Libertarian sf at LRC

An all too brief overview of recent movies and books in the sf genre that contain elements of liberty. No mention of Babylon 5, however.

The libertarian divide

Randy Barnett's recent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal appears as a modern pro-war libertarian manifesto. Quite a few libertarian commentators have responded to the effect that a pro-war libertarian is a contradiction in terms. Barnett's original thesis, that Ron Paul's anti-war stance vis a vis Iraq is not the only view in the libertarian movement, is probably true. I certainly don't agree with Barnett's theories on libertraianism and war. Also, not every libertarian supports Paul, but that doesn't meant they don't agree with his views on the war. Ron Paul has some libertarian qualities, but quite a few other bizarre and statist views (immigration, for example). This doesn't stop the minarchists from beating loudly on the Ron Paul drum. Lew Rockwell's web site and blog usually contain several Paul stories a day. And while Justin Raimondo makes some good points in this essay, I strong disagree with his concluding words, that "Ron Paul is the authentic voice of the libertarian movement." Paul, running as a Republican, is the authentic voice of the libertarian movement? Give me a break. Sure, Paul probably will be the last nail in the coffin of the Libertarian Party (a good thing, really), but by the end of 2007 he will be a non-candidate, and the libertarians hooked on politics will need to find a new fix.

Latest edition of Prometheus nears completion

Little posting of last due to work on the current issue, plus being knocked out of commission for over a week due to a bad cold. Right now I'm making final edits to a couple of stories. I'm starting to look ahead to the next issue, which is a temptation I need to resist until this one is in the mail.

I've stubbornly stuck to a 12-page format the past year, but find that I'm writing 60-80% of the more recent issues. So, after cutting the page count down from 16 to 12 for the same reason last year, I may now need to drop the issue down to 8 pages, until I can get more contributions. I might as well look into moving everything online otherwise. That's where all the action is these days anyway, and people writing about liberty and science fiction can get their bylines out faster via the internet, along with the options of commentary, linking, and a massive audience. Why should an organization with the word "futurist" in its name stick to a print newsletter? Anyway, the current issue currently contains these items:

Matthew Gaylor, RIP
Book Reviews:
The Guardener’s Tale, by Bruce Boston
The Mount, by Carol Emshwiller
Giant Lizards from Another Star, by Ken MacLeod
Brasyl, by Ian McDonald,
Glorifying Terrorism, edited by Farah Mendelsohn
Mappa Mundi, by Justina Robson
Empire, by Orson Scott Card
The Jack Vance Treasury, by Jack Vance
Off Armageddon Reef, by David Weber
Movie Reviews:
Sophie Schöll: The Final Days
Army of Shadows
Letters, plus news of the LFS Community on Live Journal

Zimbabwe: Death of a Nation

If this wasn't so sad, it would be almost funny, a perfect exercise in planned chaos. By waving the legislative pen to slash prices, the Mugabe government shows yet again reckless disregard for human life. Stop the government money press, boot out that thug in power, and bring about some genuine reforms. Otherwise this country will vanish into a whirlwind of destruction.

Glasshouse redux

In a comment thread below on Glasshouse, Sunni Maravillosa (whose blog and Salon I regularly read), talks about the criteria that "Prometheus finalists' content [be] firmly in the pro-freedom camp," and whether or not Glasshouse fits this recipe. I'd like to think that it does fall into this camp, as the protagonist holds very individualist view about life and self-defense. Also, the villains in the books are mind-controllers who spread their views via worms and viruses that re-write how people think, and they eradicate those who they believe are not susceptible to such a virus (which is basically identity theft on a large scale). In the experiment that is the glasshouse itself, you can also see how the protagonist, Robin, reacts to the conformism of the people in the village as well the those running the experiment. There's a mini-revolution within the glasshouse experiment, and in Robin's flashback as well as the events prior to him entering the experiment we see a post-human society where freedom to remold your self exists almost totally. That this society at one time almost was wiped out points to conflicts being eternal. Government is hardly present in the post-human society, and no one forces you to back your self up should you chose this.

As far as The Prisoner, I have only seen it on VHS tapes from a few years ago, and remember the fake village where Patrick McGoohan's character wakes up. It was a bizarre, self-contained place of happiness and conformity, much like in Glasshouse. Everyone talks about "the village," and in Glasshouse there's a sign that says "Welcome to the village," which to me is a very direct allusion. The taxis in Glasshouse also seem to mirror those in The Prisoner. I probably am reading too much into this allusion.

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own."

Out Stealing Horses

A Norwegian writer wins one of the richest literary prizes available, for the translation of his 2003 novel. I happen to have the Norwegian version right next to me. Admittedly it was third in line of the Norwegian books on my list to read (my small library is augmented once or twice a year), but it sounds enticing enough to bump it up to next in line.

Glasshouse review

Sunni Maravillosa posts her review of Charles Stross' novel Glasshouse. I did note some similarities between Stross novel and John C. Wright's The Golden Age while reading the former, as she also notes, but then again these are now almost standard sf tropes. Glasshouse is also a sequel of sorts to Accelerando, which was based on several short stories and novellas, and many of these deal with the same themes. Despite its shortcomings, I do believe Glasshouse is the best of the five Prometheus Award finalists. I have now read all the nominees, and I believe the choice comes down between Glasshouse and Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. I am still mulling my vote, but see no clear cut winner yet. As far as nominees for the 2008 Prometheus Award, I'm firmly behind Adam Roberts' Gradisil, which (as Bruce Sterling would say) rocks hard.

A Scanner Darkly

In my quest to present the entire run of Prometheus online in PDF format, I need to find a tool that allows merging of PDF single PDF files into one document. Today I found a link to a solution on Max OS X hints. This involves using Image Capture (which comes with every new Mac), plus loading a freeware app called Combine PDFs. Simple enough. I install the new app, and open Image Capture. Hmm, no scanner drivers on my Mac. I move onto Vuescan, an application I bought a few years ago to scan images. I proceed to scan three pages of an old issue as a test. Scanning these as B/W images involves adjusting the page on the flatbed scanner just so a few times. After a few minutes of clicking through each step and saving the files, I have three .jpg files to merge. Hmm, will those convert into a PDF? I drop the files, each around 500-600k, into Combine PDFs, and click on Merge. The process seems to work, but the resulting file is 4.2 Mb, quite massive considering it is only three pages. I must have done something wrong.

Back to the instructions from Mac OS X hints. They suggest installing SANE, and so off to that web page, locate the files, and download them. Install three elements (in proper order, if you please), and open Image Capture again. Browse for devices, and SANE appears. Cool. Follow the directions in the hint, but wait, the Scan button is grayed out. At this point take a deep breath and walk away. After a while to cool down, I will try Google for other options to reduce the size of the end product. I can't see anyone downloading 12-15 Mb files at this point.

This is a conference I'd almost like to attend. Well, probably more than almost.

Safari 3 and Blogger

Apple debuted Safari 3 beta today. The big news: it runs on Windows Vista and XP. I believe it's the second Apple application to run on Windows (after iTunes), and a bold move in trying to extend market share in the browser wars. Is it just a matter of time before the full-blown Leopard (or the cat after that) runs on any Intel computer, and not just an Apple controlled Intel machine? What then will happen to the more expensive hardware line Apple produces? How far will Apple have extended into the consumer market by that time (iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, er, scratch that last one)? Lots of questions, as the former computer company continues to slowly re-invent itself. In the meantime, I had bemoaned Safari 2's lack of compatibility with Blogger, and while it seems the Ctrl-keystrokes still don't work, at least the new version does display icons for the shortcuts. A small step forward, I suppose.

Update: I neglected to mention QuickTime, which has been around for Windows for probably a decade or so, and still going strong.

Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 not about censorship

Now this is an interesting article in LA Weekly. Ray Bradbury revisionism from Bradbury himself.

Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

Clone Wars trailer

Hmm, the trailer for the next installment in the Star Wars franchise hits the web. More toys buy now, we must.

The animation has a rough feel to it, especially for the humans. The droids and ships look great, but faces have to yet to make the seamless leap into realistic animation. I still prefer this over the previous Clone Wars animated episodes from a couple of years ago. Let's hope the story also improves.

Prometheus Experiment

Releasing a first draft into the wild is never a sane idea, but I'm playing around with publishing some older issues of Prometheus online as PDFs. I'm open to any and all suggestions about the pages, keeping in mind I'm still formatting much of the text.

The PDFs can be found here which also is my first attempt at Apple's (not always simple) iWeb software. I'm used to coding html in BBEdit, which is all source code virtually all the time, so again, not perfect. This is more of a proof of concept design.

The content index is identical to the one over at http://www.lfs.org that I compiled over the years. I sent over the index of contributors in 2005, but it has not yet been posted there. Obviously, I need to update both pages at some point.

The url probably will change at some point, and I'll probably move away from the constraints of iWeb towards something more flexible.

Glasshouse

The real reason I logged on was to mention Charles Stross's novel, Glasshouse, a Prometheus Award finalist. I finished the novel today, and am now 3/5 of the way through the finalists. Until reading this novel I did not see a strong candidate, but now I have one, and it probably will take a lot for the next two novels on the list to change my mind. Next up, John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades. I've heard a lot of good stuff about Scalzi, but this is his first novel I've had the opportunity to read, so I'm looking forward to it. My only complaint about Glasshouse is that Stross seems to have spent a lot of time inside the head of his Merchant Princes series' main character, and she sort of jumped into another novel. The protagonist of Glasshouse is female for most of the novel, and acts and talks exactly like a Miriam Beckstein template. I feel like my head needs a cool plunge into The Jennifer Morgue next to shake off that feeling. I stopped reading The Clan Corporate 22 pages into that novel because I just could not take Miriam's voice any longer. Aside from that small (and probably isolated to my own views) issue, I think Glasshouse comes across as a superb science fiction novel, and contains hugely interesting political speculations and implications, and very much driven by libertarian (or classical liberal) ideas.

Moving to Firefox?

As a Mac user I know what it's like to be kicked around and forced to eat the table scraps in the internet wars. I have tried virtually every browser that runs on the Mac, but always fall back on Safari because a) it has all my bookmarks and b) it's the most elegant and visually pleasing browser to my eye. But Blogger no longer lets me spell-check on Safari, and now Preview stopped working. At the bottom of each posting window I see the shortcuts taunting me, as none of them work in Safari. I open the same Blogger posting page in Firefox, and everything works. I guess I should switch everything over to Firefox, though my new LiveJournal page works fine in Safari, and Firefox has just such a hideous interface. Ideally I should dump blogger altogether and figure out how to move the localhost version of my blog on Movable Type that I created as a lark in October 2005. It still works fine, and is loaded with far more features I like than either LJ or Blogger.

The LP is dead

As a non-voting voluntaryist, I haven't paid much attention to the Libertarian Party. For some reason it manages to limp along, sucking in libertarians and spitting out their burnt-out husks every few years. Still, the LP core usually has remained pro-liberty, though vapidly ineffectual. In 2006, a new group took power in a coup against principles, and gutted long-standing articles of freedom. In 2007, the LP officially died when Ron Paul declared for president as a Republican. His candidacy acted like a neutron star, pulling in libertarians left and right who saw Paul as their great new hope. Over at Reason's Hit and Run, Brian Doherty links to one of the current LP'ers bemoaning the former party of principle. I wonder when libertarians will realize that the LP now has no future, through the combination of this coup and Ron Paul. What I don't wonder about is why a Republican candidate enraptures so many libertarians. Politics seduces people, and Paul's candidacy is the most prominent 'libertarian' political candidate in many years, if not all time. I expect to see many libertarian sites cozying up to the new Republican dream (in fact, I think Lew Rockwell's site already is hard at work waving the pom-poms for Paul. I believe former LP presidential candidate Badnarik is working hard inside the Paul republican machine, which shows the pure expediency of politics.) Paul certainly shares many libertarian ideals, and is the only anti-war candidate on the right (but why do so many libertarians ally themselves with just the right?), but I do not believe liberty will be achieved through this political process, nor will the media connect the dots between liberty and Paul. This is a great delusion, and when Paul falls to Rudy McMittney, those libertarians who supported Paul will moan about the great anti-liberty conspiracy. But these are just my curmudgeonly thoughts on a Monday.

New Babylon 5 movie

Via Roderick Long's blog, news that a new, original B5 movie is mere weeks away from release. I've aleady added this to my wish-list at Amazon, along with a bunch of other things I plan to purchase soon.

Unrelated post

I've been checking Centipede Press's web page often, and today discovered the first mention of the new Michael Shea collection, along with the title. No price yet, but I'm sure I will need to start saving early. (This Shea is not related to the other Michael Shea in an earlier post below.) Shea is my favorite horror/dark fantasy writer for his powerful stories and baroque language.

Melinda Snodgrass blog

Sometimes I feel like I live under the proverbial rock. I just discovered Melinda Snodgrass's wonderful blog today via Victor Milan's own blog. She's a superb writer, known for her sf and fantasy books, her work in the Wild Card series, and also from Hollywood. The only Star Trek video that I own is an episode from The Next Generation, called "Measure of a Man," written by Snodgrass for the show in 1989. One thing missing from her website is a bibliography, but perhaps I just didn't see it out there. I would like to know more about those EDGE books she occasionally refers to...

Robert Shea novel freely available

A few nights ago I stumbled upon a PBS show, an episode in a vast series on the Inquisition. This episode focused on the Cathars, and the total and brutal suppression of this 'heresy' in the early fourteenth century by the Catholic church. Having read about this moment in history many years ago, I remained on the channel, and then one word fired off a strong association. The word "light" was mentioned as part of the Cathar belief system, and I remembered Robert Shea's novel All Things Are Lights. Immediately after the show I looked up Shea on Wikipedia, and sure enough that book did deal with the Cathars and Inquisition. (It's bad when you know it's faster to look up the book on the internet rather than search through your own shelves for your copy.) Lo and behold there's a link to an official Robert Shea web page.

Shea, which died in 1994, wrote my favorite historical novel, Shike. The external page on Shea is managed by his son, Michael, who's written fiction himself. If you haven't read Shea's hard to find historical fiction, the text for All Things Are Lights has been made available online at that web site, as well as an outline to the planned sequel to Shaman.