Someone reprinted Eric S. Raymond’s essay in their LiveJournal, spurring a lengthy debate. I reprinted this essay in Prometheus a few issues ago, and while I don’t agree with all the points, it’s a very interesting essay.
Author: Anders Monsen (Page 57 of 83)
How long before this much maligned and restricted right dies completely? The most recent example is grim: convicted and arrested for a joke about Scientology? Give me a freakin’ break.
Here’s an interview with novelist Scott Nicholson, who apparently describes himself as a libertarian writer. However, in the response to this question, he demurrs, stating:
“Well, libertarianism just plain won’t work in the human world. It would only work if we each lived alone, in a vacuum, where our actions didn’t affect other people. But we live in communities that are bubbles inside larger communities. And I also diverge from the traditional party line: for example, while I favor the legalization of most drugs, I don’t favor unlimited access to guns. The government’s role could be much smaller in our lives, but it also can do good things. Libertarians are mostly out on the extreme fringes of both major U.S. political parties, and if you really press them on their beliefs, a mass of contradictions emerges. So I don’t articulate that so much in my fiction.”
And, in the other corner, we have Claire Wolfe, who does seeks some solitude in her life, stating something quite the opposite in a blog entry:
“So many things can bind us to a place. Family. Work. Inertia. Fear. History. Money is a big factor, considering leaving the country. But the ties can be so intricate, so multi-layered, so difficult to convey to anyone who isn’t walking that mile in one’s own moccasins. Being part of a community like this one — where people help each other so freely and with such enthusiasm — is a little miracle (especially for people like me who grew up rootless and unattached to the places we lived and the people who lived there). So I speculate often about getting out of this going-to-hell country. Then I think I’d have to be mad to leave a place like this, a place that embodies the essence of real, old-fashioned community, a place that is what America was at its best and ought to be again.”
Judge for yourself. Libertarianism: an atomistic impossibility, or the true spirit of a voluntary community?
The vision of real politicians squirming from seeing themselves potryed in a bad light warms my heart. The fact that this is happening in Great Britain and that it’s Labor politicos makes me raise an eyebrow or two in surprise. Then you read further and you see the real cause –
“I didn’t mind a little betrayal of socialist ideals,” says Beaton, “but the war was it.”
Still a healthy dose of disrepect of public figures is always a good thing.
Note: I am far from pro-war, but I wonder if the motives had been non-socialist whether this would have reached the airwaves.
Interesting interview with a leading transhumanist, Nick Bostrom. According to conservative historian Francis Fukuyama, transhumanism is “the greatest threat to the future of humanity” so you know it has to be interesting and probably a good idea. It’s definitely a hot topic in modern sf, viz the novels and short stories of Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, Chris Moriarty, and countless others.
A not easily identifiable person writes a LiveJournal essay on what he/she calls two libertarian pseudo-novels – Henry Hazlitt’s Time Will Run Back and J. Neil Schulman’s The Rainbow Cadenza. I think the writer is spot on in terms of the Hazlitt book, which is one of the dullest works of ‘fiction’ that I’ve ever read, but I can’t remmber Schulman’s book being as much a ‘p o r n’ novel as alluded to in the review. Sure, there’s sex in the book (some of it not very pleasant), and it’s been almost two decades since I read the book, but I thought it was a decent work of fiction then. I’ll have to re-read the novel to refresh my memory, but I came away thinking more about the musical sections than the erotica or sex scenes.
Claire Wolfe recommends a book that I think I will need to hunt down – The Secret of Santa Vittoria.
This seems like a very interesting book.
The time is a very near future, whose features are only slightly stepped up from today’s. The war is still on, and even more misdirected; domestic anti-terror measures have increased to the point where roadblocks and searches are universal and national identification cards are mandated. (In a nicely absurdist sequence, armed agents so thoroughly ransack a Canadian of Middle Eastern descent on his way into a Mariners game that they deposit a whiff of ammunition on his clothing. When he leaves the stadium in the middle of a disappointing afternoon, he is searched again and the residue prompts the evacuation of 30,000 spectators. One dies of a heart attack.)
One character is “August Vanags, the Latvian-born author of a bestselling Holocaust memoir, is a vociferous libertarian whose charm and wit suggest a concealed degeneracy,” and the other personalities in the book range all over the spectrum.
A few years I wrote a short story along comic lines, that I called “Bubba Builds a Spaceship.” I passed it around at a writers’ group I where I attended two sessions and then left. I sent it to a writer friend, who recommended a total re-write along very different lines, with more drama. Instead, I turned it into a short screenplay, and changed the title to “Mars, the Redneck Planet.” I put it away and did nothing. Tonight my wife saw a trailer on TV for this movie, and said, “Anders, they made a movie out of your story!” I watched the trailer again, and it’s eerily similar, although this is a drama with a few funny lines, and my story was intended as humorous and totally unrealistic from the beginning.
I just placed an order for this book by Ken MacLeod, which collects some of his shorter work, both fiction and non-fiction. NESFA Press runs a nice business, but the cover looks a little low-budget this time.
