New libertarian futurist novel

With a headline like "Anti-Corporate Libertarian Futurism in 'The Unincorporated Man'" from io9.com, the LFS definitely needs to check out this novel.

Moving soon

I have busy with a new site, too busy really to blog things that have appeared.

I will be shutting down this site and moving to a different location once I have finished the new site design.

The new site will contain much more stuff, including items related to Prometheus, the newsletter of the LFS.

Wilson wins lifetime achievement award

The Horror Writers of America selected two recipients of this year's Lifetime Achievement Award: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and F. Paul Wilson. Wilson won the first Prometheus Award in 1979 for Wheels Within Wheels. Since then he also has won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2004 (Sims), and the Hall of Fame Award in 1990 and 1991, for his novels Healer and An Enemy of the State.

RIP Patrick McGoohan

Nice article at reason magazine about The Prisoner from a French perspective.

Kopubco discounts

Victor Koman, author and proprietor of Kopubco, is running a 20% of sale. Aside from the fantastic savings, check out the fantastic offerings, from Prometheus Award winning novels, to New Libertarian issues, to Star Wars fandom and beyond.

Blogger now allows exports

Finally, I am able to output the content of the past couple of years in one export file. Alas, the format is XML, so now I have to puzzle through the file tree and see how to bring the export into a database for local storage.

Political poem

A very evocative and timely poem from Bruce Boston, over at Strange Horizons.

Fall 2008 Prometheus issue completed

No other issue exceeded deadlines as much as this one. Two months late, but finally ready, and in the mail next week. Includes coverage of the 2008 Prometheus Awards in Denver, and reviews of books by Cory Doctorow, S. M. Stirling, Lois McMaster Bujold, Joe Martino, George Zebrowski, and Brian Francis Slattery. Looks like the next issue also will be late at this point, but not nearly as late as this one.

John Shirley novel

From Gauntlet Press, this announcement:

Coming in 2009: New John Shirley Novel
We are pleased to announce we’ll be publishing a new John Shirley
novel in the fall of 2009, Welcome to Freedom. Here is the author’s
description:
“After a disaster wrecks a long section of the California northern coast, the town of FREEDOM, which has attempted to live without federal interference as much as possible, finds it has a little too much chance to go it alone. Vicious human predators take advantage of the situation, waves of brutality roll through the area, and a young man new to town has a coming of age confrontation with what it takes to survive at any cost... The town wants to maximize its freedom from outside help, influence and control. See what happens when you have real freedom day after day, and no rules? Is it heaven--or hell?”

The book is scheduled for a January 2009 release.

LFS in reason magazine

In April of this year Katherine Mangu-Ward from reason magazine interviewed me as part of a story on the 2008 Prometheus Award finalists. This article appears in the December issue of reason, and has been posted online. Tor published all five finalists, and reason thought this interesting enough to write a long story on the libertarian elements of sf and Tor. Tor should not be considered libertarian, or any -ian/ist, but they have a fearless and independent editorial policy. Tor publishes great fiction, and does not shy away from political books. SF mega-blog site io9 also picked up the story.

A few items I'd like to note: The title of the article actually comes from a speech F. Paul Wilson gave in 1983. I think I attributed those words to Wilson, but if somehow I omitted to do this, my apologies. Also, L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach was published first by Del Rey, and that is the edition that won the Prometheus Award. Tor reprinted the book twice, for which they should be commended, as the book long had been out of print and is a libertarian classic. Many libertarian sf writers failed to get mentioned, especially Vernor Vinge, who has published many books with Tor, and won both the Hugo and Prometheus Awards.

Anyway, hopefully this article reaches more libertarian sf fans out there and gains some attention for the Prometheus Awards.

A new front runner?

Will Terry Pratchett's new novel give Cory Doctorow's Little Brother some competition for the 2009 Prometheus Award? The synopsis certainly sounds intriguing, and I am reserving judgment on Little Brother until I have read all the other nominees. I enjoyed 95% of Doctorow's novel, but felt rather let down at the end.

Trust us with your data

One more reason I avoid sites like facebook and myspace. In the first place I would not like to be peppered with advertising at my "own" page. There's the lack of time issue. And then, there's the fact that your access can be revoked at any time, for unstated reasons. It's almost like they're the government, citing "security reasons," so that users have no idea why they are banned, and can never discover the reason.

A task too important for the government

Law enforcement: seen by 99.99% of intelligent people as the sole prerogative of the state. Why? Because to let private individuals handle the task would mean only rich people received protection, that people with money could break the law with impunity (these days they just get bailed out by the federal government). Example no. 1,423,675 to show the state option is just as ludicrous as the private option. In the real world neither is perfect. Still, the state option is nearly held up as the only option.

On the drive home today this point was hammered home again. In the middle of rush hour just south of Austin I was passed by a motorcycle cop. A few minutes later I saw him parked along the highway with his radar, scoping for violators of the reduced speed segment of the highway due to construction. Not one mile later we chanced upon a car accident, with an overturned car surrounded by private samaritans. No police in sight. There is no money in saving lives. Maybe unfair, as the accident had just happened. Still, with the nearly daily examples from Radley Balko at Reason.com of police mayhem and brutality against innocents, and other mainstream articles on mis-management and fraud from the so-called thin blue line, where are the calls to eliminate the state police? I do not believe you could flip a switch and overnight have a fully private law enforcement paradigm, as the collective consciousness is too firmly wedded to the idea this is a "wild west" scenario (purely inspired by Hollywood and detatched from reality), and that bloodshed in the streets will rule.

Still, when even free-market libertarians keep faith in the holy trinity of the state (police, law, and defense -- all nation-state concepts that dovetail nicely with fatherland/motherland/homeland mystical rites of the state), there is no hope for those who view anything free market related as horrible in being open to a market for law enforcement.

The fiction of Garet Garrett

I scoffed with some light-hearted disdain the other day at at certain web site, some of whose writers are associated the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Despite my disagreements with certain aspects of what appears on the lrc site, the LVMI continues to publish some outstanding books in terms of intellectual interest, as well as books historical interest. Several of the early libertarians of the 20th century, while most well-known for essays and non-fiction, also wrote and published fiction prior to Ayn Rand. These include Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Garet Garrett. Bruce Ramsey recently wrote a review of Garrett's novels for Liberty Magazine, books which the LVMI reprinted in 2007. This review also appears online, and shows the perils of non-fiction writers trying out fiction. Although it's been nominated a few times for the LFS Hall of Fame, I have rarely read as poor an excuse for fiction as Henry Hazlitt's Time Will Run Back. Hazlitt's non-fiction is remarkable for its clarity and economic sense, but fiction is a different genre altogether.

I think this paragraph by Ramsey about Garrett's reporting relates well to current economic issues in this country.

The nut of wisdom was not to over-borrow. Many farmers had feasted on credit during World War I, when food prices, and therefore the value of farmland, were high. They borrowed to buy more land and equipment. When prices came down, borrowers were in trouble. Garrett had the bad manners to point out that they had done it to themselves.

Amazing

The "libertarian" web site pimping for Ron Paul as a Republican Presidential Candidate, actually runs a political essay that makes sense.

Libertarian science fiction lists

Over at Tor.com, Kathryn Cramer points to a list that Dan Clore maintains, on essential science fiction for libertarians. When I have more time I'll probably comment on the list. There are some interesting choices as well as omissions.

In the mail

I'm looking forward to starting Brian Francis Slattery's new novel this week, Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America. I intend to review this in the Fall issue of Prometheus. I enjoyed Slattery's first novel, which even now remains quite vividly in my memory after reading the book over a year ago. Some books are forgettable the moment you turn the last page, but not so with Spaceman Blues, his debut novel from 2007.

Musical interlude - Lotte Kester

Being the first in a series of posts about music...

I first heard the floating tones of Anna-Lynne Williams through a video podcast of the band Trespassers William on the brilliant radio program Morning Becomes Eclectic. Trespassers William (taking its name from a Winnie the Pooh story), is a Southern California band, a sort of dream-pop, mellow sound that blends acoustic instruments with occasional electronic accompaniment. To date they have released three albums, and a fourth is in the works. Some of the band members have embarked on solo projects. Lotte Kestner is the effort of lead singer Anna-Lynne Williams, and is available to purchase online. Unfortunately if you frequent brick and mortar stores for your CDs, you may not find a copy there. Listen to the songs over at Anna-Lynne Williams' mySpace site, and support beautiful music.

I have wandered many paths through the 30 plus years I have listened to and loved music. I find myself now enjoying a variety of sounds, from the diamond-edged guitar symphonies of Explosions in the Sky, to the nuanced work of Robin Guthrie, to the ambient sounds of the album leaf, to the unpretentious dream pop of bands like Devics and Trespassers William, the now defunct Azure Ray, and similar but different bands.

I don't pay much attention to pop music, either current or yesteryear; at least one person I know will shudder at the following anecdote: at a recent gathering of developers several people competed in a Rock Band play-off. A band formed by co-workers chose the song, "Tom Sawyer." I had no clue as to who originally played this, as I have never heard anything by Rush. In high school, when my musical tastes gelled, I listed to BBC's John Peel. Indie sounds... Most of the music I embrace is encountered through chance; links mentioning influences and "sounds like" that pan out one in a while. Sigur Ros was like that, a chance listen via an iTunes network connection at work. For a while whenever I was deep in the code I would listen to Sigur Ros on repeat.

I don't deliberately embrace the obscure, but I find it neat when I come upon hitherto unknown sounds like the Danish band Under Byen. I gave up pushing my tastes onto other people years ago (I think I drove people crazy in high school when I brought my Cocteau Twins tapes to play on the school bus, back in 1985), but I still feel the urge to write about some of the kinds of music I enjoy. Music is one of those elements that define who we are, and there are times we humans feel the urge to declaim those definitions from the mountaintop, perhaps as a statement to the universe: look, I exist! This is part of who I am!

The Unincorporated Man

While scrolling down the list of forthcoming books noted by Fantasy Book Critic, I read a brief blurb about what might be a very interesting novel. The Unincorporated Man, written by two brothers (Dani and Eytan Kollin), is slated for early 2009 publication by Tor.

Justin Cord is now the last free man in the human race - owned by no one and owning no one.

Database nation

Why am I not surprised to read this story out of the UK, about the proposed tracking of kids to link them back to crimes long after childhood? Sure, it's sold as a method to protect the kids, but it really is all about control. Petty, nanny-state control. Soon to be adopted in the US and civilized countries all around the world, no doubt.

Quite telling is this quote:

Britain has more CCTV cameras than any other country, and its local authorities are increasingly using powers designed to prevent terrorism to spy on people suspected of petty crimes such as littering and failing to pick up dog mess.