is in fact a code word for the Information Sciences (Computer Science, molecular biology, etc.). Hard science, in the era of people like Heinlein was centered around thermodynamics. The information sciences do not connect very strongly with thermodynamics, in the sense that the ordering of things is much more important than their heat value. The magic of fantasy is word-magic or mind magic, in other words, software.
The big trinity of Womens' Science Fiction is Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930-1999), Ursula LeGuin (1929-) , and Anne McCaffrey (1926-). Of the three, Marion Zimmer Bradley was the most prolific. Her major literary invention, 'The Guild of Renunciates,' or "Free Amazons," is somewhere between a religious order and a radical feminist commune (in fact, she said she got much of her material by simply looking at what was going on around her in Berkeley). She is an enormously important figure because for many years she ran writing schools, and edited anthologies for her students to publish in. The number of her students who eventually published books in their own right must be at least a couple of dozen. Anne McCaffrey, who was also a writing teacher if I recall correctly, wrote her major body of work about a fictional world where freedom of action proceeded from telepathic communication with semi-intelligent giant reptiles (rather like a dog in mental outlook). Ursula LeGuin, the daughter of the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, could _perhaps_ be described as a Ghandian anarchist. In terms of sheer depth of thought, she was probably the greatest of the three, even though she wrote fewer books. One might think of her bearing approximately the same literary relationship to the other two that Emily Bronte bore to Charlotte and Anne Bronte. Le Guin wrote three major works, _Left Hand of Darkness_, _The Dispossessed, and the _Earth-Sea Trilogy_. Their basic line runs approximately as follows: "You have in fact got freedom of action. Your power is in you mind, and short of killing you, there is no way anyone can disempower you. Now, what do you want to do with your power?" At the risk of trying to force words into someone else's mouth, one can say that Bradley, McCaffrey, and LeGuin pursued a moral communitarianism which took anarchism as a base condition.
To put it another way, I can write programs faster than a lawyer can write laws to restrict what the programs are allowed to do, and I can therefore ultimately run rings around the lawyer. What matters is what kind of software I want to write, and feel proud to write. Most of the people who know enough to write a botnet virus regard doing so as a shameful thing, so botnets are contained within acceptable limits.
A couple of years ago, Cory Doctorow observed that it was no longer possible to write science fiction because one could no longer envision technologies which could not readily be reduced to practice. At this stage of the game, the major limiting factor on the information technologies (in the largest sense of the word, including genetic engineering) is not lack of scientific knowledge. Rather, the major limiting factor is political resistance, partly vested interests, and partly fear of change.
I should like to take one modern science fiction writer as illustrative. Orson Scott Card (1951--) is probably best known for the character "Ender Wiggins," the child bred from earliest infancy for the purpose of total war, who in all innocence becomes a genocidal mass-murderer while still in his early teens. The element of speculation is first and foremost a kind of extension of Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal." The fantasy is that society oversteps certain moral limits. Note that Card chose to call his hypothetical faster-than-light communications device an "ansible," explicitly linking it to LeGuin, and her almost inhumanly patient galaxy-traveling wise men. Card replied that if one has a communications device, one can plug it into the controls of a war robot.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley%2C_Marion_Zimmer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_LeGuin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Mccaffrey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_scott_card
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
Yeah, I've gotten the impression that the Futurians had quite the reputation for being openly political. Another 1970s-era source that clearly refers to their Communist-leaning reputations is Lester del Rey's 1979 book "The World of Science Fiction 1926-1976: The History of a Subculture":
"[P]olitics somehow got mixed up in fan affairs in New York. This was a time when a large percentage of the young men of the nation were severely discontented with the lingering depression and the government's apparent inability to do anything about it. Few actually became communists, but many felt strong sympathies for a movement that seemed to preach brotherhood, propose solutions, and endorse all that was good in theory. Quite a few college students at the time joined the YCL--the Young Communist League. Some of the Futurians were strongly leftist in their beliefs." (p. 79)
Asimov was one Futurian who was no Marxist or Communist; his family fled the Soviet Union when he was a small child and he dismissed Marxist interpretations of his work: "My Foundation series has been shown, by apparently careful analysis, to be thoroughly Marxist in inspiration, except that I had never read one word by Marx, or about Marx either, at the time the stories were written, or since." ("Symbolism", in "Gold" p. 402)
I'm not up enough on modern science fiction to comment on the essay's treatment of that subject, but Raymond is off when he writes that: "Not until the mid-1990s did the participants admit that many of the key Futurians had histories as ideological Communists or fellow travelers". I'm not sure it was ever that much of a secret, but certainly Damon Knight's memoir/history of the group, THE FUTURIANS, published in 1977 went into the political aspects of the group in some detail. So did Frederik Pohl (who had been a CP party member) in his 1978 autobiography THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS. Acutually, by the mid-1990s not many of the Futurians were left (though Pohl is still alive and hopefully well): Donald Wollheim died in 1990, Asimov in 1992, James Blish had died in 1975, Cyril Kornbluth all the way back in 1958 etc.).
Odd that he says nothing about Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution tetralogy, which transcends the libertarian/socialist dichotomy, and which won two Prometheus awards.