I have this in my reading queue. I searched for recommendations a while back and this was what came up.

Funny how you asked that on the birthday of Ivan Yefremov, a popular Soviet sci-fi author. Coming from arguably the times when Soviet Union has reached its’ peak, he’s been considering how would the late-stage communist future of humanity look like.

I suggest looking at The Great Circle trilogy, which is Andromeda Nebula (novel) / The Heart of the Serpent (short story) / The Bull’s Hour (novel). While they are set in the same universe and I’ve listed them in chronological orders, they address different aspects and the storylines aren’t related to each other, so you can read them in any order. Andromeda Nebula focuses for a large part on the life of space workers on the communist Earth, Heart of the Serpent is a story about a first encounter with an alien civilization (where they are a friendly intelligent industrially developed race instead of some unspeakable horror), and The Bull’s Hour is a dystopian story about an expedition from the communist Earth exploring a remote planet where a splinter group of humans from Earth have escaped in the times of great conflicts and have recreated a capitalist hellscape.

While somewhat dated, and, frankly, Yefremov lacked a good editor, I think it’s probably the best reflection of the high hopes Soviet people had for the communism in the long-term.

The Culture series by Iain M Banks. Post-scarcity, fully automated luxury communism type thing. Confronts the reader with various dilemmas about autonomy, utilitarianism and what to do when faced with external threats. I’d recommend starting with State of The Art, which is a short story where the Culture visit earth in the 1970s and try to decide whether or not to make contact.

There’s also the Fall Revolution series by Ken McLeod. It is four books from pre-revolution but post-reconstruction after a century of civil war and plague. The first two books deal with a communist microstate type thing, the third is set on a communist earth after people chose global communism in a vote and deals with the fallout of a runaway singularity. The fourth is an expedition by the communists of the third book to an Elon Musk style ancap colony on another planet. They’re all great, if a bit hefty.

Maxim Gorki’s short stories. My favorites are “Birth of a Man” and “Lullaby.”

Lemmygrad fanfiction community when?