I kept looking for this article from the front page of reason Magazine for many months, but to no avail. I knew I should have tried Google instead. The essay originally appeared in the print edition a little over a year ago, and covers two writers who have written interesting books dealing with liberty, aimed at a younger audience. Lois Lowry and Margaret Peterson Haddix have written two distinct series of books that mainstream readers might not have seen. Young Adult literature is all the rage these days. After the reign of Harry Potter comes to an end this summer, other writers will try to step in and fill the void. In the meantime, here are some great books already in place, waiting to be read.
Category: Uncategorized (Page 9 of 35)
I am not very familiar with NIN beyond a couple of songs from more than a decade ago, but I found an interesting link to a site linking to some viral marketing for a possible future album, including a “resistance” site.
James Nicoll asks this almost rhetorical question in a forum, with a bevy of replies, some from people familiar with the Prometheus Awards, some from individuals hostile to libertarian ideas. Nicoll, no friend of libertarians, closes with this question:
I understand why SF is increasingly not an American genre but Libertarian SF seems ideally suited to the US. Why, then, is the Prometheus Award going to people who aren’t libertarians (left or right) and not American?
The debate makes interesting reading. There are many points I could try to rebut, such as the statement that the Prometheus Award is marginal (why, then, do winners of this award seek to state “Winner of the Prometheus Award” on their novels, or other writers when writing about winners often mention how many Prometheus Awards that writer has won? Among other points, of course.)
Over at Sci Fi Weekly, Nick Gevers has a long interview with John C. Wright, author of (among others) The Golden Age trilogy, two Everness books (so far), and the recently completed Orphans of Chaos trilogy.
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.
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.
