RADICAL science fiction and fantasy flourished in the 1980s, a decade of economic insecurity, aggressive foreign policies and cant about “the enemy within.”

It was a period when Michael Moorcock’s Mother London drew on mythic and supernatural elements to reimagine the capital’s working-class history and reassert the values of collectivism and mutual aid, while Iain Banks’s The Bridge was a multifaceted, prophetic broadside against the self-serving philosophies of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.

In his SF collection Slow Birds, Ian Watson mapped the insecurities of the era through tales of ecological disaster, psychological control and impending nuclear annihilation. And there were powerful and idiosyncratic novels from dissident perspectives by Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus), M John Harrison (the Viriconium books) and Iain Sinclair (Downriver).

In the US, Thomas M Disch took a literary wrecking ball to the bottom-line obsessed world view of the Reagan administration in his unsettling tale of supernatural horror, The Businessman. And Lucius Shepard’s Life During Wartime was an anti-war fantasia, an excoriating examination of a clash between love and imperialism.

We’re living in hard times once again but the cultural response is mixed. A great deal of mainstream writing is grounded in bleak utilitarianism and celebration of the fast buck and the clamour of cultural dissidence seems to have faded over the past 30 years.

It’s widely assumed that politically engaged fantasy writing is a dying art form. But, as part of an SF magazine’s editorial group, I’m reading an increasing number of politically charged submissions from our “slush pile.” And the lists of mainstream publishers include dissident storytellers who subvert the cliches of both literary and genre fiction to tackle the critical issues of our era.

One of the writers who challenge the apparently inexorable drift into a world of social conformity and financial utility is Nina Allan. She’s an acclaimed writer of short stories that appear in SF, fantasy, horror and crime publications. Melding genre traditions with the stylistic bravura and thematic subtlety associated with literary fiction, she describes herself as having a “terror of soapboxing” and rejects the idea she is a “political” writer: “I have always believed the most effective way of exploring social, moral and even political issues is through the inner landscape, the personal response,” she has said.

“The personal, rather than the party political, response lies at the heart of what it is to live as a human being. People in abject social or political circumstances are driven to create a personal reality in which they can live and flourish.”

Yet her novel The Race is an unsettling and visionary tale of environmental, psychological and societal damage wrought by corporate greed and misuse of power. Set in separate but interweaving realities — contemporary Britain and a future dystopia — it concerns a coastal landscape blighted by the fracking industry, the exploitation of a coming race of telepaths and a thriving sporting-cum-entertainment industry based on racing genetically engineered “smartdogs.”

This is no prophetic allegory. Crammed with subtle symbolism and carefully crafted characters, it’s a multilayered, puzzling and ironic tale with a powerful emotional charge.

In The Upstairs Window, one of Allan’s most affecting stories, characters inhabit a postrevolutionary theocratic dystopia with brutal restrictions imposed on freedom of expression. At its centre is an artist so absorbed in his craft he loses track of the political upheavals around him.

Allan’s style and themes are exemplified in Microcosmos, a haunting and melancholic tale of near future eco-disaster. Related through splintered insights and elliptical narrative fragments, its strange emotional undertows, vivid language and fractured conversations are as vital to the impact of the story as its riff on the unsustainability of the way we live now.

Another writer exploring the depredations of capitalist society is US short story writer George Saunders who in his younger days worked as a geophysical engineer, played jazz-fusion guitar and was a self-confessed political conservative, a “kind of an Ayn Rand guy.”

He had a belief-shattering and life-changing experience, not on the road to Damascus but at an excavation site in Singapore where he witnessed the exploitation of elderly, impoverished women. At around the same time he began reading work by the US socialist and doyen of satirical science fiction Kurt Vonnegut.

Few writers tackle the experience of wage slavery with any degree of honesty and insight but Saunders shines a fierce spotlight on the crevices of corporate capitalism, exposing the crushing experience of badly paid and pointless toil.

The title story of his collection Pastoralia concerns an ill-matched couple flung together by dire financial circumstances and their struggle to behave with as much dignity as possible while scraping by as cave dwellers who are live exhibits in a theme park. It’s a touching and tragic tale examining the themes of betrayal, solidarity, simulation and integrity.

Saunders sees traditional realism as inadequate to his literary objectives. His collection In Persuasion Nation focuses on the effect of untrammelled corporate power on consumers and workers. Its themes — coercive cybernetics, biochemical manipulation, the distortion of history and the power of marketing — are examined through his characteristic mode of analysis, an approach he calls “exaggerated realism.”

Another of his collections, Tenth of December, includes Escape from Spiderhead, in which inmates in an experimental prison are used as guinea pigs for drugs enabling social control. Exhortation concerns a motivational communication to employees engaged in a mysterious task and The Semplica Girl Diaries, a surreal riff on notions of competitive consumerism, deals with people trafficking and the objectification of human beings.

Language is crucial to the impact of Saunders’s stories. He plays with corporate jargon, self-help platitudes, the deceptive euphemisms of advertising and the glib slang we use to protect ourselves from the disorientation and alienation of 21st-century life.

Writer Will Wiles is another subversive, whose The Way Inn reworks the traditions of social realism, dystopian science fiction and horror to assess the cognitive and emotional impact of utilitarian corporate architecture. It treats “customer service” as a form of psychological warfare. The book’s protagonist, Neil Double, earns a crust as a “conference surrogate,” attending business events on behalf of clients who can’t afford the time, or can’t be bothered, but feel some form of presence will make for better image management.

In Neil’s world, alienation is a virtue and everything is disposable — landscapes, artefacts, buildings and relationships. He relishes the transience, anonymity and impersonal nature of his work and takes immense pleasure in his stays at branches of The Way Inn chain. He struggles to remember which Way Inn he’s staying at, which continent he’s on and, it transpires, which fellow conferencegoers he’s had joyless sex with.

The idiosyncratic elements in Neil’s world are Maurice, a loud, lively and irksome business journalist and Dee, a strange and striking redheaded woman on an enigmatic quest. He isn’t aware how tired and jaded he is until a couple of careless blunders lead to the unravelling of his well-ordered life and then, through his interactions with Dee, he discovers a hidden “inner hotel” within the Way Inn, an occluded and provisional domain that flouts the laws of physics.

At the centre of its labyrinthine corridors is a sartorially elegant corporate minotaur, a subtle manipulator prone to spectacular bursts of physical violence.

The Way Inn is a subtle and beautifully crafted tragicomic thought experiment that leads us to rethink our relationships with commerce, the built environment and the work we do. It’s also a hilarious satire with elements reminiscent of JG Ballard’s disaster novels and the philosophical horror of Thomas Ligotti.

I don’t know how Allan, Saunders and Wiles would characterise their politics but their work asks demanding questions about the way we live and the way we think about our world.

Along with the output of China Mieville, socialist author of the anti-imperialist and anti-corporate steampunk novel Iron Council and Georgina Bruce, writer of satirical broadsides against greed, coercion and climate change, their work certainly shows that politically engaged fantasy is alive and kicking hard today.

- Andy Hedgecock is a freelance writer and co-editor of Interzone, Britain’s longest-running British SF magazine. His story The Loki Variations, exploring the possibility of a technologically mediated socialist revolution, appears in Beta Life, published by Comma Press and available from commapress.co.uk.