The Lew Rockwell Center posts a bestseller list compiled from Amazon.com referral sales, and two Prometheus Award nominated novels made the list. A third novel, John Twelve Hawks’ The Traveler,
Month: October 2005 (Page 1 of 3)
Since 1986 I have subscribed to Carl Watner’s The Voluntaryist. I own every published issue of this fine publication, which I find to be the most consistent form of libertarianism ever expressed. A short while ago Watner published a “best of” book entitled I Must Speak Out, an anthology containing 70 essays from the first 100 issues. This book now is available online as a free PDF download. I highly recommend spending a few minutes of your time reading this book. You might agree or disagree with the premises and conclusions of Voluntaryism, yet also I believe you’ll be intellectually challenged.
Previously I mentioned the Liberty Film Festival. Jesse Walker of Reason magazine actually attended the events, and details his experiences here. As I expected, rather than deal with pro-liberty issues, Hollywood’s Conservative Film Festival (as it called itself) is more about taking on the left, especially Michael Moore and anti-war ideas. As Walker muses, “If these movies represent contemporary conservatism, then conservatism today has little room for libertarian ideas.” An excellent article that covers many of the films from the festival.
From Russel Madden, a detective story set in a world where liberty is taken for granted. Yet, “Even in a fully free society danger abounds.” The novel is published through Lulu, which was founded by Bob Young, co-founder of open source company Red Hat, and touts itself as “the web’s premier independent publishing marketplace for digital do-it-yourselfers.” Death is Easy is available as print paperback and download, with a 51 page PDF preview. Support libertarian fiction and check it out.
Two writers have already made mention of their book being nominated for the 2006 Prometheus Award. Below is a preliminary list of the current nominees. Additional books are still being considered, and in early 2006 this list will be whittled down by a judges panel to five finalists. As of August 25, eight novels have been nominated for the 2006 Best Novel category. This is by no means the final list, but since I printed this list in the fall issue of Prometheus, I wanted to make it available online as well, with links to Amazon for those who wish to buy (or read more about) the books.
Chainfire
Reflex
Noble Vision
The Black Arrow
Accelerando
Infernal
RebelFire: Out of the Gray Zone
The Mists of Everness
Sad news about more regurgitated retreads. A four ‘page’ store from ABC News on sequelitis in Hollywood, throwing in the opening tidbit that Sylvester Stallone’s last three movies all were Direct to DVD dreck like Avenging Angelo, Shade and D-Tox (originally titled Eye On You). A far cry from inspiring Henry Winkler’s Fonzie in The Lords of Flatbush, and the original “Rocky” and “Rambo” movies. Old Sly is far from alone, as in the bottom-line corner, weighing in at there-must-be-profits-here-somewhere, we find planned sequels to Die Hard, Terminator, Basic Instinct and Indiana Jones. Now three of these are “IV,” and Basic Instinct only looks ahead to number two, but come on. Hasn’t the story in each case been told enough? Move on to something new. There’s still great original unfilmed books out there, but we see are sequels and re-makes. How about Probability Broach, the movie? Or The Stress of Her Regard? Two very different yet quite worthy ideas, and the latter even has vampires! As always, the lure of money trumps any statement by former stars to never appear in sequels. And enough people will rent or buy the DVDs to make them profitable, so get ready for a whole host of remakes and sequels for a very long time.
Wendy McElroy shuts down one forum and launches another, broader forum. Some of the topics of interest include “Entertainment,” which is sure to bring up books and movies related to liberty.
Via Liberty and Power.
An enticing obituary of Ba Jin, dead at the age of 100, who once wrote “Never for a moment will I put down my pen. It is kindling a fire within me.” Taking his name from Bakunin and Kropotkin, Ba Jin fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, of which he said, “Where else have authors in the world throughout history gone through something so terrifying and ridiculous, so bizarre and agonizing?” There’s a ripe history barely hinted at in this article, that I hope some modern Chinese anarchists will pick up and publish.
J. Neil Schulman Thomas M. Sipos have started blog based on the log-running Karl Hess Club dinner discussions (see link to the right on this page). So far the most interesting post (in my opinion) dealt with copyright.
Under the premise of finding something good to say about the worst movies ever made, Brad Linaweaver penned 17 entries under the column name “Der Krapp.” Now online at Big Lizards, this is sure to feed some Netflix queues. Or not.
