Looming changes in intellectual copyright law, as the Supreme Court gets ready to hear a major case next week. Implication can eventually shut down the ability to resale anything, from books to cellphones and beyond.
Category: books (Page 16 of 19)
Possible changes over at Penguin, as News Corp casts its eyes at the book market.
Looks like the second volume in Bill Patterson’s Robert A. Heinlein biography nears completion. At this rate we might see a 2013 publication date, but nothing is ever set in stone in the publishing world.
Tim Lebon’s London Eye (Toxic City, Book One), from Pyr.
I’ve just acquired two books by James P. Blaylock: Zeuglodon and The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs. A few weeks ago I re-read The Digging Leviathan just to get in the right mood.
Just started reading Brian Francis Slattery’s new novel Lost Everything. A couple of chapters in and it reads like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but on a river.
A recent post from Cory Doctorow hints that his novel, For the Win, is a finalist for the 2011 Prometheus Award. As the saying goes, more details to follow.
Children of the Sky, a sequel to Vernor Vinge’s Hugo and Prometheus Award winning novel, A Fire Upon the Deep, is slated for publication from Tor Books in October 2011, according to a report over at io9. Set anticipation level to “high,” as Vinge’s novels are superbly crafted works of the best that science fiction offers.
The NY Times has a very long and fascinating essay on the publishing phenomenon of deceased Swedish mystery writer Stieg Larsson. The Times quotes John-Henri Holmberg, a long-time Swedish libertarian author and editor, and someone who knew Larsson, about the author of these suddenly in-demand books.
John-Henri Holmberg, a Swedish editor, translator and critic who was a mentor to Larsson, wrote in an e-mail message: “He was very soft-spoken but held uncompromising views. He was a steadfast friend who would drop you entirely if you in some way proved not to be worthy of his friendship. . . . Among other things . . . he would not tolerate derogatory opinions of others based on their secondary characteristics, such as ethnicity or gender. Politically, in his youth, Stieg was a libertarian Socialist, active in a Trotskyite group; later on, I believe that he became more of a libertarian anarchist, but regardless of that the important part was his continual passion for liberty. And he would not suffer even previously close friends once he had reason to believe that in fact they harbored racist, sexist or prejudicial views.”
I haven’t yet read any of the books in the trilogy, but would consider reading them in the original language if I can locate any copies. I read somewhere the books were tough to read in translation.
The Libertarian Futurist Society announced on July 22 the winners of the annual Prometheus Award for best libertarian futurist fiction. Winner for Best Novel is The Unincorporated Man by Eytan Kollin and Dani Kollin, and for best classic work, the short story “No Truce With Kings,” by Poul Anderson.
From the LFS:
The Unincorporated Man is the first novel publication by the Kollin brothers. It is the first novel in a planned trilogy to be published by Tor. The Unincorporated Man presents the idea that education and personal development could be funded by allowing investors to take a share of one’s future income. The novel explores the ways this arrangement would affect those who do not own a majority of the stock in themselves. For instance, often ones investors would have control of a person’s choices of where to live or work. The desire for power as an end unto itself and the negative consequences of the raw lust for power are shown in often great detail. The story takes a strong position that liberty is important and worth fighting for, and the characters spend their time pushing for different conceptions of what freedom is.
Poul Anderson’s novels have been nominated many times, and have won the Prometheus Award (in 1995, for The Stars Are Also Fire), and the Hall of Fame Award (1995 for The Star Fox and 1985 for Trader to the Stars). He also received a Special award for lifetime achievement in 2001. This was the first nomination for “No Truce With Kings.”
Poul Anderson’s “No Truce with Kings” was first published in 1963. Like many science fiction stories of that era, it was set in a future that had endured a nuclear war. Anderson’s focus is not on the immediate disaster and the struggle to survive, but the later rebuilding; its central conflict is over what sort of civilization should be created. The story’s title comes from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Old Issue,” which describes the struggle to bind kings and states with law and the threat of their breaking free. Anderson’s future California is basically a feudal society, founded on local loyalties, but it has a growing movement in favor of a centralized, impersonal state. As David Friedman remarked about this story, Anderson plays fair with his conflicting forces: both of them want the best for humanity, but one side is mistaken about what that is. This story is classic Anderson and, like many of his best stories, reveals his libertarian sympathies.
Some sites that posted the news of the Prometheus Awards announcement include IO9 (with close to 100 comments, most of them snarky and dismissive of libertarianism), Liberty & Power, and Locus Online.
