Koch Research Fellows Ed Younkins, Jomana Krupinski, and Kaitlyn Pytlak have shared with me the results of a survey they conducted of 250 Business and Economics professors and 250 English and Literature professors. They asked these two groups of professors to rank the best novels and plays about business. The top 25 from each group are listed separately in the table below. What makes the results particularly interesting is that 15 titles appear on both lists, indicating a surprising level of agreement between the two groups of professors. But the two groups did not rank the 15 the same and each selected 10 other books the other group did not,  so there was significant disagreement as well.

Survey Method

Colleges and universities were randomly selected and then professors from the relevant departments were also randomly selected to receive an email survey. They were asked to list and rank from 1 to 10 what they considered to be the best novels and plays about business. The researchers did not attempt to define the word “best,” leaving that decision to each respondent. They obtained 69 usable responses from Business and Economics professors and 51 from English and Literature professors. A list of 50 choices was given to each respondent and an opportunity was presented to vote for works not on the list. When tabulating the results, 10 points were given to a novel or play in a respondent’s first position, 9 points were assigned to a work in the second position, and so on, down to the tenth listed work which was allotted 1 point.

Ed Younkins is a fellow Aristotelian libertarian. He’s done a great deal of excellent work on synthesizing Aristotelianism, Objectivism, and Austrian Economics. His books include Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion (edited), Capitalism and Commerce: Conceptual Foundations of Free Enterprise, and Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society. His next book, Exploring Capitalist Fiction: Business Through Literature and Film, is being published by Lexington Books in late 2013 or early 2014. You can find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ed.younkins.

The Best Novels and Plays About Business

Now, these works are not necessarily libertarian. The professors who took the survey are probably for the most part not libertarian. And there is not much in the way of speculative fiction on these lists.

So what would you include or not include in the category of “best novels and plays about business”? Was anything overlooked? or given more recognition than it deserves? Given the overlap, what do you think accounts for the differences in the two lists?

In episode three of the Prometheus Unbound Podcast, Matthew and I have a fantastic interview with the wonderful Jeffrey Tucker, editor of Laissez Faire Books. It’s a long one, about an hour and fifteen minutes, and we knew you’d be eager to listen to Jeffrey, so we wasted no time with chit-chat and got right down to business. We covered a number of topics ranging from LFB, intellectual property, and Jeffrey’s favorite fiction.

We started off by asking Jeffrey Tucker what it’s been like working for a commercial publisher and bookseller after having worked for a nonprofit educational institution, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, where he was editorial vice president, for so long.

Then we went on to talk about the business model of Laissez Faire Books and the role of the publisher in the digital age as a curator and service provider (curation as a service); the compatibility of open source and business; intellectual property; the nature of competition; how many entrepreneurs and businesses misidentify the source of their profitability and don’t understand why people buy their goods or services; how copyright has held back the publishing industry; and markets as institutions of teaching and learning.

“Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers — show me yours — show me that it is possible — show me your achievement — and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.”
— Ayn Rand

We talked about a new book Jeffrey wrote with Doug French (as yet unpublished) titled Who’s Going to Stop You, which was inspired by the important role played by Ayn Rand and her fiction in the libertarian movement. It’s about what many still need to learn from her — an alternative to the typical libertarian activities of electioneering and bitter diatribes against the state on the one hand and academic-style educational efforts to promote liberty on the other — which is to set a positive example in expanding freedom and personal fulfillment in our own lives and the lives of others. We can’t wait to see it.

For the last 20-30 minutes, we discussed the power of fiction in presenting abstract ideas, how it grounds and concretizes them in human action. Jeffrey Tucker told us about his favorite works of fiction, four novels by Garet Garrett (listed below), and some of his future plans for Laissez Faire Books. To our great pleasure, those plans include publishing more out-of-print and original libertarian fiction like Rose Wilder Lane’s Young Pioneers and John Hunt’s Higher Cause.

Follow Jeffrey Tucker

• LFB
• Google+
• Twitter
• Facebook
• On Prometheus Unbound

Books Mentioned

• Against Intellectual Property by Stephan Kinsella (Amazon / Free PDF)
• Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine (Amazon / Free PDF)
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (Audible / Amazon)
• Young Pioneers by Rose Wilder Lane (LFB Edition / Amazon)
• The Driver by Garet Garrett (LFB Edition on Amazon / LvMI Edition on Amazon)
• The Cinder Buggy by Garet Garrett (LvMI Edition on Amazon)
• Satan’s Bushel by Garet Garrett (LvMI Edition on Amazon)
• Harangue by Garet Garrett (Amazon)
• Higher Cause by John Hunt (Amazon)
• A Beautiful Anarchy by Jeffrey Tucker (LFB Multimedia Ebook / Amazon)

In episode two of the Prometheus Unbound Podcast, Matthew and I (Geoffrey) discuss libertarian speculative fiction and introduce the Book of the Month, Today’s Tomorrows Writing Prompt, and Fiction Forecasts segments of the show.

We break the ice with some brief chit-chat about what we’ve been reading before seguing into our discussion of libertarian spec fic. The Book of the Month is Coyote by Allen Steele. In Today’s Tomorrows Writing Prompt, we turn a speculative eye on the very real possibility of an intellectual-property dystopia. And in Fiction Forecasts, we talk about upcoming (at the time of recording) television shows, movies, and books.

What We’ve Been Reading

• The Man Who Sold the Moon by Robert Heinlein (Amazon)
• The Human Division by John Scalzi (Audible / Amazon)
• Marsbound by Joe Haldeman — See Matthew’s review

Libertarian Speculative Fiction

We covered a lot of ground in our discussion of libertarian spec fic, but we really only scratched the surface of this broad, deep, and no doubt controversial topic. I’m sure we’ll be revisiting many of the stories and issues we covered, and many more besides, in future episodes. So subscribe and stay tuned!

Here’s a brief rundown of some of the things we covered: what qualifies a work of fiction as libertarian; libertarian themes in science fiction and fantasy; why they seem to be more common in science fiction and why libertarians seem to favor this genre; our favorite works of libertarian spec fic; the Prometheus Awards; and probably more that I’m forgetting as I write this.

Authors & Books Mentioned

• Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson (Audible / Amazon)
• Wizard’s First Rule (The Sword of Truth series) by Terry Goodkind (Audible / Amazon)
• Revolutions by Stefan Molyneux (Amazon)
• Harald (Amazon) and Salamander (Amazon) by David Friedman
• Snuff by Terry Pratchett — See Matthew’s review
• Anthem (Audible / Amazon), Atlas Shrugged (Audible / Amazon), and The Fountainhead (Audible / Amazon) by Ayn Rand
• The Blade Itself (The First Law trilogy) by Joe Abercrombie (Audible / Amazon)
• 1984 by George Orwell (Audible / Amazon)
• Little Brother, Makers, and For the Win by Cory Doctorow (links to my reviews)
•  The Star Fraction (The Fall Revolution) by Ken MacLeod (Audible / Amazon)
• Alongside Night by J. Neil Schulman — See Matthew’s review
• The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith (Amazon)
• The Shield That Fell From Heaven by William S. Kerr — See Matthew’s review

Book of the Month

Coyote by Allen Steele

Coyote marks a dramatic turn in the career of Allen Steele, Hugo Award–winning author of Chronospace. Epic in scope, passionate in its conviction, and set against a backdrop of plausible events, it tells the brilliant story of Earth’s first interstellar colonists — and the mysterious planet that becomes their home.

The crime of the century begins without a hitch. On July 5th, 2070, as it’s about to be launched, the starship Alabama is hijacked — by her captain and crew. In defiance of the repressive government of The United Republic of Earth, they replace her handpicked passengers with political dissidents and their families. These become Earth’s first pioneers in the exploration of space.

After almost two-and-a-half centuries in cold sleep, they will awaken above their destination: a habitable world named Coyote. A planet that will test their strength, their beliefs, and their very humanity.

In Coyote, Allen Steele delivers a grand novel of galactic adventure — a tale of life on the newest of frontiers.

Get Coyote, or an audiobook of your choice, for free by signing up for a free 30-day trial membership at Audible.com. You can cancel at any time. Not only will you get a free audiobook, but you’ll be helping to support the podcast as we will earn a generous commission.

To start your free 30-day trial membership, go to http://audibletrial.com/prometheusunbound.

Today’s Tomorrows Writing Prompt

Matthew and I believe that intellectual “property” is a government grant of monopoly privilege — a form of economic protectionism — that can only be enforced by violating the property rights that people have in physical objects. Copyright and patents are the most prominent types of intellectual property (IP). They attempt to impose artificial scarcity in the realm of ideas, which are naturally not scarce.

We see two countervailing trends with regard to IP in society, provoking each other in a kind of arms race. One is top-down, driven by certain protected classes,  the politically connected, politicians, bureaucrats, and corporations who fear competition and change. And it is tending toward ever more invasive, restrictive, draconian, and ridiculous laws and regulations. We expect this trend to continue and even accelerate at least over the near-term. DRM, crippled products, ridiculous patents, patent trolls, and jail time and huge fines for piracy are only the beginning. This trend brings increasing centralization of power and wealth, corporatism and intellectual feudalism, no-knock raids for piracy overtaking no-knock raids for drugs.

The other trend is bottom-up, driven by a spirit of resistance and sharing and a love of openness and experimentation. This is the trend of rampant copying and remixing, of unbounded learning and innovation. It has spawned open source software, Creative Commons licenses, maker culture, torrenting, YouTube remixes, the digital self-publishing revolution, new models in online education like the Kahn Academy.  In reaction to the evils of government, it has led to advances in encryption (for privacy against government snooping), Bitcoin (for an encrypted, decentralized, independent currency), and 3D-printed weapons (which will eventually make gun control completely ineffective unless governments can lock down 3D printers).

We focused on the top-down trend of tyranny, monopolistic control, and stasis in this episode and will focus on the bottom-up trend of resistance, openness, and experimentation in episode four.

Writing Prompt

As happened with the drug war, because there is no victim to denounce the crime, civil liberties must be infringed to control behavior. As a worst-case scenario, you could see resources coming under scrutiny and control to prevent breaking IP law. Paper, for instance, might require an ID to purchase. Even the disposal of paper might be controlled. As people tried to work around these controls, more and more resources might require more and more controls.

Things probably won’t get this bad in real life, but it makes an interesting background for a sci-fi story, whether short story or novel. Citizens might be encouraged to spy on each other. If you see something, say something.

Picture a young boy or girl who has just heard a poem that he or she likes. With so many resources having come under the control of the government, he takes the only way out left to him: he writes the poem in the sand. It’s an act of defiance and a way to have the poem handy when he wants to read it.

What happens to him from there? Does he get in trouble for that? Are controls placed on sand?

That’s your writing prompt. Now go write.

We’d love to see what you come up with, so we hope you will share your stories  with us and the rest of the Prometheus Unbound community. You can post your stories in our dedicated writing group forum (must be registered and logged in to view and post). And we’ll be happy to give you our feedback.

IP-Related Stories Mentioned

• “Melancholy Elephants” by Spider Robinson — See Matthew’s review
• Emphyrio by Jack Vance (Amazon)
• The Golden Age by John C. Wright (Amazon) — imagine IP in the hands of immortals

Recommended Reading on IP

• “The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide” by Stephan Kinsella
• Against Intellectual Property by Stephan Kinsella (Amazon / Free PDF)

Fiction Forecasts

My apologies for the two-month gap between episodes one and two. I don’t really have a good excuse for it, but I will offer a brief explanation. They say every podcaster, at least when they start out, hates the sound of his or her own voice. Well, I don’t think my voice sounds bad but I definitely am not the best public speaker. I’m working on it. That’s actually one of the reasons why I launched this podcast.

Anyway, I’m something of a perfectionist who doesn’t like to do something if he can’t do it right, so when it came to editing this episode I procrastinated. I’ve also been rather busy with family and paying work, but mostly it comes down to procrastination driven by the knowledge that this episode would not be as good as I want it to be. It’s one thing to know on an intellectual level that it is more important to get something out there than that it be perfect, but it’s another thing to internalize that piece of wisdom and get over the hurdle. Many a podcaster has looked back on his early episodes and cringed. I’m sure I’ll be no different. With practice comes improvement.

This segment of the episode is a bit dated, since it is now late March and Matthew and I are mainly discussing the tv shows, movies, and books that are coming up or returning in February. But the content really is timeless. These works of fiction are not going anywhere. I think you’ll find our comments on them both interesting and amusing. And you still may discover some stories you hadn’t heard of before.

Television

Returning shows:

• The Walking Dead
• Person of Interest
• Elementary

Ongoing shows:

• Arrow
• Person of Interest
• Lost Girl
• Beauty and the Beast
• Once Upon A Time
• Elementary
• Castle

Movies

January:

• All Superheroes Must Die
• Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
• John Dies at the End
• Gangster Squad

February:

• Warm Bodies — Looks entertaining, but… is it the vanguard of a new sparkly zombies trend?
• The Sorcerer and the White Snake
• Side Effects — See Matthew’s review
• Beautiful Creatures
• Escape From Planet Earth
• Dark Skies
• A Good Day to Die Hard

Books (January/February)

• The Departure (The Owner #1) by Neal Asher (Audible / Amazon)
• Farside by Ben Bova (Audible / Amazon)
• The Daylight War (The Demon Cycle #3) by Peter V. Brett (Audible / Amazon)
• American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett (Amazon)
• A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan (Amazon)
• Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier by Myke Cole (Audible / Amazon; Book 2 of a military fantasy series)
• Trinity Rising (Wild Hunt #2) by Elspeth Cooper (Amazon)
• Necessity’s Child (Liaden Universe #16) by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (Audible / Amazon; An sf adventure series about a clan of interstellar traders)
• The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord (Audible / Amazon)
• Blood’s Pride (The Shattered Kingdoms #1) by Evie Manieri (Audible / Amazon; Medieval-Mediterranean epic fantasy with mercenaries and revolution)
• Elsewhens (Glass Thorns #2) by Melanie Rawn (Amazon)

At long last, here is the first episode of our new, original podcast.

First, Matthew and I break the ice by briefly talking about what we’ve been reading recently. I had just finished Kameron Hurley’s debut novel God’s War. Overall, I think it’s a good effort with an interesting story and world-building but is not without its flaws. Matthew had recently finished Live Free or Die by John Ringo. It was a 2011 Prometheus Award finalist, not a winner as I mistakenly thought while recording the podcast and, according to Matthew, didn’t deserve to be.

Our interview with Stephan takes up most of the episode. It’s around 53 minutes long and starts 9:40 minutes in. For those who don’t already know him, Stephan Kinsella is a patent attorney and prominent libertarian legal scholar. He is best known for his opposition to intellectual property.

We invited Stephan on the show to discuss the problems of intellectual property and piracy in the Digital Age. But first we had to ask him about his love of science fiction and fantasy. We got him to mention some of his favorite authors and books (see below for a list), and we even talked about the Hobbit movie for a bit.

Then, at about 23:15 in, we dove into the meat of the interview. Stephan explained the historical origin of copyright (censorship) and patents (government grants of monopoly privilege, which is what copyright is now too really), how intellectual property has shaped and distorted the film and publishing industries, including Hollywood’s move to California to avoid patent disputes, and why reform is not enough. We also discussed how the Digital Age — the age of the internet, smartphone, ereader, and globalization — is making the evils of copyright and patents more obvious and acute while at the same time undermining traditional business models built around intellectual property. And finally, we explore ways artistic creators might earn a living in a world without intellectual property laws.

More about Stephan Kinsella and Intellectual Property

• StephanKinsella.com
• C4SIF.org (Stephan’s Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom)
• “The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide,” Mises Daily
• Against Intellectual Property (Free in epub and pdf formats.)
• Google+: Stephan, C4SIF
• Twitter: NSKinsella, C4SIF
• Facebook: NSKinsella, C4SIF

Authors and Books Recommended by Stephan Kinsella

• Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
• Stephen R. Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (the first novel in the series is Lord Foul’s Bane)
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit; The Lord of the Rings
• Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep; A Deepness in the Sky; The Children of the Sky
• Dan Simmons, Hyperion
• Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
• Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress; To Sail Beyond the Sunset; Starship Troopers; Time Enough for Love
• J. Neil Schulman, Alongside Night
• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; The Fountainhead; Anthem
• L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach (also a graphic novel); The Gallatin Divergence
• Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
• Robert James Bidinotto, Hunter

The Prometheus Unbound Podcast

We’ve been republishing some science-fiction-related episodes from the Mises Institute and Jeff Riggenbach’s Libertarian Tradition podcast, but within the next couple of days we’ll be launching our own original podcast. You’ve probably already listened to our promo for the podcast. We hope you like it and will help us promote the podcast by sharing it around to anyone you think might be interested in liberty and speculative fiction.

For our first episode, we have for you an interview with libertarian legal theorist and patent attorney Stephan Kinsella. If you’re not familiar with Stephan and his work, you may be wondering why we interviewed a patent attorney. Well, Stephan is a leading figure in the movement against intellectual property. After talking about his favorite science fiction and fantasy novels, and the new Hobbit movie, we go on to discuss with him the history and origin of intellectual property; how copyright has shaped and distorted the publishing and film industries; how the internet, piracy, and advancing technology are undermining the intellectual property regime and the antiquated business models built on it; the rise of self-publishing; and more.

In our second episode, we’ll be discussing libertarian speculative fiction. What qualifies a work of fiction as libertarian? What are the best, or our favorite, works of libertarian speculative fiction? Do libertarian authors tend to be too heavy-handed and preachy?  Does the Prometheus Award to a good job of finding and promoting libertarian science fiction? Why are so many winners of the award written by authors who are not themselves libertarian? We’ll seek to address these questions and more.

And in episode three, in February, we’ll be interviewing Jeffrey Tucker, the editor of Laissez Faire Books.

Subscribe to our podcast-only rss feed to get episodes directly on your phone, tablet, or mp3 player: http://feeds.feedburner.com/prometheusunbound/podcast.

We hope you enjoy the show and will help us spread the word.

Site Redesign

I’m redesigning the site from the ground up on the new version 2.0 of the Thesis Theme Framework for WordPress. I think it will be much more slick, professional-looking, and powerful than the current design.

Along with the podcast logo, I had a professional create a banner for the website. We’ll finally have a proper custom image to go in the header instead of the generic, out-of-place text of the title and subtitle that we’ve had for the past couple of years.

Expect to see Prometheus Unbound 2.0 make its debut sometime in January.

If you want a sneak peak, hit me up for a link to the development site in our Google+ community.

Google+ Community

While we do have our own forums integrated into the site, Google recently launched communities (or groups) on Google+ and they seem to be really taking off. We’ve had a Google+ community since Day One. If you haven’t checked it out and joined yet, please so do. We’d love to hang out with you there.

In my opinion, Google+ communities have better layout and functionality, conducive toward having conversations, than Facebook groups. I’ve set up a number of categories to facilitate sharing and discussion. Google search within communities also makes finding old posts and conversations very easy.

I’ve been sharing a lot of stuff to it that I used to share to the general public on Google+. While both I and Prometheus Unbound have a presence on Facebook, I’m really not a fan of that social network and I’m only sporadically active on it.  I expect the Google+ community will become our home away from home, so to speak.

I plan to make use of our Google+ community and Google+ Hangouts in a new way in connection with our Lightmonthly Read book club, so read on.

The Lightmonthly Read

We haven’t had as much participation in the book club as I had expected and hoped, not only in the discussions but also in the book selection process. Reading an extra book every month as well as having to craft several extra posts and emails for the club has also proven time consuming. Over time I allowed my own active participation to slip and both Matthew and I have been busier than usual lately. As a result, the book club has effectively been on hiatus for the past couple of months.

I don’t want to completely shut down the book club, however, with the possibility of reviving it sometime down the road when we have a larger and more actively involved community that wants it. I had hoped that the book club would help build such a community. It still might. But I need to decrease the workload and streamline the book selection process.

So here is how the Lightmonthly Read is going to work going forward in 2013. Instead of a community nomination and voting process, I will simply announce a book that I’m going to read and review anyway. I’ll post my initial reactions in the Lightmonthly Read forum as I read it. And those who are interested can read along and discuss it with me. Sometimes Matthew might take my place. We might even both announce a different book and lead a discussion around it at the same time on occasion.

I tend to read several books at once. I’m still reading Robert Heinlein’s short fiction collection The Man Who Sold the Moon from the last Lightmonthly Read. I’m reading the stories in order according to internal chronology, not their arrangement in the book, so check out my post in the forum if you want to follow along. I’ve already posted my reactions to the first story, “Life-Line,” as well.

Over the next few months I will be reading John Scalzi’s new serialized novel, The Human Division, in his Old Man’s War setting (a novel I very much enjoyed). The first installment was released this week and a new one will be out every Tuesday for the next 12 weeks. They’re $0.99 each on Amazon and Google Play. If you like Heinleinian military science fiction, I think you’ll like these books.

I hope you’ll join me in reading and discussing The Man Who Sold the Moon and/or The Human Division.

Also, although I won’t be discussing it as part of the book club, I’m currently reading a short nonfiction book by Seth Godin titled Tribes. Although this was not the author’s intent, I’m finding the book to be full of inspiration and positive implications for libertarian anarchism. If you’re curious to know more, you can wait for my review (on my own website) or chat with me on Sunday.

I will begin hosting a weekly Google+ Hangout every Sunday at 4pm EST. It’ll be kind of like office hours in that I’ll open the Hangout and keep it open for about an hour, whether or not anyone shows up. Pop in if you want to chat or just to say hello. Stay the whole time or only for a few minutes. We can talk about the current Lightmonthly Read, libertarianism and speculative fiction, writing and publishing, or just about anything. It’s up to you. These weekly Hangouts will be informal and unrecorded. I hope to see you there.

Main RSS Feed

A while back, when we moved the site from prometheusreview.com to prometheus-unbound.org, we also switched to a new Feedburner rss feed url. I mentioned then that we would be shutting the old feed url down in January 2013. Well, that time is upon us. So if you haven’t already switched to the new feed url, please do so now. I’ve deleted the old feed and set up a permanent redirect to the new one.

Old: http://feeds.feedburner.com/prometheusreview

New/Current: http://feeds.feedburner.com/prometheusunbound/posts

Call for Submissions

Matthew and I can’t do this alone. We need your help. We’re looking to build a thriving community around Prometheus Unbound and we’re hoping that some of you will become not only readers and listeners but also contributors to both the webzine and the podcast.

For the webzine, we’re looking for news; reviews; interviews; and articles on fiction, science, technology, history, writing, publishing, and more. Even if you can only do one post per month, or even just one post period, your contribution(s) will be greatly appreciated.

For the podcast, we’re looking for listener feedback, audio reviews, and the occasional guest for our themed discussion episodes. Future discussion topics will include dystopian fiction, military science fiction, and banking in fiction. We’re open to suggestions for later episodes, so please send yours our way and let us know if you’re interested in being a guest on the show.

Here’s to a great 2013. I look forward to talking about libertarianism and speculative fiction with you.

Matthew and I recorded a brief promotional spot for the Prometheus Unbound Podcast. It includes part of the intro and outro that you will soon become familiar with as well as information about what listeners can expect from the podcast.

Join us as we

• interview your favorite authors, editors, and libertarian scholars;
• and discuss science fiction and fantasy in books, movies, and television.

You’ll enjoy segments like

• Book of the Month, in which we recommend a great book that ties in with that episode’s theme;
• Today’s Tomorrows Writing Prompt, where we take a current trend in society, explain its causes, and extrapolate how it will play out 10, 50, 100 years into the future;
• and Fiction Forecasts, in which we talk about upcoming books, movies, and tv shows, and predict our reactions.

As well as

• audio reviews;
• tips on writing, marketing. publishing, tools of the trade;
• and listener feedback that we read or play and respond to on the show.

We put a “video” version of the promo on YouTube for those who prefer to listen and share that way:

Editor’s Note: A transcript is unavailable. This early episode was never turned into a Mises Daily article most of the others.

Here is a brief summary, however:

In light of then recently released books on Ayn Rand — Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made — Riggenbach discusses Rand’s role in the early libertarian movement. Along the way he highlights Heller’s defense of the quality of Rand’s writing against mainstream literary critics. He goes on to argue that Heller’s book is the better of the two and explains what mars Burns’s book. He plays a couple of clips of Rand herself explaining why she and her philosophy of Objectivism are not conservative, and challenges the coherence of Burns’s conception of the American Right.

If you’re unfamiliar with Ayn Rand and her importance in the libertarian tradition, this episode offers a good primer on the subject as well as on what differentiates libertarianism and conservatism.

Editor’s Note: A transcript is unavailable. This early episode was never turned into a Mises Daily article most of the others.

Here is a brief summary, however:

In light of then recently released books on Ayn Rand — Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made — Riggenbach goes on to chronicle Rand’s early life in Soviet Russia, how she got out and immigrated to the United States, her work in Hollywood and her Broadway play, Night of January 16th, and her marriage to Frank O’Connor.

Riggenbach then covers the publication of her four major works of fiction: We the Living, Anthem (a novella), The Fountainhead (adapted to film with a screenplay by Rand), and her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. He also discusses Rand’s relationship with Nathaniel Branden, the formation of her inner circle, the publication of Rand’s nonfiction works, and the growth of the Objectivist community.

All that in 20 minutes! Phew!

If you’re unfamiliar with Ayn Rand and her work and life, this episode offers a good overview.

You can also read the transcript below:

When we think of the libertarian tradition, we tend naturally to think of political philosophers and economists of the past. But surely one part of the libertarian tradition belongs to novelists and other fiction writers.

In earlier podcasts in this series, I’ve already discussed two such figures: Ayn Rand, whose 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, is, arguably, one of the half-dozen most important libertarian works of the 20th century, and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the professor of philology at Oxford whose giant fantasy novel, The Lord of the Rings, published just a few years before Atlas Shrugged, is arguably the most culturally influential single novel published in English in the 20th century.

This week, I’d like to talk about a writer whose level of influence has been much more modest, but whose indirect influence has nevertheless been considerable. Regular listeners to this series know what I mean by indirect influence. I gave an example of it just last week, when I discussed the life and career of Isabel Paterson. Paterson’s libertarian classic, The God of the Machine, has never reached a wide readership, but, thanks to the effort of her protégé, Ayn Rand, Paterson herself has influenced millions of readers who have never even seen a copy of The God of the Machine.

The writer I’m talking about today wrote a novel in which a citizen of a totalitarian state of the future meets a woman and becomes obsessed with her. He begins a forbidden sexual affair with this woman, meeting with her illicitly in a very old part of the city where the intrusive gaze of the all-encompassing government doesn’t seem to penetrate. Through his relationship with her, he becomes involved in the organized underground opposition to the all-encompassing government — an opposition he had never previously realized existed at all. Ultimately, he and the woman are caught, imprisoned, and tortured. In the end, he is sincerely repentant of his crimes and is completely devoted to the all-encompassing government that has done him all this harm.

A familiar story, no? Can you tell me what novel I’ve just described? Ah, I see a hand in the back of the room. Yes? “George Orwell’s 1984,” you cry out confidently. And your answer is correct, but only as far as it goes, which is, perhaps, not quite as far as you thought it would.

That is a description of the plot of 1984, which was published, as we all know, in 1949. But Orwell adapted the plot of 1984 from another novel, one originally published 25 years earlier in 1924. That earlier novel was entitled, simply, We. It was the work of a not-very-well-known Russian writer, Yevgeny Zamyatin. Zamyatin was not very well known outside Russia when We was first published, and he was still not very well known in the West 25 years later, when Orwell published 1984. He remains not very well known in the West to this day.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, by contrast, is extremely well known in the West today, particularly in England and the United States, where words and phrases like “Newspeak,” “doublethink,” “thoughtcrime,” and “Big Brother Is Watching You” are familiar to millions who have never read the novel from which they come.

And there is no getting around the similarities between 1984 and Zamyatin’s We. The leader of the totalitarian state is called “The Benefactor” instead of “Big Brother,” but the basic events of the story are fundamentally the same. And we know that George Orwell did read We several years before he wrote 1984. As Natasha Randall, the translator of the current Modern Library edition of Zamyatin’s novel, told an interviewer for New York City public radio station WNYC in 2006, Orwell made no secret of his admiration for We. Randall explains,

Orwell certainly read it. Actually, he read it I think in the early ’40s, so about 8 years before he wrote his 1984. He had said that it was a great inspiration to him in writing 1984. Orwell also said that he thinks that Huxley was lying when he said he hadn’t read it, because Huxley did maintain that he’d never read We, though of the two — Brave New World and 1984— Brave New World is very similar in lots of ways.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, first published in 1932, is extremely similar to We in a number of ways. Here’s one: the World State in Brave New World is a technocratic one, dedicated to industrial efficiency and mass production. In the words of one critic,

The World State is built upon the principles of Henry Ford’s assembly line — mass production, homogeneity, predictability, and consumption of disposable consumer goods. At the same time as the World State lacks any supernatural-based religions, Ford himself is revered as a deity, and characters celebrate Ford Day and swear oaths by his name (e.g., “By Ford!”). The World State calendar numbers years in the “AF” era — “After Ford” — with year 1 AF being equivalent to 1908 AD, the year in which Ford’s first Model T rolled off of his assembly line.

In Zamyatin’s We, industrial efficiency and mass production are the bywords of life in the technocratic One State. The narrator and main character of Zamyatin’s story, the engineer D-503, tells us that “unquestionably the greatest genius of the ancients” was Frederick Winslow Taylor, the original factory and office “efficiency expert,” who invented time-and-motion studies and took pride in increasing the output of any workplace through what he called “scientific management.” Taylor’s only fault, according to D-503, was that “his thought did not reach far enough to extend his method to all of life, to every step, to the twenty-four hours of every day.”

Another example: in Huxley’s World State, sex is freely available and is, in fact, encouraged. But it is far from the monogamous sex we still regard as the norm in our own society. A popular slogan in the World State is: “everyone belongs to everyone else.” This is repeated incessantly, the formation of families is discouraged, marriage is regarded as antisocial, and, as one perceptive critic of Brave New World describes it, both “sexual competition and emotional, romantic relationships are obsolete.”

In the One State of Zamyatin’s We, first described in print eight years before Brave New World, things are remarkably similar. “Everyone belongs to everyone else.” If you want to have sex with someone, all you have to do is register for that person with the One State, and that person will show up at your room at a prearranged time with a pink ticket for you to tear in half before you get down to business. You’ll have 30 minutes to take care of business, and you’ll find that any kind of privacy is in pretty short supply.

Here is how translator Natasha Randall described the physical appearance of the One State in that 2006 WNYC interview:

The world he creates in We is very clean and very blue. And it’s an urban state, where essentially all of mankind has been driven inside of one great big green wall. And all of nature is banished to the outside of those walls, so you won’t find a flower or an animal within this green wall. And all the buildings in the One State — which is this urban state — are transparent, so one of the nicest lines in the book describes looking up at these transparent buildings where you’ll see people walking on the 20th floor and it looks as though they’re swimming, because there’s no floor beneath them.

As D-503 puts it, “we live in full view, perpetually awash with light, in among our transparent walls, woven from the sparkling air. We have nothing to hide from one another.” Even the citizens of the One State, however, do feel the need for a little privacy on occasion. As Natasha Randall notes, in Zamyatin’s novel,

There are actually times when individuals are allowed to lower blinds in their rooms. And that’s when someone arrives with a pink ticket.

So we know Orwell read and admired We before he wrote 1984, and we don’t know for sure whether Huxley read it before writing Brave New World, but it seems likely.

We also don’t know for sure whether Ayn Rand read Zamyatin’s novel before writing her own story of totalitarianism in the far future, Anthem, which was first published in 1938, fourteen years after the first publication of We. (Rand revised Anthem slightly a few years later for the second edition, which appeared in 1946.) Did she read We before 1938?

In an excellent article, “Zamyatin and Rand,” published in 2003 in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies and now available online, Peter Saint-Andre argues that Zamyatin’s We was “quite likely” a formative influence on Ayn Rand. He points out that We was completed in 1921, the same year Rand entered the University of Petrograd as a student of history, philosophy, and literature. Rand’s college years, 1921–1924, were, as Saint-Andre notes, “the years of Zamyatin’s greatest fame and influence” in Petrograd. “He was at that time,” Saint-Andre writes,

a hero to writers young and old, admired for his fierce independence and literary individualism, for he was virtually the only literary figure in Russia to voice his resistance to collectivism and conformity. Zamyatin was in those years a highly public literary and philosophical presence in Petersburg, and it is quite possible that Rand read some of his stories and essays … [or] attended one of his many public lectures.

“It also seems probable,” Saint-Andre continues, “that Rand read Zamyatin’s We in the English translation by Gregory Zilboorg published in 1924, for in a 1934 letter to her agent regarding the manuscript for We The Living … she said ‘I have watched very carefully all the literature on [the] new Russia, that has appeared in English.’”

If she did read We during the 1920s or ’30s, Rand probably read it in English. It was not published in Russian during that time, you see. It was not published in Russian, in fact, until 1952. It was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988. After finishing the novel in 1921, Zamyatin found that no publisher was willing to risk publishing it. He circulated it in manuscript around Petrograd, but according to translator Natasha Randall, a teenage university student majoring in history was unlikely to have seen it in that format.

It probably was read by the circle of writers in Saint Petersburg at the time, but it won’t have gotten very much further.

By 1924, the situation had not only not improved — it had actually become worse. The Bolshevik government had banned We. Now it wasn’t just a matter of publishers being too cowardly to bring the book out; now it was a certainty that Zamyatin’s book would not be printed and sold in the Soviet Union. Natasha Randall says there is irony in this, because Zamyatin had run afoul of the Czar’s censors early in his career and had become a Bolshevik himself out of a desire to bring down the Czar’s government.

He was a very ardent revolutionary. In fact, what Zamyatin was was a person who believed in permanent revolution. Once people decide that change no longer needs to occur, that’s where the problem begins. So when the revolution started to stagnate was when Zamyatin became very disenchanted with it, and he wrote these brilliant essays, actually, that are really readable and super entertaining about how one should be a permanent heretic.

Silenced in his native land by the Bolsheviks, desperate for readers, Zamyatin consented to an offer to publish his novel in English translation. It was this English-language edition, brought out in London in 1924, that was the first appearance of We in print. Ayn Rand spent a few days in London en route to America from Petrograd in 1926. She might have picked up a copy of We while she was there. Or she might have read that very same British edition of Zamyatin’s novel in the United States later in the ’20s or in the early ’30s.

“If you want to have sex with someone, all you have to do is register for that person with the One State, and that person will show up at your room at a prearranged time with a pink ticket for you to tear in half before you get down to business.”

For even if Rand hadn’t been in a position to read We in manuscript while a student at Petrograd University, she certainly knew Zamyatin by reputation. As Saint-Andre points out, Zamyatin “was … a highly public literary and philosophical presence” in Petrograd in the early ’20s, when Ayn Rand was a college student already dreaming of escaping from the Soviet Union and moving to America.

But whatever we decide about whether Rand read We in the ’20s or ’30s, there’s simply no getting around the obvious similarities between Zamyatin’s novel and Rand’s Anthem. Both are set in the far future in a completely collectivized totalitarian society. Both are told in the first person by their main characters, in We by the mathematician and engineer D-503, in Anthem by the engineer Equality 7-2521. Anthem is the only work of fiction written by Rand to be written in the first person. In We, D-503 meets a woman, I-330, and is led inexorably down a path to rebellion against the government of the society in which he lives. In Anthem, Equality 7-2521 meets a woman, Liberty 5-3000, and is led inexorably down a path to rebellion against the government of the society in which he lives.

In the society in which Equality 7-2521 lives, the first-person singular pronoun — I — has ceased to exist. In D-503′s society, in We, the pronoun is still in use. But the mindset of the two far future societies is very much cut from the same cloth. “Each morning,” Zamyatin’s D-503 writes,

with six-wheeled precision, at the exact same hour, at the exact same minute, we, the millions, rise as one. At the exact same hour, we uni-millionly start work and uni-millionly stop work. And, merged into a single, million-handed body, at the exact same Table-appointed second, we bring spoons to our lips, we go out for our walk and go to the auditorium, to the Taylor Exercise Hall, go off to sleep…. The small, bright, crystal bell in the bed’s headboard rings: 07:00. It’s time to get up. On the right, on the left, through the glass walls, it’s as if I am seeing myself, my room, my nightshirt, my motions, repeating themselves a thousand times. This cheers me up: one sees oneself as part of an enormous, powerful unit.… We walk — one million-headed body — with a humble joy in each of us, similar, I imagine, to what molecules, atoms, and phagocytes experience. The Christians of the ancient world (our only predecessors, as imperfect as they were) also understood this: humility is a virtue and pride is a vice; ‘WE’ is divine, and ‘I’ is satanic.

Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in rural Russia on February 20, 1884. He died just a little more than 53 years later, in exile, in Paris, on March 10, 1937. His only novel was not widely read during his brief life, nor is it widely read today. It’s become one of those classics people would rather acknowledge as classics than actually sit down to read. But it has exercised an immense influence, especially in the English-speaking world, thanks to writers like George Orwell, who did read it, and writers like Aldous Huxley and Ayn Rand, who probably read it. By influencing their more famous dystopian novels — 1984, Brave New World, and Anthem — We has made itself an honored place in the libertarian tradition.

[This article was first published online as a Mises Daily article and is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "Yevgeny Zamyatin: Libertarian Novelist."]

Editor’s Note: A transcript is unavailable. This early episode was never turned into a Mises Daily article like most of the others.

Here is a brief summary, however:

Riggenbach argues that The Lord of the Rings is “both an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power and an allegory of power exerted for domination.” The story is a dramatization of Lord Acton’s famous dictum that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

After a delving deeper into Lord Acton and his dictum, Riggenbach reads a couple of passages from one of Tolkien’s letters to his son, Christopher, that were also quoted by Alberto Mingardi and Carlo Stagnaro in their Mises Daily article, “Tolkien v. Power” (February 21, 2002). I quote the passages below for your convenience, but the whole article is well worth reading:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word state (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 1995, p. 63; see NYT Review.)

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit to it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 1995, p. 64)

Another relevant quote from Tolkien’s letters that Riggenbach doesn’t recite is this:

If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and the process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang,’ it would do a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 1995, p. 63)

Riggenbach also relates Tolkien’s description of the Shire as having hardly any government. Finally, he points to Aragorn’s reluctance to be king and Tolkien’s belief that such a man, a man who does not want power, would make a good king. This last, I think, must be understood in light of Tolkien’s second-best preference for unconstitutional monarchy and his belief that not one man in a million is fit to rule other men. One can’t very well design a political system around such a rare occurrence.

Alongside Night by J. Neil Schulman, so far as I am aware, is still the agorist novel par excellence. More than three decades have passed since its publication — not that you would know it without looking at the copyright date — yet in that time no other novel has so successfully mixed the principles of agorism with such a keen perspective on the future. There are not many novels that can top it for entertainment value either.

The story takes place in what was then the future, but which now seems a very prescient present. Not only is the story filled with theretofore unrealized gadgets and technology that differ from what we actually possess sometimes by no more than an appellation, or occasionally a small feature or manner of use, but the economic conditions described in the tale read like a seer’s forecast.

Schulman’s knowledge of economics allowed him to make a forecast every bit as accurate as the one for which Ayn Rand, in her novel Atlas Shrugged, has been lauded of late. In fact, this very knowledge of economics is probably what helped the author predict all those gadgets, for it is well established that science-fiction authors, a group not known for their economic acumen, tend to think on a grand scale when most of the advances, in a consumer-driven society, are modest devices of everyday convenience and entertainment.

It is a dystopian world we are plunged into in Alongside Night, where central control of the economy and erosion of civil liberties proceed, as they must, hand in hand. When the government abducts the protagonist’s father, a noted free-market libertarian economist somewhere between Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises in his radicalness, the high school student Elliot Vreeland embarks on a quest to free him. This quest takes him into the world of the agorists, free-market rebels and masters of counter-economics.

The story idea is a perfectly good one, and there is a strong flavor of Heinlein in the way that it is told: smoothly and economically. Even better, Schulman spends more time with some brief yet poetic descriptions that I find attractive. Particularly good for me was the description, near the beginning of the novel, of Elliott walking down a cold New York sidewalk at night. There is not an abundance of such passages, though, merely some choice bits here and there. The author wastes no time in getting the story started, and does not pause in unrolling it before us.

Most satisfying of all was the experience of a truly libertarian book, with no apologies and no compromises. More adept with characters than Rand, Schulman peoples his world with many shades of gray, but never is there any doubt that the story is a vehicle to show people cooperating without monopolies, without coercion being initiated. The novel exceeds The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in its libertarianism; indeed, I cannot recall a well-known work that can rival Schulman’s opera prima in that category.

The much shorter Alongside Night cannot compete, in certain respects, with the massive, intricate, epic wonder that Atlas Shrugged is, but there are many areas in which it surpasses Rand’s magnum opus. The handling of characters and the tone of narration come to mind (Atlas Shrugged could tend toward the overdramatic at times). The dialogue is also a bit more realistic.

I could have wished for an ending with a little more pop perhaps. Something to match the way the beginning got the heart pumping. I might have liked another hundred pages or so as well. Despite this, there is little enough to complain about. I very much enjoyed the novel and recommend it for all libertarians, be they radical or mild. I recommend it even more for statists.

We’ve got another book giveaway for you.

I’m pleased to announce that we’re working with publisher LiberNoctis to give away ebook copies of C.M. Kornbluth’s classic science fiction novel The Syndic.

From my review of the novel,

“What ifs” are the bread and butter of science fiction. What if organized crime overthrew the United States government and took over? What would life be like under the mafia? Would the people of North America be better off? These are the questions C.M. Kornbluth sought to answer in his science-fiction novel The Syndic (1953).

The new edition by LiberNoctis

brings you this classic of science fiction, with foreword and extensive afterword by noted libertarian writer Jeff Riggenbach on the history of the author, the novel, and the politics of mid-20th-century science fiction among Kornbluth’s contemporaries — men such as Isaac Asimov on the Left, Robert Heinlein on the Right, and libertarian science-fiction advocates who sought to redefine the political spectrum through the power of science fiction itself.

We republished Jeff Riggenbach’s Libertarian Tradition Podcast episode on Kornbluth and The Syndic a while back. Be sure to check it out if you missed it, or again if you didn’t. It’s well worth the (re)listen.

We’ll be giving away the ebook in both epub and mobi formats from now until December 15, 2012 at 12:00am EST.

For more information, click on the link below:

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Please help us promote this book giveaway. The Syndic deserves to be more widely read, particularly among libertarians. Share the book giveaway page (linked above) far and wide.

This month we are reading and discussing The Man Who Sold the Moon by Robert Heinlein:

This is not a novel but a collection of shorter fiction by Robert Heinlein that fall within his loose-knit Future History series. The title story, also the longest, is a novella about businessman D.D. Harriman’s dream of being the first to travel to and possess the moon, his schemes to raise capital in legitimate and semi-legitimate ways, and his efforts to avoid government ownership of the moon. The remaining short stories are “Life Line,” “Let There be Light,” “The Roads Must Roll,” “Blowups Happen,” and “Requiem.”

Moon only available on Amazon in mass market paperback, so order your copy soon. If you buy the book through our affiliate links you’ll be supporting our work here at Prometheus Unbound without costing yourself anything extra.

Join us as we read and discuss The Man Who Sold the Moon.

We’re reading the stories by internal chronological order rather than the order in which they appear in the book. I’ve written a post in the forum listing the stories in proper order and explaining why.

You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

October Recap

We’ve been reading J. Neil Schulman’s classic dystopian science fiction novel Alongside Night, winner of the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award and currently being adapted into a movie starring Kevin Sorbo (Hercules, Andromeda).

Official discussion is still open if you want to chime in before the live author chat with Schulman on November 10th. For more information on this event, see the Google+ event page. The discussion will be retired to the TLR — Previous Reads forum after the event, where discussion can continue without distracting from discussion of this month’s read.

Nominations Open for December

If you want a say in what we will read next month, head on over to November 2012 Nominations thread in the book selection forum and put in a nomination.

Deadline for nominations is Saturday, November 10th. Then voting will be open on the nominees until Tuesday, November 20th, when the winner will be determined.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Do you want to receive the results of the nomination and voting processes in your inbox every month so that you don’t have to remember to check the forum on a certain date? Are you so busy that you sometimes forget when the voting process starts for our next read? If so, then you’ll want to sign up for our email newsletter.

We used to post these updates and reminders directly on our site, but now we send them via email instead — typically on the 11th and 21st of every month. We’ll continue to post more frequent reminders on the major social networks, but there’s no guarantee you won’t miss those.

For up-to-date information about our book club, you can always visit the Lightmonthly Read page.

As Prometheus Unbound nears two years in publication — I officially launched it on October 29, 2010 — now seems as good a time as any for a little reflection and reevaluation.

We’ve got some big things on the horizon: a site redesign built on Thesis 2.0; the launch of an original podcast in January 2013; professionally designed banner, logo, and favicon. The site is going to look slicker and, hopefully, load faster in the near future. We’re about to look more professional, expand into a new medium, and, hopefully, attract a new audience.

But at the same time, I don’t want to neglect our existing services. I need to personally rededicate myself to participating in the book club. I’ve let my involvement slip over the past couple of months while other things (teaching, kids, research, admin and design work for the site) demanded my attention. I also need to write news and review posts more regularly. We could use your help in this department, however. We’re always looking for more regular and irregular contributors to bring our readers more content, not just reviews but also news, interviews, articles, and more. Stop by the community forums as well. Say hello. Tell us what you’ve been reading or watching and what you think about it. We’d love to know and want to chat with you.

The main reason for this post, however, is that something made me wonder recently whether we’re sending out email updates too frequently. We’ve greatly increased our mailing list over the past couple of months and I want to make sure we continue to bring all of you great content and not make ourselves unwelcome in your inboxes.

Our email newsletter currently consists mostly of updates from our rss feed — the post(s) we publish in a given day — and two Lightmonthly Read updates every month. The email updates for posts are not quite daily, since we do not publish posts every day, but if we did then a digest email would be sent out once per day.

We’re always looking for ways to improve the services we provide here at Prometheus Unbound, so I thought I’d ask our readers what you want.

Would you prefer to continue getting email updates on a quasi-daily basis (usually just 1-3 times per week, whenever a new post is published) or on a weekly digest basis?

Let us know in the comments, or any other way you prefer to contact us.

While you’re at it, if you have any other comments, suggestions, or even criticisms, please do not hesitate to voice them.

The date has been set for our live author chat with J. Neil Schulman, whose Prometheus Hall of Fame Award–winning novel Alongside Night is being adapted into a film starring Kevin Sorbo (Hercules, Andromeda).

The event will take place via Google+ Hangout on Air on Saturday, November 10th at 9PM EST (that’s 6PM PST / 8PM CST). It will be streamed live for those who cannot fit into the Hangout and a recording will be uploaded to our YouTube channel afterward. For more details, and to RSVP, visit the official event page on Google+.

Here are the official movie trailer, music video, and Schulman’s talk at Libertopia about bringing the book to film:

“The author does not understand socialism,” read the letter from MacMillan in reply to the submission of Ayn Rand’s novella, Anthem. They turned it down. Actually, the publisher didn’t understand socialism. Hardly anyone did in 1937, when this book was written. Rand, however, did understand socialism. She understood it so well that she knew it would result in the opposite of what it promised and that its proponents would eventually come to embrace its grim reality, rather than repudiate the system of thought.

In many ways, this book is one of the best dystopian novels ever written because it puts the central focus on the key failing of socialism: its opposition to progress. How is that possible given that progress is a central slogan in socialist thinking? The problem is that by collectivizing private property, socialism removes the machinery of progress itself. It abolishes prices and profits and calculation and the incentive to create. It puts a premium on political control, and politicians resent the revolutionary implications of entrepreneurship. Therefore, a consistently socialist society would not only be poor and backward; it would revel in those features and call them the goal.

Think about it. This was the 1930s, long before the environmental movement and long before the primitivist streak in socialist thinking was to emerge as an outright agenda to be imposed by force. But as a child in the old Soviet Union, Rand had seen it in action. She had seen how entrepreneurship and creativity had to be sacrificed for the collective, and how this drove civilization straight into the ground. A totalitarian society would not be a world with amazing technology and flying cars, but would exist only at a subsistence level. And it would try to stay that way.

This edition appears in print at a strange time in American politics. Every day, regulatory agencies are pouring out mandates that degrade our technology. They are degrading our washing machines, dishwashers, soaps, paint, light bulbs, toilets, water systems, lawn mowers, medicines, microwaves, showers, hot-water heaters, gasoline and gas cans, and probably thousands of other things. These regulations are passed in the name of the environment, security, and safety. Their one result is to drive us back in time, making the future worse than the present and probably even worse than the past.

That’s only the beginning. Through intellectual property laws, the state literally assigned ownership to ideas that are the source of innovation, thereby restricting them and entangling entrepreneurs in endless litigation and confusion. Products are kept off the market. Firms that would come into existence do not. Profits that would be earned never appear. Intellectual property has institutionalized slow growth and landed the economy in a thicket of absurdity.

So we’ve finally come full circle in the land to which Rand emigrated because it was a free country. We’ve adopted features of the system she fled. In that sense, this small book is an amazing critique of precisely the unfreeness of the system under which we increasingly live. In that sense, the dystopian world she presents is a distilled version of where we are headed. Even the author’s theory that the word “I” is the thing that is most feared by the regime has resonance.

What is the way out? We cannot give up our ideals. We must have development, innovation, and progress because they are the sources of life, and we cannot give up life. Despite all her detractors say, Rand was a genius and a visionary. This small book underscores that she saw things that no one else saw, and saw them long before anyone else did.

“What ifs” are the bread and butter of science fiction. What if organized crime overthrew the United States government and took over? What would life be like under the mafia? Would the people of North America be better off? These are the questions C.M. Kornbluth sought to answer in his science-fiction novel The Syndic (1953).

The Syndic is of interest to libertarians, not least because it was honored with the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1986 by the Libertarian Futurist Society. This edition of the novel includes a forward and an afterward by Jeff Riggenbach that set the historical context for Kornbluth’s work and life and their relevance to libertarians. The Syndic is a fast-paced, entertaining tale replete with insights into the nature of the state and of war. Indeed, it could arguably be deemed an antiwar novel; but the insights do not end there.

As The Syndic opens, the continent of North America has long been divvied up between the Syndic and the Mob. The former United States government continues to exist in exile in Iceland and Ireland as the North American Government (NAG; an apt acronym). After an odd prologue composed of historical documents that set the stage for us, we’re introduced to our main viewpoint character, Charles Orsino, a low-ranking young bagman for the Syndic, who spends his days politely shaking down small businesses in the 101st New York Police Precinct for protection money and playing a brutal version of polo with jeeps and firearms instead of horses and mallets.

Charles happens to be the target of an assassination attempt during one night out on the town, and this lands him the rare opportunity to be invited to a meeting of the leaders of the Syndic. The North American Government is suspected of being behind the attempt as well as others, and Charles volunteers for an undercover mission to infiltrate NAG territory and assess the threat. From here on out an action-packed adventure with a touch of romance ensues that allows Kornbluth to contrast life in the Syndic with that under the NAG and the Mob.

The people of the Syndic territory have it pretty good. They enjoy a great deal more freedom and prosperity than people did under the old United States government or do under the NAG and the Mob. So long as they pay their protection money, they seem to be able to do most anything they please that’s peaceful. They don’t need permits to travel. There’s no bureaucratic welfare state, no war, no militarized police barging into their homes, no close regulation of business. Women enjoy equal legal status. The young are allowed to experiment, and yet society does not degenerate — on the contrary, most seem to settle down into normal lives by middle age.

Charles has frequent occasion to be horrified during his adventure outside of the Syndic — he likens the NAG military to particularly unscrupulous pirates — to the point that he’s ready to push for his leaders to raise an army and navy to wage an aggressive war against the NAG and the Mob to destroy their governments and civilize their people before they have a chance to invade, as they inevitably will. His uncle Frank, a respected member of the Syndic leadership, will have none of it, however. It is through Frank that we, and Charles, receive much of the aforementioned libertarian wisdom.

Uncle Frank understands the state and has a keen sense of history. He understands, as few today do, that laissez-faire works — until governments start to tinker with it. Regulations and other government interventions are not the products of wise, benevolent politicians and bureaucrats. Big, established corporations call for regulation of their own industry — under the guise of consumer protection, of course, but with the actual aim, or at least effect, of maintaining the status quo and hindering competition. Government intervention snowballs. A fiat paper currency fuels public debt,  mounting inflation, and inequality. History has taught him it’s best not to meddle.

Frank frequently protests that the Syndic is not a government, but one gets the impression he does not mean this literally — at one point Charles admits that the Syndic is a government too — but rather as a warning to his fellow Syndic leaders not to behave like the Syndic is an abstract, permanent institution through which they have a right to rule for the good of the people. As Charles is wont to echo Frank, the Syndic is nothing more than “some people and their morale and credit.”

Frank understands that war is the health of the state. A standing military and a war will be a drain on their wealth. There will be much death and destruction, curtailed freedom at home, altered sensibilities, erosion of their carefree culture. The Syndic government itself would be forever changed if it embarked on the path of traditional government, centralizing and expanding its power, losing its meritocratic family- and business-like character. War would mean an end to their way of life — in the name of preserving it. The Syndic would become the very thing they meant to defend it against.

As Frank retorts to Charles: “Nothing can be a matter of life or death to the Syndic. When anything becomes a matter of life or death to the Syndic, the Syndic is already dead, its morale is already disintegrated, its credit already gone. What is left is not the Syndic but the Syndic’s dead shell.”

Despite its age, The Syndic is not a dead shell. It is a science-fiction classic that should be on every libertarian fiction-lover’s to-read list. It’s a short and quick, entertaining read — about half as long as the typical science fiction novel today, a quarter the length of the average epic fantasy novel. While characterization receives short shrift by contemporary standards, and events might feel a bit rushed to modern sensibilities, The Syndic’s strengths lie in its plotting and timeless ideas. The modern reader should be forewarned that attitudes toward women expressed within are rather old-fashioned, but the story is not without a strong female protagonist. Kornbluth’s prose is good and occasionally brilliant. I leave you with this little gem that culminates a bless-curse sequence:

“Bless the founding fathers for the exquisitely Newtonian eighteenth-century machinery of the Constitution, and curse them for visiting it in all its unworkable beauty on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.”

I listen to a number of podcasts on books and writing in the science fiction and fantasy genre. I find them interesting and valuable as a fan, as the editor of Prometheus Unbound, and as an aspiring author myself. I think you will as well, so I’ve created a curated list of my favorites and what I’m listening to now. Do you listen to any of these? Are there any I haven’t listed that you would recommend? Let us know in the comments.

General SF&F Book Podcasts

These are mostly general science fiction and fantasy podcasts about books, although movies and tv shows do come up on some of them as well. If you’re interested in the craft and business of writing, it would be worthwhile to subscribe to these not only to keep up with the state of the field but also because they often feature authors, editors, publishers, and agents as interviewees or guests.

The SF Signal Podcast — The Hugo-nominated podcast of the indispensable Hugo-winning SF Signal website. Hosted by Patrick Hester. The schedule is one interview episode and one discussion episode per week. The podcast features a wide range of interviewees, guests, and panelists, including a core group of regulars, from the science fiction, fantasy, and horror community. I haven’t listened to the new, separate Crossing the Gulf podcast hosted by Karen Burnham (a NASA engineer) and Karen Lord yet.

Adventures in Scifi Publishing — Hosted by Shaun Farrell, Moses Siregar (The Black God’s War), and Brent Bowen. A long-running podcast featuring discussion and interviews with the biggest and hottest names in the genre community as well as newer authors. The experienced hosts are self-published or aspiring authors themselves.

The Coode Street Podcast — A rather informal and, as they say, rambly conversation between editor Jonathan Strahan (Life on Mars) and academic and reviewer Gary K. Wolfe (Evaporating Genres). There is the occasional guest, but mostly it’s just the two hosts. You can learn a lot about the current state of the genre, and especially its rich history, from these widely read veterans.

Speculate! — Hosted by authors Gregory A. Wilson (The Third Sign) and Bradley P. Beaulieu (The Winds of Khalakovo), this podcast is unusual in that it features three types of episodes aired as a series: fiction reviews, author interviews, and writing technique. The hosts will review a book in one episode, interview the author in another, and discuss writing technique using that book as an example in a third. There are other types of episodes that don’t fit neatly into this three-episode series: interviews with artists and editors, and other stuff.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy — Hosted by editor John Joseph Adams (Brave New Worlds) and author David Barr Kirtley. This podcast is unusual in that the hosts seek to partner with a company to host their posts and files; they started out at Tor.com (season 1), moved to io9.com (season 2), and are now at Wired.com (season 3). “Each episode features an interview with a leading figure in the world of science and science fiction, followed by a discussion of science fiction books, movies, video games, and more.” The delivery is a bit wooden and abrupt, but the content is well worth listening for. Adams is one of the leading magazine and anthology editors in SF&F today.

The Functional Nerds — Hosted by Patrick Hester and John Anealio. Patrick is an author and, as noted above, a Hugo-nominated podcast producer and host. John Anealio is a singer/songwriter who specializes in geeky and SF&F-themed music, famous for his song “George R.R. Martin Is Not Your Bitch.” This podcast recently changed format and I’m not sure I like it as much as I used to. It was originally a traditional discussion-and-interview podcast heavily focused on SF&F books, but the new format brings the podcast more in line with the website built around it. It’s now more of a general geek show covering topics that interest the hosts from week to week. The website, for example, features different columns written by guest authors such as booze nerd, food nerd, fitness nerd, and tech nerd. They still interview authors and others in the publishing industry, but they also seem to be interviewing other types of guests more than the used to. I still listen.

SF Squeecast — Hosted by Elizabeth Bear (The Chains That You Refuse), Paul Cornell (London Falling), Seanan McGuire (Rosemary and Rue), Lynne M. Thomas (Whedonistas), and Catherine M. Valente (Deathless). SF Squeecast is a monthly podcast with a panel discussion show-and-tell format in which the hosts, and often a guest, each pick something they want to talk about on each episode. SF Squeecast won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Fancast. Personally, I think Patrick Hester’s SF Signal Podcast should have won, but hey, as they say, it’s an honor just to be nominated.

SF&F Podcasts on Writing, Publishing, and Book Marketing

Some of these feature interviews with or guest appearances by authors, editors, publishers, and agents as well.

Writing Excuses — Hosted by Mary Robinette Kowal (Shades of Milk and Honey), Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn, The Way of Kings), Howard Taylor (Schlock Mercenary), and Dan Wells (I Am Not A Serial Killer). As the tagline says: “Fifteen minutes long, because you’re in a hurry, and we’re not that smart.” This is a weekly podcast that you can consume quickly on breaks or commutes. You’ll learn about the nuts and bolts of writing. There are a lot of episodes to get caught up on. I’d recommend subscribing and listening to each new episode, while at the same time going back to the beginning and working your way forward. You’ll have to download older episodes one at a time from the website, but it’s worth it.

The Secrets Podcast for Writers — Hosted by Michael A. Stackpole (Talion: Revenant, Rogue Squadron). This podcast has unfortunately run its course, but you can still get caught up on all of its fantastic content. For some reason Stackpole only has a few episodes available on the website, but you can grab every single episode from the rss feed (just add it to your favorite podcatcher) and start downloading. Highly recommended.

The Self-Publishing Podcast — Hosted by Johnny B. Truant (The Bialy Pimps), and Sean Platt and David Wright (Yesterday’s Gone: Season One). As the name suggests, this podcast is all about being a self-publishing author. This podcast is not for the easily offended, however, and the guys engage in a lot of locker-room humor and cursing.

The Creative Penn — Hosted by Joanna Penn (get it?). This podcast has a heavier emphasis on self-publishing and marketing than the others. A valuable resource for indie authors.

I Should Be Writing — The podcast for wanna-be fiction writers. While there is some discussion of the craft and business of writing, the focus is on the trials-and-tribulations of being an aspiring author: how to deal with doubts, self-motivate, get more organized and productive, and so on. If you’re just starting out or find yourself plagued by uncertainty, this might be the podcast for you. I don’t need this aspect of the podcast myself, but Lafferty does interview notable authors, editors, publishers, and agents, and I find these interviews valuable.

Odyssey SF/F Writing Workshop Podcast — Not updated regularly. Episodes are excerpts from lectures given by guest writers, editors, and agents at the Odyssey Writing Workshop.

Bonus: Geek and Sundry Webcasts

I include these as bonuses because they’re not podcasts.  Geek and Sundry is Felicia Day’s webtv network with a number of good shows. Episodes are hosted on Geek and Sundry’s YouTube channel.

Sword and Laser — Hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt. A science fiction and fantasy book club that also features interviews and other segments. Sword and Laser is one of the core shows on Geek and Sundry. You can check out their page on the Geek and Sundry website and subscribe to the YouTube playlist of their episodes. New episodes are uploaded every other Friday.

If you missed the Google+ Hangout for whatever reason, you can watch the YouTube recording below:

The Preferred Observer will be another science fiction novel for Matthew. The libertarian elements will not be quite so pervasive, but you will nevertheless have no trouble telling that it was written by a hardcore Austro-Libertarian. The theme of this new work will be minority viewpoints and preconceptions.

The Q&A portion of the chat starts at 30:15. We had quite a good time and our conversation ranged from Matthew’s influences to Wĭthûr Wē and The Preferred Observer and the difficulty of writing good libertarian fiction that isn’t too preachy to more tangential subjects. We talked about science fiction subgenres and Star Wars. Took jabs at Lucas. The discussion even turned to the Industrial Revolution, Somalia, and comparative anarchism.

If you watch the whole video, you’ll even catch a brief teaser for Matthew’s planned third novel.

We’ve got some improvements planned for our next author chat — like, you know, a proper introduction, better lighting and camera placement, locking my chair in place, getting me to talk slower, and whatnot. ;o)

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for future updates on our original video content.

You can also read the transcript below:

When Robert Anson Heinlein died 22 years ago this month, in Carmel, California, at the age of 80, the wonder of it all was that he had managed to live as long as he did. Heinlein, who was born in 1907 in Butler, Missouri, a small town about 65 miles south of Kansas City, had been in poor health for most of his adult life.

His family had connections with the powerful Pendergast political machine, the outfit that later put Harry Truman in the US Senate, but Heinlein still had to spend his freshman year in a two-year Kansas City “junior college” — what today we would call a “community college” — before the Pendergast machine was finally able to wrangle him an appointment to Annapolis. After graduating from the naval academy in 1929 with a degree in mechanical engineering, Heinlein went to sea as an officer. But in his fourth year of active duty, he contracted tuberculosis and was honorably discharged — retired, really, with a small pension — after a lengthy hospitalization at Navy expense.

It was now 1934, the depths of the Great Depression. Robert A. Heinlein was 27 years old and living in Los Angeles, where the Navy had sent him upon his graduation from Annapolis five years before. He applied for admission to graduate school in physics and mathematics at UCLA, was accepted, and enrolled in classes there. But he dropped out after only a few weeks, partly for reasons of his still-precarious health, partly because he had become interested in politics and wanted to devote his time to working for Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial campaign instead of studying math and physics.

Sinclair was an outspoken and self-identified socialist, whose campaign as the Democratic nominee for governor of California in 1934 was an outgrowth of his EPIC movement. “EPIC” was an acronym for End Poverty in California. In Sinclair’s words, the EPIC

movement propose[d] that our unemployed shall be put at productive labor, producing everything which they themselves consume and exchanging those goods among themselves by a method of barter, using warehouse receipts or labor certificates or whatever name you may choose to give to the paper employed. It asserts that the State must advance sufficient capital to give the unemployed access to good land and machinery, so that they may work and support themselves and thus take themselves off the backs of the taxpayers. The “EPIC” movement asserts that this will not hurt private industry, because the unemployed are no longer of any use to industry.

Robert A. Heinlein worked for Sinclair’s campaign in 1934 — it won a little more than a third of all the votes cast in the election — then stayed with the EPIC movement for a few more years. He became a staff writer for, then editor of, the EPIC News, the movement’s flagship publication, with a paid circulation of two million. Having discovered what seemed to be a natural bent for writing, he tried his hand at a novel — a utopian socialist polemic entitled For Us, the Living, that never saw publication until after his death. In 1938, he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the California state legislature on an EPIC platform. Then, in 1939, at the age of 32, he began writing short stories for the commercial science fiction magazines.

“Isaac Asimov, who knew Heinlein from the mid-’30s on, was convinced that his personal political views were largely a function of the woman he was married to at the time.”

He enjoyed immediate success. Within months of publishing his first short story in the pages of the leading science fiction magazine of the day, Astounding Science Fiction, he was widely regarded as the leading writer in the field. Within eight years, by 1947, the year he turned 40, he had become the first science-fiction writer to break the pulp barrier — that is, the first science fiction writer to publish not just one story but an entire series of stories, not in the cheaply produced “pulp” magazines like Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, or Thrilling Wonder Stories, but rather in the more expensively produced, more prestigious, larger-circulation, better paying, “slick” magazines like Town & Country and the Saturday Evening Post. The Saturday Evening Post alone published nearly half the stories, including the title story, that made up Heinlein’s celebrated 1951 collection, The Green Hills of Earth.

It was also in the late ’40s that Heinlein began publishing science fiction stories in Boy’s Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. It was in the late ’40s that he began writing, at the rate of one novel per year, what Brian Doherty calls “a series of S.F. novels for boys, published by Scribner’s, that seemed to make it into every high school and elementary school library” — a series of “coming-of-age adventure tales” that made Heinlein a top favorite author of baby boomers long before those boomers were old enough to vote or order a drink in a bar.

Meanwhile, he wrote science fiction for adults as well. During the ’50s and ’60s, Heinlein won four Hugo awards for best science fiction novel of the year. In 1969, he joined Walter Cronkite on national television to offer commentary on the first manned moon landing in history. In 1975, he was named the first recipient of the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in the field, by the Science Fiction Writers of America. By the time of his death in 1988, his nearly four dozen books — including novels and collections of short stories — had sold more than 40 million copies. And they haven’t stopped selling in the more than two decades that have gone by since then.

Why is all this important from the point of view of the libertarian tradition? Because, among the many hundreds of thousands of readers who made Robert A. Heinlein’s career in science fiction such a brilliant success were quite a few who later came to think of themselves as libertarians and to associate themselves, in one way or another, with the organized libertarian movement. Not a few of these would be happy to tell you that it was by reading Heinlein’s stories and novels that they discovered libertarian ideas and became persuaded of their power and truth.

In the early 1970s, according to a survey undertaken at the time by SIL, the Society for Individual Liberty, one libertarian activist in six had been led to libertarianism by reading the novels and short stories of Robert A. Heinlein. Among the prominent libertarians of the late 20th Century who have named Heinlein as an important influence on the development of their own political thinking were Dave Nolan (the founder of the Libertarian Party) and the late Samuel Edward Konkin III.

But was Heinlein a libertarian? There certainly are libertarian ideas in some of his books. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, for example, the winner of the Hugo award as the best science fiction novel of 1966, is the story of a libertarian revolution on the moon — a revolution designed to free Luna from the control of politicians and bureaucrats on Terra, that is, the Earth.

One of the leaders of the revolution is a “distinguished man with wavy white hair, dimples in cheeks, and [a] voice that smiled,” Professor Bernardo de la Paz, who speaks of “the most basic human right, the right to bargain in a free marketplace.” De la Paz calls himself “a rational anarchist” and argues that the question we need to put to ourselves when thinking about political issues is this one: “Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of the group to do alone?” According to Professor de la Paz, this is “the key question … [a] radical question that strikes to the root of the whole dilemma of government.”

As the professor puts it,

A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as “state” and “society” and “government” have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame … as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else.

Both in his physical appearance — the wavy white hair, the dimples, the smiling voice — and in his ideas, Professor Bernardo de la Paz bears a striking resemblance to a real-life libertarian who flourished and enjoyed considerable influence within the libertarian movement during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s — Robert LeFevre. Now it so happens that Robert A. Heinlein and his third wife, Virginia Heinlein, lived in Colorado Springs throughout the 1950s and through the first half of the 1960s, the very period during which Robert LeFevre, a neighbor of theirs as it turns out, was serving as editorial page editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph.

Heinlein was writing The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress during the years when LeFevre was operating his famous Freedom School up the road a few miles in Larkspur and working to transform it into a degree-granting, four-year institution he wanted to call Rampart College — during the years when, in effect, LeFevre was transforming himself from an editorialist, controversialist, and rabble rouser to a professor. It has generally been assumed, though it was never confirmed by either Heinlein or his widow while they were alive, that the fictional Bernardo de la Paz was based on the real Robert LeFevre.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is unquestionably a libertarian novel. It is unquestionably one of the three or four most influential libertarian novels of the last century. But whether its author, Robert A. Heinlein, can plausibly be described as a libertarian in his personal political views remains a troubled question.

We have seen that Heinlein’s first period of political activism, in the mid-to-late 1930s, was devoted to the advocacy of policies like a guaranteed annual income, universal tax-funded schooling, and government seizure of unused private factories and farms so they could be transformed, at taxpayer expense, into workers’ co-ops. Whatever this is, it is not libertarianism.

Heinlein’s next period of political activism came in the late 1950s, during the very years when he was first getting acquainted with Robert LeFevre. On April 5, 1958, the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph published a full page ad sponsored by — but let’s let Robert A. Heinlein tell the story. The following quotations are taken from the full-page ad he wrote in reply and paid to have published a week later, on Saturday, April 12, 1958.

Last Saturday in this city appeared a full-page ad intended to scare us into demanding that the President stop our testing of nuclear weapons.

The instigators were seventy-odd local people and sixty-odd national names styling themselves “The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.”

This manifesto … is the rankest sort of Communist propaganda … concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense.

We the undersigned … read that insane manifesto of the so-called “Committee for a ‘Sane’ Nuclear Policy” and we despised it. So we are answering it ourselves — by our own free choice and spending only our own money.

If it comes to atomic war, the best we can hope for is tens of millions of American dead — perhaps more than half our population wiped out in the first few minutes.

The risks cannot be avoided other than by surrender; they can be reduced only by making the free world so strong that the evil pragmatists of Communism cannot afford to murder us. The price to us will be year after weary year of higher taxes, harder work, grim devotion … and perhaps, despite all this — death. But we shall die free!

We the undersigned are not a committee but simply two free citizens of these United States. We love life and we want peace … but not “peace at any price” — not the price of liberty!

Poltroons and pacifists will think otherwise.

Heinlein urged his readers to join a new organization he was starting up, called the Patrick Henry League, to promote his ideas.

Again, whatever this may be, it is not libertarianism. As Murray Rothbard explained in his classic essay “War, Peace, & the State,” published in 1963, five years after the publication of Heinlein’s fatuous polemic, suppose

Jones finds that he or his property is being invaded, aggressed against, by Smith. It is legitimate for Jones … to repel this invasion by defensive violence of his own. But now we come to a more knotty question: is it within the right of Jones to commit violence against innocent third parties as a corollary to his legitimate defense against Smith? To the libertarian, the answer must be clearly, no. Remember that the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or property of innocent men is absolute: it holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It is wrong and criminal to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or starving, or is doing it to save one’s relatives, or is defending oneself against a third man’s attack.

Now, with regard to nuclear weapons, here is what Rothbard had to say:

While the bow and arrow and even the rifle can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear weapons cannot.… These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a sin and a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.

“Heinlein made it clear that he expected all Americans to cheerfully pay ‘higher taxes’ to implement the policy of mass murder he espoused.”

Since “it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, cannot be used in a libertarian manner,” Rothbard argued, “therefore, their very existence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake. And if we will indeed use our strategic intelligence, we will see that such disarmament is not only a good, but the highest political good that we can pursue in the modern world.”

Ten years later, in his invaluable introduction to the libertarian idea, For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Rothbard summed up his view of the point Robert A. Heinlein had made in that 1958 ad in the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph.

Anyone who wishes is entitled to make the personal decision of “better dead than Red” or “give me liberty or give me death.” What he is not entitled to do is to make these decisions for others, as the prowar policy of conservatism would do. What conservatives are really saying is: “Better them dead than Red,” and “give me liberty or give them death” — which are the battle cries not of noble heroes but of mass murderers.

It is noteworthy, is it not, that while Heinlein boasted that he and his wife had paid for the publication of their ad by “spending only our own money,” he simultaneously made it clear that he expected all Americans to cheerfully pay “higher taxes” to implement the policy of mass murder he espoused. Similarly, the man who wrote stories depicting a successful space program funded by private enterprise also made it clear that he expected Americans to pay taxes — that is, to tolerate government theft of their money — to support NASA.

Isaac Asimov, who knew Heinlein from the mid-’30s on, was convinced that his personal political views were largely a function of the woman he was married to at the time. In the ’30s, when he was married to wife #2, Leslyn MacDonald, whom Asimov describes as “a flaming liberal,” Heinlein was working with Upton Sinclair and his EPIC movement. Twenty years later, married to wife #3, Virginia Gerstenfeld, he re-emerged as a Cold Warrior fixated on the supposed nobility of the military and newly devoted to a “free market” for which he had had little use during the years of the Great Depression.

If so it was, I say, “so be it.” Many men have tailored their beliefs to match those of their wives. They have found that it helps to preserve and promote domestic harmony. And they believe that domestic harmony is a valuable thing, a thing worth preserving. Robert A. Heinlein was hardly the only man, or even the first man, to venture down this path.

What we need to stay focused on here, I think, is that in his books, Heinlein was his own man. He found social and political ideas — ideas about the different ways human beings might figure out to live together peaceably in large groups — endlessly fascinating. He liked to fool around with such ideas, speculate about how they might work out in practice. Libertarian ideas weren’t the only ones he fooled around with and speculated about in his fiction. But because of his interaction with Robert LeFevre in Colorado in the ’50s and ’60s, libertarian ideas were among those he toyed with and dramatized in certain of his stories. Whether he was personally a libertarian or not, all those of us who are libertarians owe him a profound debt for writing The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. For that book alone, Robert A. Heinlein has earned a place in the libertarian tradition.

[This article was first published online as a Mises Daily article and is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "Robert Anson Heinlein (1907–1988)."]

Before the third of the Batman trilogy hit theaters, I had heard that The Dark Knight Rises was a film without hope, with a long and dreary narrative that never loosens its grip. It leaves the viewer without a sense of answers.

I saw it and left confused. It saw it again, and left confused again. All the while, I kept wondering if this interpretive effort would pay off. Maybe it’s just another movie and lacks the ideological significance of the previous two.

I too had read several reviews that had condemned the film from a left-wing point view, arguing that it took a cheap shot at the Occupy Wall Street movement, suggesting that it consists mainly of brainless menaces who are easily manipulated by a strongman leader. The filmmakers deny this.

Regardless, this was probably the best political feature of the film.

However, the merit of its warning about left-wing populism was seriously compromised by the portrayal of the Gotham cops as saintly guardians of the social order. Neoconservatives loved this part of the film, made all the better to them because the prisons are full and Gotham is ruled by a civilian-led authoritarian regime of tight law and surveillance — the neocon dream come true.

What’s going on here? Why is the movie so full of mixed messages and, in the end, so unsatisfying?

Finally, it hit me. And this will be perfectly obvious once you hear it.

The problem is that the film gives Gotham (and us) a choice between two forms of despotism, one “left wing” and one “right wing,” and asks us to choose the lesser of two evils. We can have one of two systems: bureaucratic/authoritarian or revolutionary/dictatorial. The idea of a self-managing society is just out of the question. The film biases that choice by showing one as offered by the evil villain and the other by a corrupt, yet stable status quo.

Do you see now? The Dark Knight Rises replicates the choice that the present political system presents to us. We look at the choices and throw up our hands, knowing full well that neither really offers answers to the problem. Watching this film is like watching the Sunday talk shows that feature two flavors of the same poison. It’s the State of the Union address and the response to the State of the Union address, neither of which tells what’s true or gives us a way out.

It’s the two sides of the street fights between the Occupy protesters and the cops. It’s the left versus the right. It’s Republicans versus Democrats. It’s “law and order” versus revolutionary dictatorship. It’s Italian fascism versus Soviet communism. It’s the two sides of the Spanish Civil War. It is also the choice faced by old Rome in its late stage: rule by a corrupt oligarchy of the Senate or a cruel imperial dictatorship of Caesar.

It is the choice given to every nation in its late stages. No truly informed citizen believes that this is all that should be on the menu. But The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t show us another way. It never shows us the option of a self-managing society where people are permitted to shape their own destinies apart from the will of two gangs of political elites. Whoever wins the great struggle over Gotham’s future, the results will be imposed from the top down.

The result is that viewers are left with a sense of hopelessness in the same way that the current political climate denies people authentic hope. Whatever happens will come from the center and top, leaving the rest of us unfree to manage our own lives, keep and use our own property, mind our own business, and cobble together our own human associations. In The Dark Knight Rises, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not even distant memories.

The film opens with Bruce Wayne/Batman in a long period of retirement, living alone in his mansion during eight years of stability in Gotham. But what is this stability, really? It’s not prosperity, because the homes for orphans are full and they can’t get jobs once they are too old to live there. The prisons are jammed with supposedly violent thugs and the leaders of organized crime, swept off the streets thanks to a new draconian law that unleashed government power.

The new law is named after martyred district attorney Harvey Dent. In the first scenes of Gotham, the city is celebrating Harvey Dent Day. The police are in firm control of the city, as led by the police commissioner and the political powers of the city. From the perspective of the elites, nothing is wrong. Life is blessedly boring. Crime has fallen so low that police joke about soon having to chase down people with overdue library books.

Is there corruption? Of course. This is Gotham. In fact, the corruption is so deep and pervasive that the saintly district attorney after whom the present order is named is a lie. He is actually the villain named Two-Face — a perfect metaphor for every member of the political class. In his tenure, he said one thing and did another. People thought he was doing good, but he was secretly doing evil. Even the best men of the current regime in Gotham are willing to spread the lie of the greatness of Dent, solely for the purpose of maintaining government power and immunizing the power structure from criticism.

The strongman dictator Bane sees the vulnerability of this seemingly stable system. He perceives that people are seeking something, some form of liberation, and that he can use this political impulse to solidify his control over Gotham on his way to plotting its final destruction. He recruits the unemployed to work under the city in the sewers to plot his takeover.

Bane has plenty of people willing to risk death to work for him, both because they are desperate and because Bane offers a radical alternative to the present order. Meanwhile, the city elites go on about their daily tasks, completely oblivious to what is happening beneath the surface.

At the appointed hour, Bane initiates shock and awe in the form of massive explosions throughout the city. At the football game where a large portion of Gotham’s citizens are gathered, Bane blows up the field, and announces to everyone that he is the new leader of the city. Their elites have failed and now a people’s revolution is taking place.

“Gotham, take control,” Bane says, “take control of your city. Behold, the instrument of your liberation! Identify yourself to the world!”

The rich are looted. The prisoners are set free to become armed gangs in the Bane regime. Show trials are established on the model of the late stages of the French Revolution. Guilt is presumed and everyone is sent to die, to the cheers of the workers and peasants. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie cower in their homes in fear.

This is when the Dark Knight rises to set the world right again. His most-loyal allies in this army are the massive number of police who had been recruited during the years of seemingly crimeless stability.

As audience members, we are being asked to cheer for Batman because he opposes the bloody and ruthless Bane, who is a Stalin-like figure. But the best possible result that Gotham can get out of this is a restoration and intensification of the previous fascist system of police, prisons, rule by corrupt elites, and mandatory obedience to Gotham’s version of the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security.

As a result, it is hard to cheer. The choice is left or right dictatorship. It is Occupy versus the cops. It is Stalin versus Mussolini all over again. It is Hoover versus FDR. It is the Democrat despot or the Republican despot.

This is the dreadful choice that political systems all over the world have set up. You have to decide, based on your cultural identity and ideological preferences, what form of top-down rule you desire. There’s Plan A or Plan B, but no Plan C. There are two types of prison cells, but there is no way out of the prison itself. Our choices are not really authentic choices. All of us are inchoately aware that whatever the results are, we will not be freer than we were before.

One of the most-compelling images of the film is a prison that is considered the worst prison in the world. It is buried deep in a hole. You can look up 200 feet in the air and see the light, but there is no way that ordinary people can climb out. This is a chilling image of where most people in the developed world are today. We look up and we see a far-distant light, and that light is called liberty. But we don’t see a way to get there.

This much we can see. There is no Dark Knight who will save us. We must save ourselves.

[LFB]

As part of a move toward more consistent branding, I have moved Prometheus Unbound to a new domain and changed the Feedburner url for our main posts rss feed.

Prometheus Unbound is now located at prometheus-unbound.org.

The old url, prometheusreview.com, will continue to redirect to the new one for the foreseeable future. But the site has permanently moved from the old url, so please update any links you have on your site or in your bookmarks.

If you don’t already have us on your “blogroll,” we’d appreciate it if you would add the new url to it. Give us some link love, baby, yeah.

The old Feedburner url for our main posts rss feed was feeds.feedburner.com/prometheusreview. The new one is feeds.feedburner.com/prometheusunbound/posts. The old url will remain active at least until January 2013 in order to give our community plenty of time to switch, but it will be shut down eventually so please do subscribe to the new url now rather than later.

Our apologies for the inconvenience, but we do think these changes will be better for Prometheus Unbound and our community in the long run.

If, while browsing through the site, you notice anything that looks broken or any strange characters like this “é,” we would greatly appreciate you letting us know so that we can fix the problem.

To make up for the inconvenience, some new features have been added to our community forums: unanswered posts list, polls, post previews, topic descriptions, and more.

“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” is a delightful fable, not only on account of the political themes it explores but also some very fine writing. The short story was first published in Clarkesworld Magazine (Issue 55, April 2011) and then republished by Escape Pod (Episode 343, March 2012). If you’re partial to audio fiction, you can spend a pleasant half hour listening to the story being narrated by Kate Baker (Clarkesworld) or Mur Lafferty (Escape Pod). Yu’s tale has been nominated for a 2011 Nebula Award and a 2012 Hugo and is a finalist for a Locus Award and the Million Writers Award, and it is deserving of all of these honors. Yu, a student at Princeton, is a new author to watch.

Yu’s tale warns of the transitive and cyclical nature of violence — from thoughtless destruction to calculated imperialism. It begins with a boy attacking a wasp nest and ending the uneasy truce between the wasps and his village. The villagers make an amazing discovery: the wasps had inked beautiful maps of the land (China) into the walls of their nest. Soon the wasps were hunted to near extinction and a group of survivors manages to escape.

The leader of the surviving wasps has learned well the hard lessons of realpolitick. Once the new nest has been established, she orders her wasps to expand aggressively. A nearby bee hive is enslaved and forced to pay tribute. The victim of violence has resolved to avoid being the victim ever again by becoming the oppressor.

But the subjugation of the bees has unintended consequences. Some of the bees are educated and trained in philosophy, science, and cartography. One day a bee with an inclination to anarchism is born and so educated and trained, and she produces a brood of anarchist sons…

And, well, just go on and read or listen (or both) to the story. It’s free. You won’t be disappointed. Then return to read the spoilery sections below wherein I get a bit analytical.

MILD SPOILER WARNING

Naturally my favorite lines in the story are the ones about anarchism:

To her sons in their capped silk cradles — and they were all sons — she whispered the precepts she had developed while calculating flight paths and azimuths, that there should be no queen and no state, and that, as in the wasp nest, the males should labor and profit equally with the females.

[…]

“Govern us,” they said to the two wasp-taught anarchists, but they refused.

“A perfect society needs no rulers,” they said. “Knowledge and authority ought to be held in common. In order to imagine a new existence, we must free ourselves from the structures of both our failed government and the unjustifiable hegemony of the wasp nests. Hear what you can hear and learn what you can learn while we remain among them. But be ready.”

The “authority … in common” bit might be given a left-anarchist spin, but I think is too ambiguous to really say. It could just mean we should all be equals in political authority à la the Lockean state of nature, not that we must make all decisions collectively. The “knowledge … in common” bit is suggestive of an anti–intellectual property stance — expressing the belief that ideas cannot be owned, with “in common” being analogous to the public domain.

MAJOR SPOILER WARNING

The ending of the story is somewhat ambiguous and has left people speculating. The old bee colony awakens from winter and happens upon the remains of the anarchist bee colony.

Bees lay dead and brittle around it, no identifiable queen among them. Not a trace of honey remained in the storehouse; the dark wax of its walls had been gnawed to rags. Even the brood cells had been scraped clean.

Some have thought that this means the anarchists all died for want of planning, because, you know, it’s just obvious that there can be no economic plans without a central monopolistic authority to hand them down from on high. Is Yu’s point that an anarchist society is not viable? I do not think so. In fact, she tells us that anarchism is a viable hereditary trait in bees and depicts them implementing plans for the fast-arriving winter. Perhaps they simply did not have enough time from the beginning of their exodus to the onset of winter to prepare enough food and shelter to survive. Perhaps they all starved to death through no fault of their political ideals. Or perhaps they were attacked by a bear.

In any case, the story nevertheless ends on a positive note with the remaining few sentences.

But in the last intact hexagons they found, curled and capped in wax, scrawled on page after page, words of revolution. They read in silence.

Then—

“Write,” one said to the other, and she did.

The idea of anarchy will live on to inspire others.

In case you missed the announcement, Laissez Faire Books is serializing a novel on its blog. The first installment (of 22) was published yesterday, and subsequent installments will be published weekly on Wednesdays. The novel, Higher Cause, appears to be a present-day to near-future thriller. The description mentions new forms of energy as well, so it may be a techno-political thriller or a bit science-fictional.

The author, John Hunt, is an Austro-libertarian and a medical doctor, “a pediatric pulmonologist and allergist, former navy officer, tenured associate professor at the University of Virginia, cofounder of several companies, as well as Trusted Angels Foundation.” His bio also mentions that he’s written another novel titled Assume the Physician, “a spicy, eye-opening, tear-jerking, belly-laughing romp, and is chicken soup for anyone who struggles in the medical system of America.”

Hunt describes his novel as having “timely sweeping themes, active free-thinking characters, conflicts affecting the world, spies, guns, explosions, new forms of energy, sinister conspiracies, government plots, nationalization, destruction, and hope.”

Laissez Faire Club members will receive early access to the ebook (mobi/epub) before serialization is complete.

Follow the links above to learn more about LFB’s publishing experiment and read the first installment.

But stay tuned! Because Matthew Alexander will be reviewing each installment on the Friday after it comes out. Let’s read this book together and discuss it in the comments sections of his reviews.

The Libertarian Futurist Society issued a press release on Friday, July 13th, announcing the winners (plural) of the 2012 Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian Novel.

The winners and finalists, with links to our reviews:

The Winners

• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman (consistently came in last in voting for our Lightmonthly Read selection; not yet reviewed)

The Finalists

• The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge
• In the Shadow of Ares by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson
• The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod
• Snuff by Terry Pratchett (our current Lightmonthly Read; review coming in early August)

The 2012 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award winner is “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster.

Our Take

We’re not sure we would have recommended any of the finalists for the Prometheus Award this year.

We haven’t read The Freedom Maze yet, so we can’t question its selection as a co-winner. Maybe it is worthy and we’ll discover this if and when we get around to reading it. Clearly it meets the criteria of the LFS voting membership.

While we enjoyed Ready Player One we do not think it was libertarian enough to qualify for the Prometheus Award. The same goes for The Children of the Sky and The Restoration Game.

While In the Shadow of Ares was libertarian enough, and apparently written by actual libertarians (unlike many Prometheus Award winners), and we enjoyed it, we do think the writing quality was not quite there. The authors are ones to keep an eye on, however.

We’re currently reading Snuff and, as one would expect from Terry Pratchett, it is well written. Whether we think it is unambiguously libertarian enough remains to be seen. We’ll publish a review in early August.

We’d love to publish a review of Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, if anyone is interested in submitting one.

~*~

Read the full press release below.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, July 13, 2012

2012 PROMETHEUS BEST NOVEL WINNERS ANNOUNCED

The Libertarian Futurist Society will hold its annual awards ceremony for the Prometheus Award during Chicon, the 70th World Science Fiction Convention, to be held August 30-September 3 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.

For the second time in its history, there’s a tie for the Best Novel award. The two winners are The Freedom Maze (Small Beer Press) by Delia Sherman and Ready Player One (Random House) by Ernest Cline. The award for Best Classic Fiction (the “Hall of Fame” award) goes to The Machine Stops, a short story by E. M. Forster, written in 1909.

At its award ceremony to be held at the WorldCon in Chicago, the Libertarian Futurist Society will present plaques and one-ounce gold coins to Delia Sherman and Ernest Cline. A smaller gold coin and a plaque will be presented to The Machine Stops. The specific time and location will be available in the convention program.

This was the first Prometheus nomination for both Sherman and Cline. Sherman’s credits include five fantasy novels anediting two collections. Ready Player One is Cline’s first novel; his official bio includes a variety of odd jobs, poetry slams and writing screenplays.

Delia Sherman’s young-adult fantasy novel focuses on an adolescent girl of 1960 who is magically sent back in time to 1860 when her family owned slaves on a Louisiana plantation. She’s mistaken for a light-skinned slave fathered by a plantation owner. She endures great hardships, commiserates with others suffering worse, works in the household and the fields, and sees the other slaves demonstrating their humanity in the face of incredible adversity. In the process, she comes to appreciate the values of honor, respect, courage, and personal responsibility.

Ernest Cline’s genre-busting blend of science fiction, romance, suspense, and adventure describes a virtual world that has managed to evolve an order without a state in which entrepreneurial gamers must solve virtual puzzles and battle real-life enemies to save their virtual world from domination and corruption. The main characters work together without meeting in the real world until near the end of the story. The novel stresses the importance of allowing open access to the Internet for everyone.

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster was published in 1909. Forster described it as a reaction to H.G. Wells’s fiction. The story describes a future in which most people never leave their rooms and interact only through the Machine’s video and text facilities. People in this dystopia depend on the Machine for all their needs. When the Machine falls into disrepair and fails, the people are isolated from one another and many die, though Forster depicts it as a hopeful ending with a few wild humans on the surface likely to carry on and learn to be self-sufficient again.

The other finalists for the Best Novel award were The Children of the Sky (TOR Books) by Vernor Vinge, In the Shadow of Ares (Amazon Kindle edition) by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson, The Restoration Game (Pyr Books) Ken MacLeod, and Snuff (Harper Collins) by Terry Pratchett. MacLeod has won three Best Novel awards, Vinge has won twice, and Pratchett has one previous winner.

The other finalists for the Hall of Fame award were As Easy as A.B.C., a story by Rudyard Kipling (1912); ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman, a story by Harlan Ellison (1965); and Falling Free, a novel by Lois McMaster Bujold (1988).

The LFS is announcing the winning works before the ceremony so that fans of the works and the writers can begin to make plans for attending the awards ceremonies. Anyone interested in more information about the awards ceremony or other LFS activities at ChiCon can send email to programming@lfs.org.

The Prometheus awards for Best Novel, Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame), and (occasional) Special Awards honor outstanding science fiction and fantasy that explores the possibilities of a free future, champions human rights (including personal and economic liberty), dramatizes the perennial conflict between individuals and coercive governments, or critiques the tragic consequences of abuse of power–especially by the State.

The Prometheus Award, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (lfs.org), was established in 1979, making it one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently in sf. Presented annually since 1982 at the World Science Fiction Convention, the Prometheus Awards include a gold coin and plaque for each of the winners.

Publishers who wish to submit novels published in 2011 for the 2012 Best Novel award should contact Michael Grossberg, Chair of the LFS Prometheus Awards Best Novel Finalist judging committee online at BestNovelChair@lfs.org domain or via postal mail at 3164 Plymouth Place, Columbus OH 43213.

The Hall of Fame, established in 1983, focuses on older classic fiction, including novels, novellas, short stories, poems and plays. Past Hall of Fame award winners range from Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand to Ray Bradbury and Ursula LeGuin.

Founded in 1982, the Libertarian Futurist Society sponsors the annual Prometheus Award and Prometheus Hall of Fame; publishes reviews, news and columns in the quarterly “Prometheus”; arranges annual awards ceremonies at the WorldCon; debates libertarian futurist issues (such as private space exploration); and provides fun and fellowship for libertarian SF fans. All members of the LFS are eligible to nominate eligible works for its awards, and to vote on the Hall of Fame. Full members are eligible to vote on the Best Novel.

A list of past winners of LFS awards can be found on the LFS web site at www.lfs.org

For more information, contact LFS Publicity Chair Chris Hibbert (publicity@lfs.org).

Ernest Cline is a science fiction fan and video game enthusiast who, as a former tech support employee, has spent most of his working hours surfing ’80s pop culture on the internet. As an author, he has successfully drawn from these interests to write an engaging story that weaves new technology with low-tech nostalgia. Although he has previously written about the gaming world (his screenplay Thundercade follows a video gamer’s quest to restore his championship gaming title), Cline takes the concept to an exciting new level in his science fiction novel Ready Player One, Prometheus Award finalist and our June Lightmonthly Read, which offers the reader a full immersion into the world of virtual reality gaming.

Ready Player One begins in the year 2044, and protagonist Wade Watts doesn’t have much going for him in the desolate Portland Avenue Stacks. He’s an overweight, unpopular orphan living with his aunt in a crowded RV park, where the RVs are stacked up to 20 units high in an effort to accommodate everyone in an overpopulated city fraught with power outages and gunfire. Wade finds solace by playing video games and watching reruns of family sitcoms from the ’80s, trying to lose himself in a decade when the world was a simpler and friendlier place. He also spends much of his free time logged into the OASIS, a massively multiplayer online game that has evolved into a virtual reality-based global network.

The online world of OASIS is not without conflict, however. The creator of OASIS, James Halliday, died five years before without naming an heir. At his behest, a contest is being held to determine who will control the OASIS. In his video will, Halliday explains that he has hidden three keys (Copper, Jade, and Crystal) to three gates in the simulated world of the OASIS. The first person to pass through all three gates will become heir to Halliday’s multi-billion dollar estate and gain full control of the OASIS.

Desperate to find a way out of the Stacks, Wade becomes a gunter (short for “egg hunter,” a reference the Easter egg hidden in the video game Adventure). Because Halliday had an infatuation with ’80s pop culture, his death sparks a global obsessive interest; spiked hair and acid-washed jeans come back into style, and gunters attentively study the decade’s fads and trends in hopes of discovering a clue to the keys’ locations.

Wade hopes his own vast knowledge of the decade will give him an edge in the competition, but the odds are against him. He must race to find the keys before they are found by another gunter — or worse, by the Sixers, employees of the dangerous Nolan Sorrento and Innovative Online Industries, a corporation set on gaining control of OASIS at any cost.

While the plot is engaging, the most captivating aspect of the book by far is the world of the OASIS. Through the eyes of Wade’s avatar, Parzival, the reader is invited to explore the virtual world in great detail, and we are able to experience the action firsthand as Parzival travels through the OASIS in his search for the elusive keys. Many of the OASIS zones are modeled after classic video game environments, and some of the more interesting action in Ready Player One takes place in virtual reality arcades, with the characters acting out dialogue from cult classics such as the movie WarGames and trying to beating high scores on the arcade games Joust and Pac Man.  The world of the OASIS is described in great detail; however, little attention is given to the relationships between the characters, and as a result they seem slightly less important than the setting itself.

While Ready Player One has many great elements, there are a few other minor problems with the story that should be pointed out. The book starts with an exciting prologue, but the first few chapters were very slow paced.  Too much time passes without action, with the author writing lengthy descriptions of themes that later prove unimportant to the plot and introducing others that remain undeveloped.

A related problem is that details of the OASIS itself and various pop culture elements seem excessive at times. When considering Cline’s target audience, one wonders why explanations of avatars and chat rooms are necessary. Cline’s readers are most likely already familiar with these concepts, so this only serves to stand in the way of the enjoyment of the story.

In contrast, there were also times when the author intentionally kept information hidden, and dramatic conflicts were resolved by divulging that actions had been taken in the past that allowed the character to easily sidestep the problem. This made the resolution a bit unbelievable, almost as if a bit of cheating had taken place on the author’s end.

Because the villains in the story represent an evil corporation and there is mention of an ongoing global energy crisis and catastrophic climate change, the story seems to have a slightly leftist slant. There is a refreshing passage that states the characters’ preference for private education in the OASIS, which is funded entirely by private charity, because the public school system is “underfunded” and overcrowded.

To my dismay, however, there was nothing overtly libertarian to be found elsewhere in the story. There is virtually no government presence beyond a few minor regulations — such as those pertaining to the purchase of weapons and body armor from vending machines — but it is unclear whether the author views having so little government as a sign of progress or is using the absence of regulation to explain why there is a three-decade Great Recession taking place.

I’m pleased to announce that we’re launching our first book giveaway on Prometheus Unbound. Our very own Matthew Alexander has been generous enough to agree to give away free copies of his libertarian science fiction novel Wĭthûr Wē.

We’ll be giving away ebook copies in Kindle (mobi) format during the entire month of July 2012.

One lucky winner will also receive a signed paperback copy of Wĭthûr Wē.

For more information, click on the link below:

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Please help us promote this book giveaway. Share the book giveaway page (linked above) far and wide.

And congratulations to Matthew whose Wĭthûr Wē recently won the 2012 Libertarian Fiction Book of the Year presented by the Libertarian, Agorist, Voluntaryist & Anarch Authors & Publishers Association (LAVA).

One judge described Wĭthûr Wē as “[a] beautifully written explanation of anarcho-capitalism, without being overly didactic or so steeped in philosophy that the plot suffers.”

Living Proof is the opera prima of Kira Peikoff, the daughter of Ayn Rand’s intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff. In it, Peikoff uses a near-future setting to explore the logical conclusion of certain prolife arguments with which she disagrees. The plot of this thriller is well-structured and the writing, notwithstanding the occasional imperfection, is decent. However, in the end it gave me the same feeling I get from a dish made from good ingredients that nevertheless wants salt. Or pepper. Or oregano. Or something.

Arianna — a protagonist in the Randian tradition — is a brave, rational, free-thinking and beautiful doctor working at a fertility clinic in New York City in the year 2028. Embryos have been given the same legal status as human beings, and the Department of Embryo Protection is tasked with making sure that embryos not used in implantation are frozen and taken care of instead of being disposed of. The DEP chief becomes suspicious of Arianna when her clinic experiences a sudden and inexplicable surge in popularity. He sends Trent Rowe undercover to earn Arianna’s trust so he can find out what she is up to and if she is “murdering” embryos. What Trent discovers will challenge his beliefs, and he must make a choice between what he was raised to believe, and what Arianna has taught him.

Peikoff’s prose is decent, although she occasionally misuses words, which sound like notes of a melody played flat. On page 58, for instance, she uses “pretext” when she means “pretense.” On page 55 she uses “oblivion” when she cannot possibly have meant it.

She also has an affinity for metaphors, some of which go off well and help elucidate an idea. For instance, on page 261 she writes, “But recently the cells had been tantalizingly close to the goal, developing as astrocytes or microglia instead of oligodendrocytes, like Cokes instead of Diet Cokes.” However, there are just as many times when no metaphor is needed, or the one she chooses takes the reader out of the story. A good example is on page 163, where a character is said to be “trapped in an ethical straitjacket, laced tight with emotional strings.” It is not that the metaphor cannot convey the idea, but the particular one used seems a little silly and distracting, like a knowledgeable professor whose belly spills over the waistline of the pants he bought when he was 40 pounds lighter.

Quibbles aside, the novel generally reads smoothly and the story it tells has a solid structure. We are hooked into the plot, and know the stakes, when Trent is given the task of infiltration. Moral dilemmas develop, a few obstacles are put in his way and a sense of urgency is introduced as time begins to run out on both sides, for different reasons. Finally, everything leads to a climax with a short resolution afterwards.

The author undeniably has a grasp on this aspect of storytelling, but the story lacked the impact it might have had. The characters tend to be bland, often representing aggregates of young urban professionals rather than being unique individuals. When the characters are not bland, they lean towards the implausible, such as the head of the DEP who turns out to be a devoutly religious crusader who is enraged at the idea of the disposal of embryos. A little cartoonish, he would probably better represent the activists who lobbied to protect embryos rather than the police and bureaucrats who enforce the laws. There was only one character whom I truly found interesting, and this lack of engagement robs the story of appeal.

There were also a lot of insipid throwaway scenes, usually taking the form of a brief visit to a character to remind us that he is still in the story. During these scenes, the character does little or nothing, but we visit his thoughts to review how he feels about the situation. The story might be scrubbed clean of these bits and come out better for it.

One final thing that distanced me from the story were a few unlikely actions taken by the characters. For instance, to aid Trent in his infiltration, his family and the family of his boss are brought in to stage a dinner for Arianna. The problem is, many of them have to pose as people they are not to maintain Trent’s deceptions, but these are normal people, untrained and unused to this sort of counter-intelligence game. I find it difficult to believe that real investigators would even think to use a tactic like this.

There is a Randian flare for the dramatic that pops up now and then, such as when Arianna begins to take piano lessons and the notes she plays, even from simple scales, are described in effusive terms, leaping from her delicate and deft fingers. Her very soul can be felt even in these simple warm ups, something that I have never experienced in real life but have run into many times in Ayn Rand’s stories. Whether or not this is a flaw I suppose is up to the reader, but I rolled my eyes at it. The ghost of Rand definitely informs much of the work, whether it be the Romantic departures from realism, the praise of reason, the denigration of religion, or the theme of the oppressive state hampering people of quality from making the world a better place. Absent is the virtue of selfishness, which is fine by me.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

One last mention might be made of that spice that seemed to be missing. The story went through the proper motions of buildup and climax, but there was nothing truly arresting. When Trent finds himself unsure of which side he is on and starts lying to both sides, more might have been made of his predicament. There were a few obstacles and character responses to them, but not as much as I felt the story needed. There were no unforeseen twists and no momentum changes. Once the stakes are known, the reader already has a good idea of how things will play out.

END OF SPOILERS

I enjoyed the book, though I was not captivated by it. Being a first work, it leaves some room for improvement but also demonstrates definite skill. A reader could do far worse than invest some time in Living Proof, and might do well to keep an eye on Kira Peikoff. If her sophomore effort improves on some of the weak points mentioned here, it could be a very fine work.

On June 5, acclaimed author Ray Bradbury passed away. I can’t say I have been much affected by the loss. My relationships with most authors typically begin and end within the pages of their books. I find that delving into writers’ and actors’ lives — specifically the components of their political beliefs — is often a disappointing venture to complete. Yet it still saddens me that our world is no longer graced by the man’s presence.

It is interesting that he descended from Mary Bradbury, a woman who was convicted and sentenced to hang in the 1600s during the infamous Salem witch trials. After such brutalities were imposed on the family, I can’t tell if it’s nature or nurture that Ray grew up to be skeptical of the way things were. Among Mary’s other descendents is Ralph Waldo Emerson, the world-renowned individualist writer who grew up to say, “The less government we have the better.” I found out a few years ago that one of my great-great-great-great- ad infinitum grandmothers, too, was prosecuted as a witch during the Puritans’ wicked trials. I can take this only as a fantastic compliment and hope that my antistate relatives were fighting the good fight with the Bradbury family, leading to the libertarian ideals I now cherish so deeply.

Bradbury’s first original book, Fahrenheit 451, is a fiery testament against the censorship of opposing ideas. He maintained repeatedly that the people — not the state — were the book’s antagonists, but the real enemy, more than the actual individuals in question, was their obsession with political correctness, which led to the shredding and burning of old literature in the first place. And as anyone will tell you, we libertarians typically have little patience for political correctness. It does nothing except dilute the true meaning of words and stupefies the population into apathy.

He further touches on this issue in the coda of Fahrenheit 451, spurred by editors erasing the phrases “God-Light” and “in the Presence” from his story. Bradbury writes,

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority … feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

It is possibly why the author found no use for this elitist attitude so frequently found in modern universities. Bradbury didn’t go to college. Many claim this kind of decision turns people into economic underlings. (Ironically enough, Bradbury wrote the first draft of Fahrenheit 451 while physically underneath the UCLA campus.) The fact that the novel is now considered a staple of American literature proves that these pro-university critics were — and, frankly, still are — incorrect.

He spoke of disliking formal education in an interview with the New York Times:

I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

Not every libertarian is anti-university, per se, but most of us do see these overgrown institutions as the accidental offspring of government intervention. A mix of federal agencies, accreditation licenses, and obscene financial-aid packages have converted efficient trade schools into bureaucratic (and thus extremely expensive) nightmares offering courses and majors on topics unrelated to any industry needed in the market. A quick glimpse of today’s public school system, I’m sure, would have shown Bradbury the dystopic stasis he hoped America would never become.

Like us, he held optimism in the people’s ability to correct these problems without the dictates of the nosy politicians scavenging in Washington, DC. This hatred of the state came to light during an interview with Time magazine almost two years ago. When asked if he’d been upholding his antipolitical reputation, Bradbury responded with strong words, making sure to provide some sage advice on the potential of peaceful, loving resolutions:

I don’t believe in government. I hate politics. I’m against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.… All I can do is teach people to fall in love. My advice to them is, do what you love and love what you do. Then you become free of all laws and all gravity.

Indeed. There is little more to add. It’s a shame I never knew these things as I read Bradbury’s books many years ago. Perhaps I would have read them more slowly, paid extra attention to certain paragraphs, and taken a deep breath afterwards to reflect on the chance that maybe, somewhere deep in the plotline, there was more than just a fantasy. The conversation with ancient writers, the nonstop rain on a distant rock, watching the earth catch on fire from the edge of Mars — we’ll probably never know if these descriptions were symbols of something we’ll finally understand years into the future.

But this we do know: a wonderful human being — who left behind a literary legacy of fighting for the freedom to acquire and share knowledge — passed away as Venus and the sun crossed paths; the two symbols of love and truth mark a beautiful end to a life we’ll remember for a long time.

They all came out and looked at the sky that night.… There was Earth and there the coming war, and there hundreds of thousands of mothers and grandmothers or fathers or brothers or aunt or uncles or cousins. They stood on the porches and tried to believe in the existence of Earth, much as they had once tried to believe in the existence of Mars. (The Martian Chronicles)

[Mises Daily]

You can also read the transcript below:

Ray Bradbury celebrated his 90th birthday this past Sunday. He was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, a medium-sized town of around 20,000 people about midway between Chicago and Milwaukee on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Bradbury has depicted Waukegan fondly, even idyllically, in his fiction, most notably in his 1957 novel Dandelion Wine — even though the Waukegan conjured up in that book, which is set in 1928, is a bit larger than the Waukegan Bradbury was born into in 1920. The town’s population grew by more than 50 percent during the ’20s. By the beginning of the Great Depression, there were more than 33,000 people who called Waukegan home. The Bradbury family was not to be among these people for much longer, however.

They had already spent a year in Tucson, Arizona in the ’20s, for reasons having to do with Ray’s father’s employment. Tucson was where Ray attended first grade. And in school year 1932/33, when Ray was 12, they were back in Tucson again. Then, after a few months cleaning up loose ends in Waukegan, not long before Ray’s 14th birthday, they moved to Los Angeles, where they remained. Ray Bradbury himself is there to this day. It was in Los Angeles that he went through high school and in Los Angeles that he launched his extremely successful career as a fiction writer.

It is common to hear Ray Bradbury described as a “science-fiction writer,” but this is misleading at best. Only a minority of Bradbury’s total production is science fiction by any normal standard, and at least half of it is straightforward realistic fiction like Dandelion Wine. The fact is, however, that Bradbury’s second, third, and fourth books, his first three books to come to widespread attention —The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) — were works of science fiction, or, at least, were widely believed to be. Bradbury was typecast early, you might say. He came to fame as a “science-fiction writer,” and a “science-fiction writer” he will therefore forever remain.

For our purposes here, on the other hand, Bradbury’s most important book is undeniably the third of those titles I just listed: Fahrenheit 451, his short novel about censorship, one of the most influential libertarian novels of the 20th century, first published nearly 60 years ago. And of all Ray Bradbury’s books, Fahrenheit 451 is probably the one most entitled to be called “science fiction.”

It describes an American society of the indeterminate but probably fairly near future in which possession of books is illegal. In an emergency — if, for example, an individual is found to be in possession of a sizable collection of books — the local fire department is summoned. The firemen arrive on a truck, dressed in fire-resistant clothing and carrying hoses. But their hoses pump, not water, but kerosene, which they use to drench the illegal collection of books they’ve been called to take care of, along with the rest of the house in which they’re stored. Then they set the whole sodden mess afire and watch it burn to the ground.

Actually, not all books are illegal in Bradbury’s America of the probably fairly near future. Or so, at least, it would appear. For when Guy Montag, the young fireman who is the main character ofFahrenheit 451, poses a question to his colleagues at the local firehouse — “In the old days, before homes were completely fireproofed,” he asks them, “didn’t firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them up and get them going?” — they answer him by consulting “their rule books, which also contained brief histories of the Firemen of America.”

According to these rule books, the Firemen of America was “established [in] 1790, to burn English-influenced books in the Colonies.” The “First Fireman,” according to the rule books, was Benjamin Franklin. Like all state-sponsored official history, this relies on a certain level of ignorance in its readers if it is to have its full intended effect. The firemen reading the rule books should be unaware, for example, that by 1790 “the Colonies” had been politically independent from England for seven years, and that Benjamin Franklin, in 1790, was 84 years old and on his deathbed. It would help if the firemen reading these rule books were also unaware that Franklin really was a pioneer fireman, though it was in the 1730s not the 1790s, and he was, of course, the kind of fireman who puts fires out and prevents them rather than the kind who stokes fires and gets them going. Of course, in a society whose government banned the possession of any books that taught any contrary, revisionist history, such a level of ignorance might be fairly easy to maintain in the general population.

It might be argued that people don’t have to have books, necessarily, to stave off such ignorance. They could get correct information about history from other media. And this is true. Today, for example, people can get such information from the Internet, and we haven’t even reached the future yet.  There is no Internet in Fahrenheit 451. There is only television.  In fact, television is very close to omnipresent. But it is a kind of television that could exist only with the assistance of computer technology.

A typical middle-class home in the world ofFahrenheit 451 has an entire room devoted to TV, with the images being received on huge screens that cover three or four of the walls in that room. In some programs, the viewer is given a small part, addressed by name by the other characters, and assigned a few lines to speak. But never is any actual information of any lasting importance conveyed to the viewer.

Bradbury never makes it perfectly clear whether the utter mindlessness of television in the world of Fahrenheit 451 is a result of government censorship or an outcome of market processes. It unquestionably might be the latter. One of his characters, a retired English professor and secret lover of books named Faber, speaks contemptuously of “the solid unmoving cattle of the majority,” and it is, of course, majorities that markets serve best. “Remember,” Faber tells Montag at one point, “the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it’s a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line.”

And why did the public itself stop reading of its own accord? Because so many of the individuals who made up that public wanted to avoid ever being offended by reading anything they didn’t already believe. And most of the rest wanted to avoid having to think at all — they wanted to avoid difficult decisions, the strain of trying to focus their minds on ideas that could plausibly be looked at and understood in more than one way.

Another of Bradbury’s characters, a fire chief named Beatty, explains the part about being offended in a key conversation that takes place about a third of the way into the novel. “Let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we?” Beatty says to Montag.

Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! … Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. … There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time.

“Ask yourself,” Beatty says to Montag, “What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say.” According to Beatty, one part of what has to be done to make people happy is to make them feel equal to everybody else. “Surely,” he says to Montag,

you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally “bright,” did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

“Why did the public itself stop reading of its own accord? Because so many of the individuals who made up that public wanted to avoid ever being offended by reading anything they didn’t already believe.”

Keeping people happy, Beatty tells Montag, also requires that you avoid confusing them or expecting them to judge between competing ideas. “If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him,” Beatty tells Montag, “give him one. Better yet, give him none. … If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it.”

In the space of a crucial week, Montag himself opts to worry instead of being mindlessly happy. He has been vaguely aware for a while now that, despite the government’s best efforts on his behalf, he is not, in fact, happy. His wife drifts mindlessly through her nights and days in a haze induced either by sleeping pills or by radio and TV. She no longer has anything to say to her husband, who has become, at best, an afterthought in her life.

Montag has been stealing the occasional book from the clandestine libraries he is assigned to burn. By the time of the beginning of Fahrenheit 451, he has accumulated maybe 20 of these books and has stuffed them into a hiding place he has devised behind an air-conditioning grill in the ceiling of his suburban house. He has tentatively decided to take a look at these books, see for himself what they contain, why they’re illegal.

Then one night on his way home from work, he meets a 16-year-old girl on the street. It turns out she’s his next-door neighbor, a girl who likes taking walks in the evening, a girl with a startlingly different way of looking at things and the world — a girl who, perhaps unwittingly, encourages Montag’s growing determination to rebel, if only in a small way, against the system that, at least through his employment, sustains him. Within a week of meeting the 16-year-old Clarisse, Montag has murdered his fire chief and destroyed his station’s expensive, high-tech Mechanical Hound. He has left his wife, gone on the lam, and joined an underground organization of men and women, each of whom has committed one or more books to memory, awaiting the day when it will once again be legal to print, sell, and read such things.

Fahrenheit 451 has become one of the most influential libertarian novels of the past century, in large part through the efforts of schoolteachers in both public and private institutions of learning. Virtually anyone who has gone through 7th, 8th, and 9th grades in this country in the past 40 years has likely been assigned Fahrenheit 451 in an English class. When I was in 7th, 8th, and 9th grades myself only a few years earlier, between 1958 and 1961, Fahrenheit 451 was not yet part of the official curriculum; instead, it was one of those books students were likely to be seen carrying around with them, in some sort of cheap, mass-market paperback edition, to read on their own time, for pleasure.

The fact that students liked it was, of course, one of the reasons it became part of the official curriculum. Here was a book you didn’t have to struggle to get kids to read. Also it was a book that would raise the hackles of few, if any parents; there was no sex in it at all, and only a few hells anddamns by way of so-called bad language.

On top of all that, for a libertarian novel it was really fairly kind in its depiction of the state. It absolves the state of blame for starting the war on books. It acknowledges that powerful impulses toward mindless conformity and suppression of deviation exist in the population itself — that, on a deep level, many, many people want to be “protected” by the state from the risk of being offended and from the necessity of thinking for themselves.

And so it is that a large segment of our population knows this book because it was assigned in school. For many, it is probably one of the few good things school ever did for them. The downside of the situation is that millions of these people, probably the majority of them, have not looked at Bradbury’s remarkable little novel for years, since they were 13 or 14 years old.

It’s worth another look.

[This article was first published online as a Mises Daily article and is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451."]

One cannot help but notice that, cinematically speaking, director Ridley Scott’s best days seem to be behind him. They were glorious days, though short lived; nothing after Blade Runner could compare to his second and third films. One might also note that he left his best days behind at precisely the time when he left behind science fiction. It is understandable, then, if one supposes that a return to the genre that made him might also be a return to form. Alas, it is not so. Scott’s latest feature, Prometheus, is a disappointment even for one whose expectations were not that lofty.

Prometheus returns us to the universe of Alien, that sublime work of sci-fi horror that remade an entire genre. This time, it is the late twenty-first century, a few decades before Ripley, Dallas, Parker, and the rest will land on LV426. Cave paintings all over the world, and from many different millennia, have been found to depict a giant gesturing to the stars as smaller, human forms worship him. Through means not satisfactorily explained, two scientists, Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) and Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), determine that this is an invitation from a race that created our kind. Not only that, but they are able to pinpoint the star system to which we have been beckoned. The infamous Weyland-Yutani corporation bankrolls a scientific expedition to the system and danger ensues.

A strange approach to the movie is taken, one which is a peculiar fit for a prequel to Alien. Whereas the original started when the story started, introduced us to believable characters whom we slowly came to know only by how they acted and interacted, and got down to the business of slowly creeping us out before scaring us senseless, Prometheus attempts a good deal more. It begins with an ill-advised prologue in which we see one of the mysterious beings, instead of discovering them for the first time with the crew later in the movie. After the prologue we see the prelude to the expedition, the scientists discovering one of the cave paintings, something rendered entirely unnecessary when they explain it all to the crew anyway after coming out of hypersleep. They even spend some time with character back story.

One of the keys to horror is how much is shown to the audience. It is often scarier to see less; perhaps I should say usually scarier. Alien achieved a consonance with this idea in its streamlined script. We might have been shown a prologue of the original Space Jockey crashing into the planet, followed by a title saying 2000 YEARS LATER, as we faded to the Nostromo crew finishing up final preparations for the trip back to Earth. We might have been given all sorts of backstory for the characters, but we were not. We saw only enough to orient ourselves and connect with the seven men and women on board, and the movie opens as late into the story as it can. This informational parsimony is a key to Alien’s enduring success; it sets the right tone, keeps us in the right frame of mind for a horror flick. Prometheus, I am sad to report, overindulges.

If that were its only sin, it would be forgivable and the movie still a success. Unfortunately, the script is so poorly written that I am tempted to declare that the reason for Lost’s decline has been discovered. All sorts of mistakes are committed, mistakes one would not expect to see from a mildly talented amateur.

First of all, there is no attempt to show us competent science in progress, and this happens more than once. When the cave painting is discovered, Holloway asks Shaw if she has dated it yet. This despite that fact that she only found it a few minutes earlier before calling for him to come see. Yet she gives him an answer accurate to within a millennium. I have never worked with cave paintings, but I just feel like this is implausible.

Later on, when the ship arrives at its star system and the crew awake, they eat one meal, have a pep talk, and directly land on their target moon without pause, preparation, or deliberation of any sort. I have never flown a starship, but I just feel like this is implausible. They rather quickly find a likely spot for alien activity and land next to some ancient structure. Without pause, preparation, or deliberation, they exit the ship and go exploring, showing less prudence and circumspection than one would expect from a Kindergarten class’s field trip (they rush inside, start pressing and prodding things and even take their helmets off when they learn the air is breathable). I have never excavated and explored alien structures, but I just feel like this is implausible.

Characters behave in strange ways just so something plotful can happen. When they first enter the structure, they come across an alien cadaver. The geologist becomes angry that they are spending their time studying it because it has nothing to do with his line of work. Instead of being fascinated by the discovery of an intelligent extraterrestrial species, or just getting down to doing his work with his own equipment, he yells at Shaw and declares that since there is nothing there for him, he is going back to the ship. While completely without logic of any sort, it does get him separated from the group so that scary things can happen. In another instance, one character deliberately infects another, and the motive is never revealed. But it does allow for an awesome fight scene later on.

MILD SPOILERS MILD SPOILERS

Even the laws of science itself are cast aside and shattered. A procedure is performed on a cadaver so old that it should have been dust, but they are able to jam something into its skull and use electricity to spark some life into it, despite knowing little about its anatomy. The Space Jockey’s DNA is revealed to be an exact match to ours. Even setting aside the Darwinian problems with this, no human who ever lived has come out looking like what these things look like; they simply cannot be an exact match to our DNA (so the previous point still stands).

Also, the head of a nasty little creature is cut off and it regrows in less time than it takes to read this sentence. I realize that the one implausible point of Alien was that the chestburster somehow grew to enormous size in such a short time without, apparently, eating much. But at least one character expressed surprise at this, a surprise we all shared, and the discovery of the skin it was shedding, like a snake, made for a nice step in the development of that thread.

Prometheus’ deviations from reality are many and entirely without rhythm or development. They just throw one thing after another at the viewer. Worst of all, perhaps, are the physical feats performed by a character mere seconds after getting a C-section.

END OF SPOILERS END OF SPOILERS

Finally, the cheap and lazy approach to the script leaves certain threads undeveloped or unfinished. They are merely forgotten. To cite one example, there is a big fight scene with multiple fatalities that occurs in the hangar/garage of the human spaceship. It happens and then is forgotten. Did anybody ever clean up the mess? Did anybody ever miss anyone who died there, or bury the bodies? Did it damage anything vital to their mission?

As far as I recall, the fight scene had no effect on the rest of the movie, and yet the human response to something like that is a good engine to drive the plot. In the original Alien, the death of Kane led to an effective scene where his body was shot out into space. Even if the fight scene had been the most wonderful thing ever filmed, it still hurts the integrity of the larger project because it has no effect on the movie, like a rock thrown in a lake that makes no splash or ripples. One gets the sense that it is there merely to be an action scene, and once the action is over, the writers did not want to be bothered with it anymore.

Despite some gorgeous photography and philosophical pretensions, Prometheus mainly deals in the sort of experiences one can get from a roller coaster. To do more, it would have to honor logic and character actions, make sure that the scenes were not only impeccable, but that they came together to form a coherent whole. These elements of logic of character and plot are what can pull an audience into the story and make it special. These are the elements that make it a story in the first place, and not merely an action demo reel.

Prometheus, however, is a cheap story, and it cheapens the Alien universe. I long ago wrote off Alien Resurrection as a movie that never happened, but that film did not try to ruin previous films. Prometheus might be harder to erase. It took the tantalizing enigma of the Space Jockey and killed its wonder by solving the mystery. Perhaps if the solution had been captivating it would have done no damage, but it turns out the Space Jockey race was engaged in acts fully as illogical as the actions of some of the characters in the movie. Maybe the project was simply doomed from the start as soon as it set its sights on that cryptic, fossilized pilot from another planet, the one who fascinated generations of fans. After all, who would remember a serial killer of prostitutes in London in 1889 if his identity had been discovered?

Science fiction prequels are going to get a bad name. George Lucas and Ridley Scott have taken the best franchises the genre has to offer and given us lame precursor stories, though Scott’s is nowhere near as bad as Lucas’s. Even if there is nothing in the present film to appall the libertarian — the theme of the evil corporation is hardly even detectable — there is plenty to displease cinemagoers of all political persuasions. And now I see that Ridley Scott is going to work on a Blade Runner project?

Someone stop him before it is too late.

In the Shadow of Ares is a tale with a marvelous setting and a great central idea that, as it unfolds, wraps the reader up and will not let go. It is also a minarchist libertarian tale, in that the dangerous, punitive, and stupid aspects of government are laid bare while the readers are urged to hold government in check to allow the market to better flourish. There is a lot here to like, but there are also a number of defects that mar the work, though nothing to such a degree and of such a nature as to make one pessimistic about better future prospects for the first-time authors. They have shown that they can design and fashion a stirring tale; let us hope that they polish the next one.

Amber Jacobsen is the First Kid on Mars, the first child born there to parents who were among the earliest colonists. It is thought that Mars is too dangerous for children, and Amber’s parents have been chided for deciding to remain and have a child there. Even in her teenage years, she remains the only child ever to be born on Mars.

Having homesteaded some land where they live in an airtight “hab,” sheltered from the lethal conditions on the Martian surface, Amber’s parents, Aaron and Lindsey, have earned the ire of the Mars Development Authority, a quasi-governmental organization that no one will stand up to and that wishes to extend its power and control over every colonist on the red planet. In addition to the effrontery of daring to live free, Aaron Jacobsen has also made enemies with one of the officials at the MDA. When the MDA secretly sabotage the Jacobsen residence, they are forced to find another place to live.

They make their way to The Green, a relatively large settlement that figures to be of central importance in the new Martian society as soon as their land claim vests. This the MDA does not want to see happen, because it means they will lose all authority over them, both the authority spelled out in The Charter — analogous to the US Constitution — and any authority that the MDA has helped itself to.

Amber finds herself unwanted because of her age, though she yearns to be taken seriously. While trying to prove herself to the people of The Green, she also becomes deeply invested in the mystery of the Ares III mission, which disappeared a couple decades before under perplexing circumstances. She starts to suspect that someone who knows more than she is trying to prevent her from making any headway in her search and is willing to take criminal measures if necessary.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment in the story, for me, is that it creeps up on the edge of a real radical libertarianism, but then shies away (the second disappointment would be an implied support of intellectual property, which simply has no place in a libertarian order). There is no better example of this than the endless bickering with the MDA over The Charter. They argue about whether it is a living document or meant to be taken at its word, but never do they question the legitimacy of the document itself, nor the reason the MDA should be telling them what they can do on Mars as if it owned every stretch of the planet’s surface. This is not a criticism of the merits of the novel, merely a wish to see more Rothbardianism in my literature, especially in a work that comes so close.

There are other problems too, though they cannot hide the talent that is definitely there. The villains are caricatures, for example, and never quite elicit the response in the reader that the authors are going for, because they cannot be taken seriously. Not only that, but there is an implausibility to the interactions of characters, particularly enemies, that is difficult to get past at times. When the authors want to demonstrate something between characters, they lay it on good and thick. Even the familial interactions of the Jacobsens, which do not suffer the kind of overplayed antagonism of so many other relationships, never rise above the formulaic kind one can find by the dozen on any number of television stations when sitcoms are running.

More problematic still is the structure of the book, the layout of the plot. It takes a long time to discover what it is really about. This is strange given the intricacy of the central plot and how many setups for it were introduced early on, seeds that will bear fruit later. The authors, then, either knew what the book was about when they wrote the first act and simply did not want to get into it yet, or went back later, with things clearer in their minds, and added in needed details but without streamlining the story.

When the novel does find itself, there follow about twenty to twenty-five chapters that had me constantly reaching for my wife’s Kindle during every spare moment so that I could read a little further. Though character interactions were mediocre, the inner life of the main character as revealed to us makes us care about her. The actual investigation into the Ares III mission, especially as it gets going, is truly a wonder of well-placed details, plausible dead ends, and red herrings that fit together without, as far as I can tell, a single slip in logic. Bravo. Hollywood could use a couple writers who can make a mystery like that.

The villain is finally revealed and we get some gripping life-or-death action scenes, which are well set up and even turn out plausibly enough to keep my interest. When the laws of physics are broken too badly too often, I grow bored. I most definitely was not during In the Shadow of Ares’ climactic scenes.

I did grow bored in the score of chapters that followed the climax. The main point of the story has been resolved, for good or ill, the villain revealed, the chase and fight scenes enacted, and the winner declared. However, lots of unsynchronized story arcs have to be wrapped up, but the momentum has been lost. No one wants to munch on crackers and brie after the chocolate cake has been devoured. These items need to be rebalanced within the story, so that they can come to their conclusion during or before the climax, with one last chapter to show the result of The Green’s struggle with the MDA. A denouement cannot be a full quarter of the book.

The first Lightmonthly Read gave us a book that was at times tedious, but often a true thrill. To give a net grade would miss these details, but all in all I would say I had some fun reading it. I also think there is real talent in this writing duo, considering their obvious technical knowledge and their ability to forge a top notch mystery. One is left hoping that their sophomore effort will come with an increased mastery of the other aspects of storytelling.

Having never read a Ken MacLeod novel before, I found my introduction to him to be a bit rocky. The opening chapters of The Restoration Game were replete with irritants. After that it settled down and started to tell an interesting story, but never quite managed to completely convince. It had the right ingredients for a better tale, but it could not get the doses right and wound up feeling, for all its positive points, out of balance.

The story’s protagonist, Lucy Stone, spent most of her childhood in the fictional Soviet Republic of Krassnia, but now works for a computer game company in Edinburgh. Her company is hired to make a Krassnian version of a popular medieval computer game, and her heritage and lingual abilities, rare to be found in the West, are the reason her company was chosen. There is more to this request for a Krassnian video game than is initially apparent, however. Lucy’s mother is a former CIA operative, and another man who might be her father is mired in the same kind of political intrigue. Through them Lucy gets entangled in an international plot the details of which are murky but the danger in which becomes increasingly apparent. Finally, she finds herself on a mission with consequences so far reaching that “epic” does not seem to do them justice.

The novel opens with a prologue written in second person, which constitutes the first irritant. I do not see the point of second person, unless it is to make the author seem a little overbearing, informing a reader what he is doing instead of telling him about a story. To me, it seems like a cheap way to “be different.” It is fortunate that there are only three second person chapters in the book, all with a commonality that one supposes the shared difference in perspective is meant to highlight.

It is unfortunate that the second chapter is a flash forward to near the end of the book. In it, the narrator is clearly on the verge of a very traumatic experience, but its effect is attenuated by the fact that we do not know what the problem is, or The Other Thing that she refers to, and we cannot much care about her since we have not gotten to know her yet. Any effect of the mysteriousness of this Other Thing evaporates when we realize it is a flash forward, and must make another jarring jump before the story can get started.

Finally, three chapters in, we are introduced to a protagonist at the beginning of a story and start to get to know her. Her narration style reminds one of a fourteen-year-old girl on the phone with a fellow teenybopper. Soon after, she jumps into backstory. So the initial chapters of the book consist of odd bits of second person narrative, an annoying narrator with a less than propitious voice for this sort of story, and leaps from one time frame to another that are apt to give the reader whiplash. We get a perspective of someone, us apparently, outside our universe, then a future time frame, then a present time frame, then a past time frame.

This is the sort of thing that makes me regret opening a book in the first place, but there were two redeeming qualities about the beginning, qualities that gave me hope that the book would get better (the narrator’s voice also got less irritating, or perhaps I just accustomed myself to it). The first was a bit of cleverness after the prologue, the kind you do not get from writers of no talent.

I stopped dead. My rolling case, in accordance with Newton’s first law of motion, kept rolling and collided painfully with my calf muscles. It then rebounded (third law), toppled over (second law), and made me stumble (Murphy’s law).

The second was a small section in the prologue that hints at a profound and very arresting idea:

“… you have brought those poor creatures to the brink of disaster. Nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, and what else? Oh yes — cultural calamity, as they discover they are in a simulation. How long will it take for that to dawn on them?”

“Blame the SPs for that,” says Andrea Memmius. “They used an off-the-shelf navigational package as the basis for their extrasolar astronomy simulation. Naturally it is Ptolemaic. They were not to know—”

“That their virtual creations would one day send probes to the edge of the solar system? That they might just notice that the galaxies are spinning too fast? That the underlying physics of their world are inconsistent?”

“So far,” says Caro Odom, “the sim-people have shown remarkable creativity in rationalizing these… dark matters!”

We are given to understand, then, that our universe is a simulation. It is also what I interpret as a dig at modern conventional physics, and one that maybe they have coming (for those interested in these sorts of things, there is, on page 233, a clear reference to MOND). However, it comes as a disappointment to discover, by degrees, that the story is too small for a concept like that. It has too little time to apportion to it, given the other tasks it sets for itself.

MAJOR SPOILER MAJOR SPOILER

This conceit of a simulated universe is forgotten until the end of the novel. When Lucy finally, at the end of her mission, finds evidence of it, it feels tacked on, a foreign element in a story that is not intrinsically about it. The idea is not, insofar as I can tell, hinted at, talked about, or developed in any way after its introduction in the prologue. Then it resurfaces in the final act.

Perhaps The Restoration Game could be improved by omitting the prologue, by introducing a mystery whose elements baffle investigators through the course of the book until the final answer is hinted at in the end, when Lucy discovers a great secret. That way, it would have been a part of the story the whole time, but subtle enough not to give the game away, rather than an addition on the front and back of a story otherwise unconcerned about the topic. And better yet, it might have been left tantalizingly inconclusive rather than definite.

END OF SPOILER END OF SPOILER

Lucy’s family history is delved into several times, either by her telling us what she knows, or reading an old diary and relating it to us, or hearing stories from others who were there. The backstory itself is intriguing, but the time devoted to it is out of proportion to the other elements of the novel. By the time it is finally told, with the exception of an important reveal at the end, we are over halfway through the book. Meanwhile, very little is advanced or developed in the current timeline. Lucy meets a guy, they fall in love, she works on her video game project.

The current timeline is mostly to put her in situations so that the reader can read more of the backstory. Then, with the majority of the book’s pages used up, the current timeline suddenly kicks into gear and Lucy goes on a very rushed mission that runs her smack dab into, as I have said, a gigantic idea that towers over the small novel like a colossus.

Complaints aside, I did enjoy the book. The backstory is too much, but it is interesting. Several generations of Lucy’s family are explored and they have some remarkable history. I also felt the author did a crafty job of mixing the events of his story with the turmoil in Ossetia and Georgia that happened in real life. Apparently, these unforeseen events, occurring while he was writing the book, forced him to make some last minute changes. This he pulls off marvelously.

The one thing I cannot figure — not about the book per se, but rather about reaction to it — is why this would get a Prometheus Award nomination. I do not see anything particularly libertarian about it. It explores some of the nastier aspects of communism, but even socialists are given to do that once in a while. Indeed, in seeing the sensitivity to nuance with which the author paints the different brands of communists, one might suspect him of being, if not in the fold, some sort of ideological cousin. Certainly he has gotten to know the movement.

It also does not paint the CIA in a wonderful light, but a book cannot be called libertarian simply because it opposes some of the same things a libertarian does. There are no libertarian characters; the sympathetic ones are just about uniformly social democrats. This might be realistic for a novel principally set, in one timeline at least, in modern-day Edinburgh, but it is hardly libertarian. Nor is there any attempt, so far as I can discern, to make an understated libertarian point about the things going on in the book.

I suppose that is not my concern. The Prometheus Awards may nominate whom they wish, and one imagines there is a paucity of truly libertarian material out there. What does concern me is whether or not I like the book, and I did. Sort of.

How gigantically humongous and intrusive is the federal government? A traditional measure is to look at the pages of regulations in the Federal Register, which is, by now, probably the world’s largest book collection. The problem with this approach is that it takes no account of how a single bad regulation can have monstrously deleterious effects.

Copyright regulation is a good example of this. There was no universal enforcement until the very late part of the 19th century, and terms were mostly short in the early days of this regulation. In the course of the 20th century, regulations became ever more tight and the copyright terms ever longer, so much so that today, the words you sign away to a conventional publisher are theirs to keep for your lifetime plus 70 years!

One standard argument for doing this is that noncopyrighted works will not be efficiently exploited. You have to assign ownership or else the resource will vanish into the ether. No one will care about it, and civilization will lose extremely valuable literary works. Our market for ideas will be impoverished.

Now, to me, this argument seems obviously false, but that’s probably because of my own experience in publishing. I’ve seen it happen — so many times that it is predictable — that once a work has fallen out of print but is still under some kind of protection, it is mostly neglected by the heirs. No one who “owns” the work has the incentive to bring it to light, while those who care about it fear the law or don’t want to pay some arbitrary price set by the owners.

Meanwhile, when a work is public domain, there are dozens of people bidding to get it into print. This was true all throughout history, actually. The reason American school kids in the 19th century read British literature is that it was not regulated in the United States, and therefore, it could be sold very cheaply and distributed very widely. It is true today: Whether music or books, the material in the commons is far more in demand than that which is regulated. And the demand leads to the supply.

In other words, the opposite of the conventional exploitation theory is correct. The copyrighted works drop from memory, while the public domain works last and last. But of course, this observation draws from my deep involvement in the industry, and we can’t expect academic scribblers to understand anything about how the world actually works in real life.

One academic, however, actually bothered to test the theory that protected works are more widely available than works in the commons. The research of Paul Heald of the University of Illinois College of Law shows that public domain works are far more widely distributed, while protected works have a habit of falling down the memory hole.

Lately, he worked with a research assistant who came up with a script that dug through the Amazon.com book inventory to look for books currently in print and their years of publication. With the invention of scanners and print-on-demand technology, there was an explosion of works — and, of course, works that are in public domain because they were published before 1922.

The point is thereby thoroughly proven, and the “market failure” argument against the free market is once again debunked:

But there is more significance to this chart than meets the eye. For years, I’ve suspected that there was a serious problem developing due to government regulations. There is a vast gap into which millions of books have fallen. They can be reprinted or republished only at high risk and expense. Many of these books have uncertain copyright status, the “owners” are asking too high a price or can’t be found, or are orphaned. The costs are too high. I’ve had experiences with probably a hundred or so titles in this class, and I’ve always assumed that thousands or millions more fall into this category.

There was a brief moment in the early days of Google when the company naively imagined that it could do the right thing and make all of this literature available for instant viewing and printing. They had the technology to rescue it all and bring it to the whole world. Publishers, backed by regulations that favor them, went bonkers. Google tried a profit-sharing agreement. Didn’t work. Finally, Google bailed and cooperated with the prevailing system.

The results you see in this graph. There is an 80-year black hole in which literature is being buried. In some ways, a whole century of ideas is being forced under a rock by government in league with large publishers. And it is getting worse by the day. Publishers are going through their back catalogs and threatening anyone who puts even a scrap online. Not that they plan new editions; they are just claiming what they think of as their assets.

This is a case of incredibly tragic loss. As you can see from the above chart, the literature of 1850 is more available than the literature of 1970. How preposterous is that? This is all a direct result of unprecedented, outrageous regulations that have effectively put a censorship veil over history’s most productive period of literary creation. This entire world is trapped in libraries that no one visits or is being put on remainder racks so that libraries can create more space for coffee bars.

There is a more general lesson that pertains to all government regulations. Even one line can be impossibly damaging to industry and to social advancement. It is extremely difficult to quantify the losses. This is just one case, but it is an important one because it deals with the most important thing any civilization possesses: its treasury of ideas. That treasury has been thrown to the bottom of the sea. Someday, explorers will discover it and wonder how any society could have let this happen even though it had the means to do otherwise.

[LFB]

Brian Doherty of Reason.com was able to visit the set of Atlas Shrugged, Part II — Either-Or, based on Ayn Rand’s inspiring novel, during part of its ongoing 31 day shoot. After poor box office sales and being panned by critics, including our own Matthew Alexander (read his review), many wondered whether the second and third installments would ever be filmed. Encouraging DVD and VOD sales convinced the wealthy “rights”-holder, John Aglialoro, to persevere and a few new Randian investors to hop on board. I’m not sure whether the budget is the same, but in a risky move two things certainly aren’t: the director and the entire cast.

Yes, you read that right. The director and the entire cast from the first film were not retained for the second and third installments. The irony is not lost on those of us who both recognize that so-called intellectual property is illegitimate and are painfully aware of how fiercely most followers of Ayn Rand cling to it that copyright appears to have played a major role in this potentially devastating turnover. As one of the producers, Harmon Kaslow, himself explains,

just from a practical standpoint when we set out to make Part I we had a ticking clock where if we didn’t start production by a certain date John’s interest in the rights could lapse. We didn’t have the luxury at that moment to negotiate future options with the various cast members.

The need to rush to get the first movie filmed no doubt had a negative effect on its quality as well.

Kaslow tries to alleviate our doubts, ”The message of Atlas is greater than any particular actor, so it’s one of those pieces of literature that doesn’t require in our view the interpretation by a singular actor.” But, I’m sorry to say, while this is true, replacing the cast destroys the integrity of the three-part film as an artistic work — at least for me. It simply cannot be viewed as a seamless whole. There will be a jarring effect from the discontinuity in the transition from the first to the second installment.

The new director will be “John Putch (a TV veteran with many episodes of Scrubs and Cougar Town behind him),” so we can safely assume that, with a small budget and a tv director, Atlas Shrugged, Part II will feel more like a made-for-tv movie than a professional Hollywood film.

In light of Atlas Shrugged, Part I and these revelations, I cannot say I have much hope that the remaining installments will be good films.

Here’s a brief run-down of some of the new cast:

• Jason Beghe, ”most recently of Californication,” as Hank Rearden;
• Esai Morales, “most recently seen as Caprica‘s Joseph Adama,” as Francisco D’Anconia;
• Samantha Mathis, “perhaps most famously of Pump Up the Volume opposite Christian Slater,” as Dagny Taggart.

On the plus side, a new screenwriter has been brought on board; apparently this Duncan Scott worked with Ayn Rand on a bootleg film adaptation of We the Living.

What’s your opinion of the first film and the prospects going forward in light of these revelations? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Read the full story of Brian Doherty’s experience on set.

Back in February, the Libertarian Futurist Society announced the 2012 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award finalists. Over the weekend, on March 31st, they announced the 2012 finalists for the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian Novel.

Below is the most of the press release.

io9 picked up the press release as well; the comments offer up a predictable ton of FAIL, so you might want to read them for a good laugh or avoid them if you have a low tolerance for stupidity and ignorance.

The first finalist on the list, The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge, was reviewed by Matthew Dawson back in February. But we still need reviews of the rest of the finalists, preferably before the winner is voted on.

As a reminder to our readers, we are open to submissions of reviews (as well as news, articles, interviews), whether you’d like to contribute regularly, irregularly, or just once.

So if you’d like to read and review one of the finalists, nominees, past winners, or another piece of fiction, we’d be happy to consider it for publication.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 31, 2012

2012 PROMETHEUS AWARD FINALISTS ANNOUNCED

The Libertarian Futurist Society has announced finalists for this year’s Prometheus Awards, which will be presented during the 70th World Science Fiction Convention over Labor Day weekend in Chicago.

The Prometheus finalists for Best Novel recognize pro-freedom novels published last year:

The Children of the Sky (TOR Books) — A sequel to Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and in the same universe as Prometheus-winning A Deepness in the Sky, this novel focuses on advanced humans, stranded and struggling to survive on a low-tech planet populated by Tines, dog-like creatures who are only intelligent when organized in packs. The most libertarian of the three human factions and their local allies must cope with the world’s authoritarian factions to advance peaceful trade over war and coercion.

The Freedom Maze (Small Beer Press) — Delia Sherman’s young-adult fantasy novel focuses on an adolescent girl of 1960 who is magically sent back in time to 1860 when her family owned slaves on a Louisiana plantation. With her summer tan, she’s mistaken for a slave herself, and she learns the hard way what life was like.  In the process, she comes to appreciate the values of honor, respect, courage, and personal responsibility.

In the Shadow of Ares (Amazon Kindle edition) — This young-adult first novel by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson focuses on a Mars-born female teenager in a near-future, small civilization on Mars, where hardworking citizens are constantly and unjustly constrained by a growing, centralized authority whose excessive power has led to corruption and conflict.

Ready Player One (Random House) — Ernest Cline’s genre-busting blend of science fiction, romance, suspense, and adventure describes a virtual world that has managed to evolve an order without a state and where entrepreneurial gamers must solve virtual puzzles and battle real-life enemies to save their virtual world from domination and corruption. The novel also stresses the importance of allowing open access to the Internet for everyone.

The Restoration Game (Pyr Books) — Set in a world whose true nature is a deeper mystery, this philosophical and political thriller by Ken MacLeod (winner of Prometheus awards for Learning the World, The Star Fraction, and The Stone Canal) explores the dark legacy of communism and the primacy of information in shaping what is “reality” amid Eastern European intrigue, online gaming, romance and mystery.

Snuff (Harper Collins) — A Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett (winner of a Prometheus Award for Night Watch, also set in Discworld),  Snuff blends comedy, drama, satire, suspense and mystery as a police chief investigates the murder of a goblin and finds himself battling discrimination. The mystery broadens into a powerful drama to extend the world’s recognition of rights to include these long-oppressed and disdained people with a sophisticated culture of their own.

Thirteen novels were nominated this past year and read and voted on by 10 judges, selected from LFS members. The other nominees: Cowboy Angels, by Paul McAuley (Pyr Books); The Hot Gate: Troy Rising III, by John Ringo (Baen Books); REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson (William Morrow); Revolution World, by Katy Stauber (Night Shade Books); Sweeter Than Wine, by L. Neil Smith (Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick); Temporary Duty, by Ric Locke (Amazon; Kindle edition, Ric’s Rulez blog); and The Unincorporated Woman, by Dani and Eytan Kollin (TOR Books).

For more than three decades, the Prometheus Awards have recognized outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy that stress the importance of liberty as the foundation for civilization, peace, prosperity, progress and justice.

The Worldcon’s Prometheus Awards ceremony most likely will take place, as in previous years, on the Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend (to be confirmed this summer at a Chicago Worldcon hotel and meeting room to be announced).

The answer: freedom and opportunity.

Dr. Robert Zubrin has long been a strong proponent of Mars colonization and he has put forth a strategy for doing so with existing technology on the (relative) cheap. Hint: We don’t need to build big spaceships in orbit or colonize the moon first. If you’re interested in this subject, I recommend you check out his books Entering Space, The Case for Mars, and How to Live on Mars. These books are understandable to the layman but also include enough nitty-gritty details and formulas to satisfy the more mathematically inclined enthusiast, and they make excellent resources for science fiction authors.

In the brief video below, Zubrin is answering a question about his book, How to Live on Mars, at the 28th Annual International Space Development Conference, held March 28-31, 2009. Watch it and then continue on after the break for my thoughts on what he had to say.

When I first heard him say that space is all about a free future for humanity, I got excited. But then as he elaborated, I became increasingly dismayed. The problem is that Zubrin seems to equate scarcity with conflict in a zero-sum game in which everyone is competing for a dwindling pie of resources and their products; and he sees getting access to the virtually unlimited resources of the entire universe as the only way to guarantee freedom and brotherhood for all mankind. Shall we have a Soylent Green future? Or a Star Trek future? The answer depends on whether we colonize space, starting with Mars.

I love Entering Space and The Case for Mars, and expect I’ll love How to Live on Mars as well, so this disappointed me terribly. I’m not sure which would be worse: that Zubrin actually believes this false alternative he presents, or that he doesn’t believe it and wants to colonize Mars so badly that he’s willing to concoct a compelling, yet entirely false, story to dupe us into supporting his vision. I suppose honest and economically ignorant is better than slimy huckster, so I prefer to assume the former.

One of the flaws in Zubrin’s story is that it assumes zero technological progress. It’s true that we have a finite amount of resources on planet Earth and that at some sufficiently distant point in the future, eons hence, if the sun doesn’t go nova first, we will use them all up. But people don’t operate on such grand time scales; we are too high time preference for that.

On the time scale in which human action is conducted, economic pressures and an increasing division and specialization of labor tend to lead to the postponement of the final exploitation of a given resource. New sources are discovered. New methods of extraction are invented. More efficient methods of consumption are developed. And, when push comes to shove and supplies dwindle short of demand, leading to higher prices if governments do not interfere with the market, alternatives are discovered and commoditized. This process will continue through our lifetimes and at least the lifetimes of our children and our children’s children.

So we don’t have to see each other as enemies simply because we don’t have the vast resources of the universe at our disposal.

But the main flaw in Zubrin’s story is that colonizing space won’t solve the problem of scarcity. Plentiful, even unimaginably plentiful, is not the same thing as non-scarce. The unimaginably plentiful resources of the universe will not suddenly be made available to us all at once as we enter space with the intent on exploiting and colonizing it. They are to be found in clumps spread far and wide through the universe. Our ability to exploit them will be limited by capital and technology and time. As more resources become available, they will be exploited to meet insatiable, pent-up demand. There will always be the potential for conflict over scarce things.

We already have the solution to the problem of scarcity, and we’ll need to implement it just as consistently in the broader universe as we already need to, but don’t do, right here on Earth. That solution is clearly defined, consistently respected, and strongly enforced private property rights.

The fundamental and conjoined rights to liberty and property are the metanormative principles that make all forms of human flourishing morally compossible. They are a basic requirement and are constitutive of respecting others as rational beings, as moral agents, as persons. Property rights function to avoid, or at least minimize, conflict over scarce resources by the assignment of moral and legal claims of exclusive ownership, serving as the basis for mutually binding and enforceable rules governing the peaceful acquisition, use, exchange, and abandonment of property — provided states don’t systematically violate them and interfere with market activity.

Ironically, we already have one non-scarce resource at our disposal: ideas. And yet Zubrin appears to approve of patents, which are nothing but statist grants of monopoly privilege that have the effect of creating artificial scarcity where before a truly infinite and immediately available supply existed. Patents stifle innovation, hinder progress, and divert valuable resources and competitive energy away from real productive uses to wasteful conflict in the realms of politics and litigation.

The real reasons why space is so important are not so dramatically stark and falsely dichotomous as a Hollywood plot device, and yet they are still wonderful and inspiring. There is a superabundance of resources available in the universe for our exploitation that will make possible wonders that we cannot yet conceive. The frontiers of space present infinite opportunities to those with an entrepreneurial spirit — opportunities for starting over, for making a new life for oneself, for bold social experiments and business ventures. Out on the frontiers of space, there is the promise of escape from the long tyrannical arm of the state — at least for a while. Isn’t that enough?

The latest craze to seize the literary world has been transformed, according to the law of Hollywood, into cinema. The Hunger Games, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins, is helmed by Gary Ross and co-written by the author herself. Targeting a younger crowd, the movie yet boasts enough maturity and craftsmanship to appeal to other demographics. I continue to await the next science fiction masterpiece, but if the interlude between masterpieces had more movies of this caliber, I would gripe a good deal less.

In the world of the story, an Empire has put down a rebellion by thirteen districts. The thirteenth district was destroyed and the other twelve must, each year, supply a male and female between the ages of 12 and 18 to participate in the Hunger Games. The 24 participants train for a few weeks before competing in a winner-take-all gladiatorial contest that leaves only one alive. Interspersed in their training are interviews with the media, banquets, and chances to impress viewers and thereby win sponsors who can assist the contenders during the competition.

Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is a young girl in district twelve. She hunts for food in forbidden territory but is permitted to do so because she sells much of her catch to the guards (the first in a series of welcome demonstrations of governmental corruption). When her younger sister’s name is pulled as the female representative for the Games, Katniss demands to go as a volunteer in her stead.

She and the male representative, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), are whisked away in an opulent high-speed train. They meet Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), a former district 12 representative who won the contest years ago. He is to act as their advisor during the training, an endeavor that begins badly before they get past Abernathy’s cocksure flippancy to find a decent person underneath.

In the capital, they encounter a decadent culture full of soft and foppish dandies, the culmination of metrosexual evolution, perhaps. This pampered and preened upper caste is a stark contrast to the gritty miners Katniss and Peeta are used to. Katniss at first struggles to adjust to her new environment, while Peeta makes the transition more smoothly.

I regret to report that the first half of the movie is the one that comes off better. Though the latter half is never bad, some problems do start to accumulate and these prevent it from pulling the viewer to the edge of his seat, as is the intention. The first half, though not without flaws, is a more adroit creation.

I did have some minor complaints with the first hour and a quarter, the shaky camera foremost among them. I will record my complaint once again for posterity: if the camera is jittery, there ought to be a reason. If we are filming a sedate character eating meager scraps of food in his poverty, there is no reason I can think of why bouncing his image around the silver screen, such that we can barely tell what is going on, contributes anything important to the story, conveys anything of the mood and character or does much of anything else except irritate.

There was a moment in the capital, when the contestants are first introduced to the masses, that I found a little silly. Much is made of the importance of a first impression, so some time is spent designing the right costumes for the chosen. Katniss and Peeta, coming from a coal mining district, are given an ensemble to represent their background and, presumably, impress the audience and win them supporters. This would not be a problem in itself, as their outfits turn out to be a perfect tacky fit to the gaudy crowd that has come to watch them, but the movie does not deride the moment. It treats it is a minor triumph. There is a sudden upswell of music, and then the camera cuts to the two conscripts and pulls back to show black with a few paltry flames trailing behind as they ride through an arena on their chariot. In a world of technology far more advanced than ours, it is difficult to see how this could be as impressive as it was portrayed to be. If I felt like the storyteller were sharing my embarrassment for anyone who saw grandeur in the moment, I would have not been inclined to groan, but such was not the case.

Despite these complaints, I felt that the first half was a bit of solid filmmaking. The camera captures mood and character well, the story develops naturally and smoothly and the adult actors and maybe one or two of the kids make their roles convincing. It is unfortunate that it turned out to be superior to what followed. The second half is the event itself, and the screen time is turned over almost exclusively to the teenyboppers, who simply do not sell their rolls like the older actors. Jennifer Lawrence is acceptable, but the others come off as plastic models and 90210 types rather than real people from districts stricken with want and neglect (or gladiatorial trainees who have spent their young lives preparing to participate in the games, as some of them are).

Apart from poor casting and makeup choices, I felt there was a lack of interaction between the various characters, something that might have raised the stakes on an emotional level. I also felt like there was no recognition of what they were facing. Katniss and Peeta are presumably going to have to kill each other at some point, if someone else does not do it first, yet there is little to no reflection on this. Even Haymitch, who must have done some killing himself, has nothing to offer on the terrible act of killing an innocent human being. A lot of emotional depth could have been added to the story with some development of these ideas.

Implausibilities are numerous once the battle begins. Katniss makes a stupid mistake, for no apparent reason, that one thinks Haymitch would have warned her not to make. A rebellion starts in one district, sparked by something that I can only think is seen every single year during the Hunger Games, yet this time we are meant to accept that it gets people riled up. This rebellion leads the director of the Games to make a decision that makes very little sense in the story, but is full of contrived implication for Katniss and her romantic interest. Near the end Katniss’ previously established tree-climbing aptitude is forgotten so that the climax can be more exciting. Even one of the flaws shared by both halves is revealed as a disappointment only in the second half. This has to do with the introduction of a character, Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth), whose chiseled jaw, baritone voice, and on-camera swagger simply scream protagonist — again, in a 90210 as opposed to a mining district sort of way — and yet we come to realize that he ultimately means nothing to the movie, repeated cuts to his perspective during the competition notwithstanding (I presume he plays a greater role in the sequels).

The greatest disappointment, though, has more to do with what was not done than with what was done. The climax is simply not thrilling enough. Its outset is a bit jarring, because though we have been kept up to speed on the body count and know it cannot be far away, the emotional buildup and final hook are too diminutive or little developed to make us ready for the last chapter. It bears repeating that the movie is not bad, nor is its climax, but the aforementioned problem keeps it far away from being great.

As an example to follow, I would suggest the climax to Predator, a good movie with a great final act. There comes a moment when character arcs are finished, interactions between hero and villain have been sufficient, and a last obstacle and chance for the hero to save himself suddenly present themselves, so that we know the last confrontation is at hand. We are made to endure tantalizing minutes watching the preparation, which is full of hints of things to come, and finally get what we have been waiting for. Something like that, so similar to the Hunger Games’ scenario, would have suited the film nicely. There are many other ways it could be handled, but whatever the ending, it needed more of an emotional crescendo, more of a mix of tenseness and giddy excitement. What we actually got, though not devoid of satisfaction, was more subdued, not as completely fulfilling as it might have been.

All things considered, it was a decent film. It would be easy to exaggerate the libertarian element, but it is an allegory for our times, when powerful interests suppress a people, some of whom yearn to be free. It is not precisely clear that a libertarian solution is one the author has in mind — many a leftwing statist has made similar complaints, after all — but it is nice to see powerful authority depicted as it deserves to be. The Hunger Games is a pleasant time at the theater if you are already on your way, and, even if you are not, you might consider making the trip.

Whatever good you have heard about The Hunger Games, the reality is more spectacular. Not only is this the literary phenom of our time, but the movie that created near pandemonium for a week from its opening is a lasting contribution to art and to the understanding of our world. It’s more real than we know.

In the story, a totalitarian and centralized state — it seems to be some kind of unelected autocracy — keeps a tight grip on its colonies to prevent a repeat of the rebellion that occurred some 75 years ago. They do this through the forced imposition of material deprivation, by unrelenting propaganda about the evil of disobedience to the interests of the nation-state and with “Hunger Games” as annual entertainment.

In this national drama and sport, and as a continuing penance for past sedition, the central state randomly selects two teens from each of the 12 districts and puts them into a fight-to-the-death match in the woods, one watched like a reality show by every resident. The districts are supposed to cheer for their representatives and hope that one of their selected teens will be the one person who prevails.

So amidst dazzling pageantry, media glitz and public hysteria, these 24 kids — who would otherwise be living normal lives — are sent to kill each other without mercy in a bloody zero-sum game. They are first transported to the opulent capitol city and wined, dined, and trained. Then the games begin.

At the very outset, many are killed on the spot in the struggle to grab weapons from a stockpile. From there, coalitions form among the groups, however temporary they may be. Everyone knows there can only be one winner in the end, but alliances — formed on the basis of class, race, personality, etc. — can provide a temporary level of protection.

Watching all this take place is harrowing to say the least, but the public in the movie does watch as a type of reality television. This is the ultimate dog-eat-dog setting, in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes. But it is also part of a game the kids are forced to play. This is not a state of nature. In real life, they wouldn’t have the need to kill or be killed. They wouldn’t see each other as enemies. They wouldn’t form into evolving factions for self-protection.

The games provide that key element that every state, no matter how powerful or fearsome, absolutely must have: a means of distracting the public from the real enemy. Even this monstrous regime depends fundamentally on the compliance of the governed. No regime can put down a universal revolt. The plot twist in this story actually turns on a worry among the elites that the masses will not tolerate a scripted ending to the games this time.

So here we see the first element of political sophistication in this film. It taps into the observation first recorded by à‰tienne de La Boétie (1530-63) that all states, because they live parasitically off the population on an ongoing basis, depend on eliciting the compliance of the people in some degree; no state can survive a mass refusal to obey. This is why states must concoct public ideologies and various veneers to cover their rules (a point often raised by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his work). “National traditions” such as the Hunger Games serve the purpose well.

The political sophistication of this film doesn’t stop there. The Hunger Games themselves serve as a microcosm of political elections in modern developed economies. Pressure groups and their representatives are thrown into a hazardous, vicious world in which coalitions form and reform. Survival is harrowing, and hate is unleashed as would never exist in normal life. Candidates fight to the death knowing that, in the end, there can only be one winner who will take home the prize.

Slight differences of opinion are insanely exaggerated to deepen the divide. Otherwise irrelevant opinions take on epic significance. Lies, smears, setups, intimidation, bribery, blackmail and graft are all part of a day’s work. All the while, the people watch and love the public spectacle, variously cheering and booing and rating the candidates and the groups they represent. Everyone seems oblivious as to the real purpose of the game.

And just as in The Hunger Games, democracy manufactures discord where none would exist in society. People don’t care if the person who sells them a cup of coffee in the morning is Mormon or Catholic, white or black, single or married, gay or straight, young or old, native or immigrant, drinker or teetotaler or anything else.

None of this matters in the course of life’s normal dealings with people. Through trade and cooperation, everyone helps everyone else achieve life aspirations. If someone different from you is your neighbor, you do your best to get along anyway. Whether at church, shopping, at the gym or health club, or just casually on the street, we work to find ways to be civil and cooperate.

But invite these same people into the political ring, and they become enemies. Why? Politics is not cooperative like the market; it is exploitative. The system is set up to threaten the identity and choices of others. Everyone must fight to survive and conquer. They must kill their opponents or be killed. So coalitions form, and constantly shifting alliances take shape. This is the world that the state — through its election machinery — throws us all into. It is our national sport. We cheer our guy and hope for the political death of the other guy.

The game makes people confused about the real enemy. The state is the institution that sets up and lives off these divisions. But people are distracted by the electoral and political mania. The blacks blame the whites, the men blame the women, the straights blame the gays, the poor blame the rich, and so on in an infinite number of possible ways.

The end result of this is destruction for us but continuing life for the Gamemakers.

And of course, in both elections and Hunger Games, there is a vast commercial side to the event: media figures, lobbyists, trainers, sign makers, convention-hall owners, hotels, food and drink businesses, and everyone and anyone who can make a buck from feeding the exploitation.

In all these ways, this dystopian plot line illuminates our world. I’m not suggesting that this is the basis of the appeal, though its uses as political allegory are real enough. More disturbing is the possibility that the story suggests to young people today the limits of the life opportunities for the generation now in its teen years. They have a darker worldview than any in the postwar period.

If The Hunger Games helps this generation understand that the real problem is not their peers or parents or anyone other than the Gamemakers, maybe they, too, will plot a revolt. Democracy is, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe says, the god that failed. I’m told that we have to wait for the third film for that.

[LFB]

Editor’s Note: While I agree with Jeffrey Tucker’s characterization of statist democracy and politics, I argue in an article in Libertarian Papers, “Immanent Politics, Participatory Democracy, and the Pursuit of Eudaimonia,” that democracy and politics can and should be reconceived along non-statist lines. There is more to democracy than voting and electoral politics within a statist system; it, and genuine politics, is essentially about discourse and deliberation between free people in joint persuit of their own well-being. As with everything else, the state, as a monopolist institution through which people vie to impose their values on others by the threat or use of initiatory physical force, corrupts democracy and politics, perverting both their ends and their means.

Jeffrey Tucker is the publisher and executive editor of . He is the author, most recently, of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo (2010) and It’s a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes (2011). The former editorial vice president of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, he is an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research fellow with the Acton Institute, and a faculty member of Acton University.

Allen Mendenhall: Jeff, this interview is exciting for me. It’s something of a reversal of the interview that we did together in January 2011. This time, I’m interviewing you. I’d like to start off by asking about your two recent books, Bourbon for Breakfast and It’s a Jetsons World. Tell the readers of this site a little about both books.

Jeffrey Tucker: Both books cover the unconventional side of private life as governed by the market and human volition. I guess you could say that this is my beat. I’m interested in the myriad ways in which the government’s central plan — and there is such a thing — has distorted and changed our lives, and also interested in the ways we can get around this plan and still live fulfilling lives. I take it as a given that everything that government does is either useless or destructive or both. The government does a tremendous number of things, so this is a huge area. Bourbon is more focused on the rottenness of the state and its harm, while Jetsons is more the marvelous things that markets do for us. Neither subject gets the attention they deserve.

AM: These books are available for free online in PDF and EPUB formats. Explain why you’ve chosen to make your work freely and widely available.

JT: Every writer wants to be read, so it only makes sense for all writers to post their material. Of course publishers tend to intervene here with promises of royalties in exchange for which you become their slave for the rest of your life plus 70 years (that’s when they dance on your grave). This is the essence of copyright. It is a bad deal for writers. Those who go along with it these days nearly always regret it later. If they actually earn royalties — and very few actually do — it is likely they would have earned more had the material not been withheld pending payment. The bestselling books of 2012 — the Hunger Games series — are posted by pirates everywhere, even against publisher wishes. But, you know, this is starting to change. Publishers are gradually seeing the point to posting material online. Sadly, they aren’t budging on the copyright issue, which is really pathetic. No libertarian should ever publish anything with any institution that is not willing to embrace a very liberal policy on reprints, and one that is likely enforceable such as Creative Commons — Attribution. Meanwhile, the government is using copyright, a phony form of property rights, to step up its despotic control over the digital age. The situation is extremely dangerous. One hundred years from now, they will be laughing at our times and poking fun at how the anachronistic state tried its best to thwart progress.

AM: You strike me as an optimist. Is that true?

JT: Not as a matter of principle but there are certain rational reasons to be very hopeful about the future. The future is always uncertain except in this one sense: it will be different from today. The state is very bad at managing change. Freedom is very good at managing change. Freedom is a form of play, a relentless process of adaptation, trial and error, of testing and pushing out the boundaries. Freedom is really marvelous at implementing an infinite world of ideas, whereas the state pretty much has only one idea: push people around. This is why freedom always ends up outrunning the ability of the state to manage it. Freedom is smarter, and connects more closely with human ambitions and dreams, and this is especially true in a digital age. For this reason, I think we have reason to be full of confidence and hope.  

AM: After a long tenure at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, you recently became publisher and executive editor of . A lot of people are anxious to see what you’re going to do with that enterprise. What can you tell them at this point?

JT: Well, I’m glad to report that we are selling books and that’s fantastic. We also have some two dozen books in the process toward publication. I’m being pretty fussy with the books overall, commissioning excellent introductions and writing all sorts of editorial prefaces and things. As we approach summer, you will see many more wonderful things happen, things that have never been done before, but I think I’ll let the details be a surprise.

AM: What is ? Many readers of this site are probably unfamiliar with it.

JT: The company has this brilliant history that traces to 1972. Murray Rothbard was in many ways at the center of its founding but there were also many Randians involved. Between that point and the digital age, it was the main way that people received libertarian literature. Oddly, one thing I’ve noticed since coming to work here is that the “curator” role is still something that Laissez Faire can play. If we can guarantee a certain number of sales on a particular book, we can make the difference as to whether it is published or not. Much to my surprise, this seems to be happening already.

I’m extremely pleased that Agora Financial took over LFB in 2011. Agora is a for-profit company with offices all over the world, and the firm has a dynamic ethos that embraces commerce, change, and progress. The past is just data in a company like this, while all the energy/action is in the future. As you might imagine, I like this environment. It is a natural home for me.

AM: Thank you so much for taking the time, Jeff. Is there anything else you’d like to say before we conclude?

JT: I have a strong sense these days that libertarianism, broadly considered, is undergoing huge changes in strategic outlook, and I’m happy about that. We are moving away from the “movement” mentality of the analog age and into a broader sense of the global universe of ideas. This means taking more risks, exploring more areas, and generally having more fun than ever. It’s a good time to love liberty.

AM: Thank you so much.  This was really great, and I hope we can do it again.

Editor’s Note: currently has some science fiction books in stock, including what looks to be some old editions as well as some stories I’d never heard of. It is my hope that LFB, under Jeffrey Tucker’s leadership, will not only continue to sell libertarian genre fiction but will also (at some point) create an imprint for publishing original libertarian fiction.

[The Literary Lawyer]

I started the 11-hour Audible.com audiobook of The Hunger Games, by all-time bestselling Kindle author Suzanne Collins, in the evening. Eight hours later, I finally summoned one small spark of the courage of its heroine, 16-year-old black-market hunter-gatherer Katniss Everdeen, and touched a half-frozen, bloody, mud-encrusted finger to my iPhone’s STOP button even though three hours remained. As soon as I awoke a few hours later, I checked the condition of my burns and cuts and was surprised to find that they had healed. No, that wasn’t it; those things had only happened to characters in a book.

The Hunger Games film-release buzz intrigued me enough to dive into the book before visiting the theater. I had previously only heard superficial mentions of a dark, brutal story and did not become interested until some of the advance film reviews suggested that the story might actually convey significant and thoughtful content in an action package. It does.

This is a fresh addition to the list of classic dystopian dramatic critiques of the state that work by showing what the state does to society and human beings in a magnified, allegorical form. The author’s choice of a close first-person voice and sympathetic main character transform the central state’s artificial battle game show into a very human landscape in the context of a post-apocalyptic North America. The nature of zero-sum game-making is revealed through a specific set of living eyes.

The Hunger Games are staged annually as an ongoing punishment for a failed rebellion against the center decades earlier. The center wants the 12 peripheral districts, each also kept isolated from the others, to always remember their subservient status and the futility of resistance. Twenty-four “tributes” between the ages of 12 and 18, one male and one female from each of the districts are selected by a lottery called “the reaping” and travel by luxury express train to the glorious and wealthy “Capitol” to compete in a gladiatorial survival reality TV marathon that the entire nation watches like the Olympics.

Instead of winning on points or being voted off, contestants are to live off the land and kill each other any way they can in a struggle to be the last one alive as days of combat, evasion, and nature survival stretch out before the cameras. Only one can live, winning a year of bonus rations for their home district and personal survival, a generous lifetime income, and celebrity status. Those selected are trained, groomed, costumed, and interviewed before the games. Viewer betting is intense, and sponsors can, at great expense, send players they favor well-timed small gift aid items by precision micro-parachute drop during the games. This makes it helpful for players to make a good impression on potential sponsors before the games even begin, incentivizing them to participate in staged pre-game pageantry.

This Year’s Games

Katniss has been a part-time hunter and gatherer from early childhood. In a starving coal district, she became the sole provider for her unstable mother and younger sister after her father’s death in a mine explosion. She supports her family by recalling her father’s lessons and becoming an illegal hunter in the forest outside the dilapidated District-12 security fence. Officials avoid arresting or shooting her or Gale, her hunting partner, because the officials themselves enjoy buying wild game, vegetables, berries, and herbal products from them.

Katniss and Gale find a small frontier of liberty in the forest outside the state’s fence and a thriving black market inside it. Outside the fence is also the only place they can speak their true thoughts about their district’s poverty and the injustice of the center’s rule. The relative ease of honesty and authenticity in private and the necessity of being fake and false under surveillance is a recurring theme.

When her little sister, despite very low odds, is selected for this year’s Hunger Games, Katniss jumps in to volunteer in her place. The older sister’s skills will certainly come in handy in the games, though that is unlikely to equal the lifetime preparation of the “professional volunteers” a few of the other districts train from early childhood. Yet we can also already sense that her humanity and life choices make her someone who might just try to maintain, at least temporarily, scraps of humanity within the inhuman arena to come. First inklings of the realm of romance further complicate her already impossible situation.

An Allegory of Natural Cooperation Versus Artificial Zero-Sum Games

Why do the players not just join together and refuse to fight? The state’s experienced “Game Makers” have carefully considered and adjusted for this over the years. For example, they build into the vast land reserve selected as each year’s “arena” certain prepared unnatural disasters they can trigger if things get too boring for the viewing audience. Players are also uncertain just how much of the arena environment is really natural. What they do know is that too long a stalemate or too much productive cooperation will lead the Game Makers to cause elements of this environment to start injuring or killing players, ruling out long-term survival for more than one.

I found in this a telling allegory. The state’s Game Makers are working not to solve the zero-sum dilemma of game theory, but to make sure that win/win cooperation is sufficiently forbidden that a zero-sum game remains the only option. The game is carefully rigged to stifle natural human cooperation and maintain artificial conflict. Thus, the people, both in the game and in their home districts, are left with less time, energy, or opportunity to turn their attention to standing side-by-side and perceiving their true common enemies — those who set them up to play their life roles under constructed zero-sum terms.

Nevertheless, even though game conditions seem to make long-term trust untenable, some short-term alliance options might still make sense. Even in such a game, the time-preference principle tells us that players will tend to prefer that the economic “bad” of violent death arrive, if not never, then at least later rather than sooner. Certain players might bet that even a risky temporary alliance might still add time to their lives. Not dying sooner also lifts from zero their odds of ending up the last one alive, even if by some unexpected later fluke. This helps explain why players might form temporary alliances in the early going despite the prospect of a sole-survivor endgame.

This book succeeds stunningly in its dramatic structure, brevity, and execution. Perhaps the “young adult” rubric has even aided in omitting the unnecessary and focusing squarely on story. As it turns out, though, these are the hallmarks of any good book and here we find a level of content, theme, and execution that should by no means be considered suitable only for a teen audience. To be precise, I think the book is easily interesting enough for adults, even those with only slight sci-fi leanings, though unsuitable for younger children who lack the tools needed for healthy digestion of such complex and intense material.

Futuristic technical and biotech science-fiction elements, including a range of bioweapon species called “muttations” still living decades after their use in the war, are generally believably rendered and add texture without upstaging human drama. The socio-political situation presented is on the simplistic side, but seems sufficient to do its core job of supporting the story. Besides, we are only seeing first-person through the young character’s eyes based on her limited information about the wider world she inhabits. This makes the amount of socio-political detail that readers see realistic from her viewpoint.

I thought the audiobook narrator, Carolyn McCormick, did a reasonable job with the performance, especially with the all-important lead female character/first-person narrator. While the interpretations of some of the other voices, particularly the male characters, were a little weak and distracting to me a few times, it wasn’t that difficult to tune through those weaker elements and stick with the content.

Can Win/Win Win?

This story encourages questioning and acts of humanity even in the face of the zero-sum games the state tries to limit us to on various kinds of battlefields, both metaphorical and real. Few more important core messages can be smuggled to young people — or anyone else. Doing such smuggling in plain sight, with a highly entertaining and successful book and film franchise is a victory for humanity. This book can encourage us to look beyond artificial win/lose and lose/lose games and create cooperative win/win person-to-person relationships that reestablish islands of truth and rightness within whatever enclaves we might manage to construct against dystopian backdrops.

Is being moral really possible when things get personal and come down to life or death, spear versus sword? What to do remains up to each person who is victimized by being forced into artificial environments of coerced self-defense. This story makes it clear that the root criminals, regardless of whether and how individual players live, kill, or die, are the Game Makers and those who hire them. Yet it is also clear that the ultimate “success” of any such game still requires that player participation be successfully extracted somehow.

Just scanning for opportunities to “cheat” at evil games allows players to retain a greater degree of self-ownership and humanity — even if in the end they might not be able to find a way out and must elect to play in self-defense. Still, the potential for that moral spark that even seeks a way out of such games is something the Game Makers and their bosses — even with all their wonders of eavesdropping, threats, kidnapping, exploitation, divide-and-rule tactics, and zero-sum-game construction — can never fully take away. That is an enduring message for all the ages, and for all ages.

So question the rules of the games you play in. Just don’t start reading or listening to The Hunger Games in the evening if you value sleep.

Anyone who read Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax as a kid might dread the movie version. No one really needs another moralizing, hectoring lecture from environmentalists on the need to save the trees from extinction, especially since that once-fashionable cause seems ridiculously overwrought today. There is no shortage of trees and this is due not to nationalization so much as the privatization and cultivation of forest land.

And yet, even so, the movie is stunning and beautiful in every way, with a message that taps into something important, something with economic and political relevance for us today. In fact, the movie improves on the book with the important addition of “Thneed-Ville,” a community of people who live in a completely artificial world lorded over by a mayor who also owns the monopoly on oxygen.

This complicates the relatively simple narrative of the book, which offers a story of a depleted environment that doesn’t actually make much sense. The original posits an entrepreneur who discovers that he can make a “Thneed” — a kind of all-purpose cloth — out of the tufts of the “Truffula Tree,” and that this product is highly marketable.

Now, in real life, any capitalist in this setting would know exactly what to do: immediately get to work planting and cultivating more Truffula trees. This is essential capital that makes the business possible and sustainable through time. You want more rather than less capital. An egg producer doesn’t kill his chickens; he breeds more. But in the book (and the movie), the capitalist does the opposite. He cuts down all the trees and, surprise, his business goes bust.

The book ends with the aging capitalist regretting his life and passing on the last Truffula seed to the next generation. The end. However, the movie introduces us to the town that is founded after this depletion occurs. It is shielded off from the poisoned and depleted world outside, and oxygen is pumped in by the mayor who holds the monopoly on air and builds Lenin-like statues to himself. The people eventually rise up when they discover that “air is free” and thereby overthrow the despot, chopping off the statue’s head.

It was this line about how air is free that clued me in to the movie’s possible subtext. You only need to add one metaphor to see how this movie can be the most important and relevant political-economic drama of the season.

The metaphorical substitution is this: The Trees are Ideas.

Now, the action really begins. You can even see that the dazzling tufts of the trees look like how we might imagine that an idea looks. It is puffy, colorful, silky, and has the scent of “butterfly milk.” And of course the tufts are the essential capital that makes the business possible. The Thneed from which the tufts/ideas are made is useful for anything from wearing as a hat to functioning as a hammock. It’s sheer flexibility adds to the allegorical flavor.

Of course the trees are renewable just like ideas. You can draw from them but you dare not forcibly prevent access to them, much less kill them. And yet every time the axe slices through the trunk, the ideas are rendered non-renewable. The axes represent the state’s laws that introduce artificial scarcity into the non-scarce realm of ideas. Do this enough — and private businesses use the government’s laws to do this all the time these days — and you kill what gave rise to the business in the first place.

And in this case, the cooperation of the capitalists makes total sense. When a business uses “intellectual property” law to forcibly monopolize an idea — Apple’s touch screen, big pharma’s medicine formulas, a tune recorded by an industry mogul, a story printed by a big publisher — it is killing that idea for others to learn from and use. The idea is made non-renewable for a period of time dictated by the government. This introduces a propensity toward economic stagnation and decline. It might seem to make sense in the short run but in the long run, everyone suffers.

This is exactly what we see in the real world. Industries that are not cutting down the trees of ideas are flourishing. Fashion is innovative and dynamic. The cooking world shares recipes and techniques. The open-source software movement is innovating every day. In contrast, industries where IP is dominant have a tendency toward monopolization and stagnation: pharmaceuticals, proprietary software, old-line publishers, for example. It is especially interesting to remember that one of the most controversial and hated monopolies of our time happens to be Monsanto’s patents on seeds.

In the movie, the results are put on display in the most compelling way. The town of Thneed-ville is stagnant. Nothing is growing, nothing is changing, nothing is truly alive. It is frozen and fixed, cartelized by a single mogul who provides everyone that essential thing: air. Tellingly, there is total unity between the owner of air and the state. It is the ultimate corporate state, and it has bamboozled everyone into thinking that this is just the way the world is supposed to work. They know of no better way.

This situation changes when a young boy discovers the truth about what happened to ideas. He finds out that they were once plentiful and provided all the life and energy that society needs to thrive and grow. He is given a single seed to a Truffula tree — and it represents the hope that the world of ideas could again come to exist and inspire the recreation of a thriving, dynamic, progressive, growing society.

So of course the mayor has to steal the seed that represents hope for ideas again. A massive chase ensues, and, in the course of it, the boy breaks down the wall between Thneedville and the darkness outside. It is enough for people to discover that air is not scarce but rather belongs to everyone. They begin to turn on the mayor and sing a great song and dance a dance in complete defiance.

As in real life, once the ruler has lost the confidence of his subjects, his rule is over. The seed is planted right in the middle of town, and the air monopoly is ended. Eventually the beauty and life of the world is restored.

There are wonderful lessons to this movie if rendered in this metaphorical way. Look at what we are doing to ourselves with the imposition and enforcement of the gigantic thicket of “intellectual property” that is taking over the world. It is like a huge thicket of thorns, and we can hardly move without getting stuck and stabbed. It is transforming the nature of the market, which needs ideas as we need oxygen, from a world of free exploration into one with billions of invisible cages. This is slowing down progress, killing creativity, monopolizing production in the hands of the rich and powerful, and even threatening the digital age itself.

The lesson is summed up in the incredibly inspiring anthem at the end:

We say let it grow
Let it grow
Let it grow
You can’t reap what you don’t sow
It’s just one tiny seed
But it’s all we really need
It’s time to banish all your greed
Imagine Thneedville flowered and treed
Let this be our solemn creed
We say let it grow

[LFB & C4SIF]

I think the three most important are our new mailing list, Support page, and Dwolla account.

Email Newsletter

Previously, you could subscribe to our posts via email using a widget in our sidebar powered by Feedburner. That you could do this was not obvious, however.

We now have a new and improved mailing list powered by MailChimp. And there’s a new email subscription form at the top of the sidebar. It should be hard to miss.

I’ve kept the subscription form simple. All you have to do is enter your email address and click “subscribe.” Later, you can choose to add more information to your account profile, such as your name. You can also choose to receive the email newsletter in html (default), plain text, or mobile format.

Once subscribed, you will receive an email in your inbox at the end of any day on which we have published new posts. We may also use the mailing list to send out the occasional special announcement. We promise not to spam your inbox.

If you’re subscribed to our posts via Feedburner or WordPress.com (Jetpack), please switch over to the new mailing list.

Support Page and Dwolla

Over the past few weeks and months I’ve added more ways that you can support Prometheus Unbound. I’ve also added a Support page that lays out clearly all of the ways you can support our work, both financially and non-financially, as well as what we plan to do with any money we receive. Big plans. But we need your help to accomplish them. Head on over there and check it out.

The most recent addition is support for donations via Dwolla. For those of you who don’t like PayPal, for whatever reason, and prefer to donate with cash rather than credit, Dwolla is a promising alternative with the potential to revolutionize online and mobile banking and payments. You just need a Dwolla account linked to your bank account to securely transfer money to ours. For more information, see the Support page.

Please consider donating if you value our work and want to help us keep bringing you new and improved content. Donate any amount you like; however much you think our work is worth to you. We appreciate any support you can give us.

Or support us in one of the many other ways listed on the Support page.

Miscellaneous

Don’t forget that you can also subscribe to Prometheus Unbound on your Kindle and in Google Currents.

There are always our rss feeds as well. The link to our main feed has been moved to a hyperlinked rss icon to the far right of the navigation menu. And if you visit the Archives page, you’ll have ready access to author and category specific rss feeds.

Speaking of categories, I’ve reorganized most of our categories into three groups:

1. Features: kind of the main table of contents for Prometheus Unbound — our various departments, such as news, reviews, and interviews;
2. Genre: the broad genre categories we cover, such as science fiction, fantasy fiction, horror, and nonfiction;
3. Medium: categories for the different forms in which we consume our fiction, such as prose (novels, short fiction), film, and television.

The Tag page we treat like a book index and keyword list. You’ll find subgenres and all manner of more specific references there.

I rearranged some items on the navmenu and sidebar and did a major overhaul of the css that styles the navmenu. Hopefully things look nicer and cleaner now. At least you can actually see submenus!

Finally, a word about browsers: the site looks fine to me in Chrome and Firefox, but it may not display properly in Internet Explorer (damn you, Microsoft!). I’ll try to work on that. I don’t know how it looks in other browsers. Feel free to let me know if something doesn’t look right to you.

As a reminder to our readers, we are open to submissions of reviews (as well as news, articles, interviews). Even if you can’t contribute regularly, we’d like to have a number of part-timers who only contribute occasionally. We’re even open to one-time contributors.

So if you’d like to read and review one of the finalists, nominees, past winners, or another piece of fiction, we’d be happy to consider it for publication.

Below is the full press release from the Libertarian Futurist Society, which presents the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, February 18, 2012

2012 PROMETHEUS HALL OF FAME AWARD FINALISTS ANNOUNCED

The Libertarian Futurist Society has chosen four finalists for this year’s Hall of Fame Award. The Award will be presented at the 70th World Science Fiction Convention, to be held in Chicago over Labor Day weekend.

The nominees are:

Falling Free, a novel by Lois McMaster Bujold, first published in 1988. An exploration of the legal and ethical implications of human genetic engineering.

“‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” by Harlan Ellison, first published in 1965. A satirical dystopia set in an authoritarian society dedicated to punctuality, where a lone absurdist rebel attempts to disrupt everyone else’s schedules.

“The Machine Stops,” by E.M. Forster, first published in 1909. Described by the author as a reaction to H.G. Wells’s fiction, it portrays a decaying future of human beings incapable of independent existence or first-hand contact.

“As Easy as A.B.C.,” a short story by Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1912. An ambiguously utopian future that has reacted against the mass society that was beginning to emerge when it was written, in favor of privacy and freedom of movement.

The winner will be chosen by ranked choices voting by the members of the Libertarian Futurist Society.

Eleven other works were nominated: Sam Hall, by Poul Anderson; The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov; Courtship Rite, by Donald M. Kingsbury; That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis; A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn; 2112, by Rush; A Time of Changes, by Robert Silverberg; Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain; Emphyrio, by Jack Vance; and The Book of Merlyn, by T. H. White.

First awarded in 1983 to Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the Hall of Fame Award honors classic works of science fiction and fantasy that celebrate freedom, show paths to its enhancement, or warn against abuses of political power. Since 2000, it has been open to short stories, films, television episodes or series, graphic novels, musical works, and other narrative and dramatic forms.

LFS President William H. Stoddard chairs the Hall of Fame Committee. All members of the Libertarian Futurist Society are eligible to serve on it and to nominate classic works for its consideration.

I happened to be visiting FIRE’s website today and noticed a video about the story. I first heard about this story a couple of months ago but for some reason didn’t write about it here at the time. It’s a particularly interesting news story for me because it occurred at the intersection of three of my interests: libertarianism, science fiction, and (higher) education. FIRE is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, whose mission is defending said rights in higher education.

For those who might have missed the story, and in the interests of curating it here, I might as well do a “news” post about it now, eh?

To make a long story short, the campus police at the University of Wisconsin–Stout had a policy of censoring posters that were suggestive of violent threats. James Miller, a professor of theater and speech had put up a poster of Mal with a line of his from the pilot episode of Firefly:

You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake, you’ll be facing me, and you’ll be armed.

The incident escalated from there, to the point that Miller contacted FIRE for help. Then the SF community got involved. Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, and even Neil Gaiman notified their million-plus Twitter followers about the case. The university at first defended the censorship (free speech in academia!, eh? only for PC speech), but eventually folded under the mounting pressure from free speech advocates and Firefly fans.

If you want to learn more about the case, FIRE has extensive coverage. But for a brief introduction beyond my short summary, check out this video by FIRE featuring Neil himself:

The Children of the Sky is the long-anticipated sequel to the Vernor Vinge’s Hugo Award–winning A Fire Upon The Deep. It is set in his Zones of Thought universe, which imagines a galaxy divided into regions that support different levels of technology and intelligence, from the easy FTL travel and posthuman Powers of the Transcend to the appropriately named Unthinking Depths at the galactic core.

The first time I read this book, I didn’t like it. I, like many others, was expecting a fast-paced adventure spanning the galaxy, such as A Fire Upon The Deep. Instead, the setting is limited to Tine’s World. I was looking for a satisfying resolution to the menace of the approaching Blight fleet, but the ahuman superintelligence stays comfortably in the background. I almost didn’t give it a second chance, but I did, and I appreciated it more the second time through. Once I got past the fact that this book was not what I was expecting, I enjoyed it, although it isn’t on the same level as A Fire Upon The Deep or A Deepness In The Sky.

The story starts 10 years after the ending of the previous book. Ravna Bergsndot leads the awakened Children, refugees from the Blight’s destruction of their home and stranded on Tine’s World. They are attempting to build a technological civilization capable of repelling the Blight with the help of the Out of Band II, the partially-functional starship that originally carried Ravna and the frozen Children to Tine’s World, and the Tines, a fascinating alien species made up of packs of 4 to 8 wolf-like creatures that act as a single individual.

Ravna and the Children have the support of Woodcarver, the ruler of an emerging empire. However, many of the Children are suspicious of Ravna’s interpretation of the Blight and the destruction of their home world, and in the far-off Tropics, a pack named Tycoon is starting an industrial revolution, assisted by Vendacious, Woodcarver’s traitorous spymaster.

One of my biggest problems with the book is the pacing; there are long stretches in which nothing much happens to move the plot along. The political intrique that is the main focus of the first half of the book is predictable and not particularly interesting, and the second half is mostly an excuse to explore Tine’s World.

Also, despite being the main threat at the end of A Fire Upon The Deep, the Blight is mostly ignored. The few scenes that do involve the Blight are confusing and badly integrated into the plot. Few of the questions posed by the previous book are answered, and the confrontation with the Blight will have to wait for a third book (for which plenty of room is left).

Another weakness is characterization. Surprisingly, I found most of the Tinish characters more realistic and sympathetic than any of the human ones (Vendacious, who appears to be evil for the sake of being evil, being the main exception). Ravna’s actions and motivations, in particular, sometimes just don’t make sense, and none of the humans are compelling enough to really care about.

On a positive note, Vinge’s world-building is, as always, fantastic. The Choir, a hive mind in the tropics of Tine’s World, only hinted at in A Fire Upon The Deep, is brought to the forefront and turns out to be much more than the mindless rabble that it appears to be. Tycoon’s interaction with the Choir is especially interesting; the description of a Choir-run factory is one of the high points of the book. Tinish psychology and society is further explored, including “broodkenning,” the art of blending members with different strengths into a coherent pack.

There is also exploration of the relationship between humans and their computers and other machines. The Children grew up on a world where their every need was taken care of by technology, and they find themselves thrust on a primitive planet where the skills they were learning are worthless and little details like weather can be fatal.

The occasional libertarian insights also spruce things up: human society in the Beyond is based on free trade and consensus, and Ravna and the Children bring some of that viewpoint to Tine’s World.

Overall, Children in the Sky doesn’t live up to the expectations set by A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness In The Sky, but is still readable and enjoyable, for the universe Vinge creates if nothing else. If you are a true fan of Vernor Vinge (like me), or can put up with the negatives for the world-building gems, give it a read. Otherwise, just wait for the next book.

A physicist by training and an economist by vocation, David Friedman, son of famed economist Milton Friedman, is best known in libertarian circles as the author of The Machinery of Freedom, a utilitarian case for anarcho-capitalism.

But David Friedman has also written two fantasy novels: Harald and Salamander. Recently, in two blogposts, he discussed the economics and physics in his fiction. Update: There is a third post on related matters (military logistics) in Harald; be sure to peruse the comments on this one.

In the first post, Friedman references a blogpost by an economist working at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research about his realization that “Sci-fi needs economists.” He can take heart, perhaps, that science fiction authors are becoming more economically literate (or so Gregory Benford believes).

Reading Friedman’s posts reminded me of some things I read and listened to from L.E. Modesitt, Jr., a while back. A professional economist before becoming a full-time science fiction and fantasy author, Modesitt has also discussed how he incorporates the economic point of view into his work (see The Magic of Recluse, for starters) as well as the importance of understanding economics in order to write practical fantasy:

• “Got a Job in Magic Land?” (Tor/Forge Blogpost)
• Writing Excuses 4.21: Writing Practical Fantasy (Podcast)

Both writers and readers could stand to benefit from an understanding of at least the basic principles and insights of economic science, so check all of this material out and then head on over to Mises.org to begin your education or just learn more.

AM:  Right off the bat, it strikes me that I don’t know what to call you.  Will Neil work?

JNS:  Sure. It’s J. Neil Schulman in credits, and Neil in person.

AM:  Anyway, thank you for doing this interview, Neil.  You’ve had a fascinating and unique career.  You’ve written novels, short fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and other works.  Which of your works is your favorite and why?

JNS:  Every artist gets asked this question sooner or later. I asked it of Robert A. Heinlein when I interviewed him in 1973, and his answer was, “The latest one I’ve been working on.”

I’ve only completed one movie so far — Lady Magdalene’s — so it’s a Hobson’s Choice on that one. Ask me again when I’ve made two! But a lot of people also seem to like the script I wrote for The Twilight Zone, “Profile in Silver.”

I’ve written three novels. My first, Alongside Night [editor's note: free in pdf], seems to be my most accessible and popular. I consider my second novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, to be my most layered, literary, and richest in explicit philosophy. My third novel, Escape from Heaven, is my favorite. It may not be as timely as my first novel or literary as my second novel, but it’s the one that’s closest to my heart…both the funniest thing I’ve ever written, and the one which is most deceptively simple. It appears to be a lightweight piece of comic fantasy, but it’s full of ideas that if examined more closely turn both traditional theology and rationalist philosophy on their heads.

Short stories? I’ll pick a few: “The Musician,” “Day of Atonement,” and “When Freemen Shall Stand” — all in my collection Nasty. Brutish, and Short Stories — and my latest short story, “The Laughskeller,” published on my blog, J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review.

AM:  Your worldview is, in a word, libertarian.  Why is that?  How does libertarianism come across in your writing?

JNS:  In my nonfiction essays it comes across explicitly. In fiction, drama, and comedy, I try to examine libertarian themes without preaching. I was probably most subtle doing this in The Rainbow Cadenza. The utilitarian politics advocated by the chief villain, Burke Filcher, is so self-consistent that a lot of readers have thought this character speaks for the author. In fact, I wrote the novel to attack utilitarianism as a nullification of the natural individual rights I believe in. The novel reduces utilitarianism to absurdity — it’s a formal satire of it.

Alongside Night is less subtle, though I’m probably more successful in the new movie script than the 1970s novel when it comes to letting the audience make up its own mind. I have learned some refinements of my craft in the last three decades.

AM:  I recently noticed that you commented on a post at the Austrian Economics and Literature blog edited by my good friend Troy Camplin.  Tell me about the influence that Austrian economics has had on you.

JNS:  I would say that Austrian economics — and more fundamentally, the analytical tools of praxeology and games theory — have been fundamental to my work for my entire professional career. They’re not the only tools in my kit, but they get shopworn as much as any of them. Austrian economics is most explicit in Alongside Night, projecting the social and political consequences of fiat money hyperinflation — but I used games theory in plotting “Profile in Silver” and applied praxeology to the afterlife in Escape from Heaven.

AM:  What are some of your latest projects?  Is there anything you’re working on that our readers should be anticipating?

JNS:  That’s the easiest question you’ve asked me. I’m in production on the movie I adapted from Alongside Night, and won’t be working on much of anything else until it’s done. I’m the screenwriter, the producer, and the director. I’m even acting in one of the supporting roles. I’ll be supervising every phase of post-production and making the plans and deals for distribution.

AM:  You’ve written in a variety of genres?  Do you prefer one above the others?

JNS:  I never write within a genre. I consider genres to be artificial marketing categories designed to make writers imitate past successes. I use Louis Sullivan’s architectural principle of “form follows function.” So it’s my goal to let the internal logic of characters and story determine “what happens next” — no matter what premises this requires and where it takes me. I have within my unwritten-stories file a multigenerational saga that starts in the past as historical fiction, continues in present day as “mainstream,” and concludes in the future as science fiction. How could I ever write that if I believed in the limits of genre?

AM:  Okay, to end, I want to ask, what are you reading right now?  What does a guy like you read for pleasure on a day-to-day basis?

JNS:  I have tons of news and related text I need to read on a daily basis simply to stay current.

Reading for pleasure? I’ve promised my daughter that I’ll finish the Harry Potter series before I get on to anything else — but I do have a movie to finish first!

AM:  Thank you so much, Neil, for taking the time.  I want to make sure we do this again soon.  There are other things I want to ask, but I’ll have to hold off for another day.

JNS:  My pleasure.

I’m finally getting around to writing about two short stories published late last year that were written by libertarian authors. Both are works of literary fiction.

One of the stories is by our very own Allen Mendenhall. “Communitas” was published in the online quarterly magazine of literary fiction, Full of Crow, in October 2011. You can read it online in full for free. The story is set in Okmulgee, Oklahoma and is told from the point of view of a nameless old man obsessing over a lost… loved one? It strikes me as a rather bleak tale about the modern breakdown of identity, social relationships, and moral decency.

Allen is a multi-talented writer, attorney, editor, and teacher. Visit his website to learn more about him. Also, check out his interview with Jeffrey Tucker.

The other story, “Pretty Citadel,” is by Kerry Howley and was published in The Paris Review, also an online quarterly magazine of literary fiction, in the Fall 2011 issue, No. 198. The first four paragraphs of the story can be read online for free, but you’ll have to purchase the issue for $12 in order to read it in full.

“Pretty Citadel” is set in Burma, in a local newspaper office, and is told from the point of view of a woman (I assume) who works there. Her boss talks of revolution, though it’s not clear it’s the political kind. There’s mention of most everything besides the newspaper being banned — it being an exception because it is censored before publication by a government bureaucrat — and of politically incorrect people being disappeared. I like the way the brief glimpses into the workings of the totalitarian Burmese regime are casually interspersed between cynical descriptions of Burma and the POV character’s work. But that’s about all I can tell you about this story, as I’m not about to pony up $12 for one short story, however good it may be.

Kerry Howley is a former editor of a Burmese newspaper (which would help explain the story’s setting, I suppose) and a senior editor of Defunct: A Literary Repository for the Ages. You may already know her from her work as a contributing editor for Reason Magazine as well as some tv news appearances. Visit Kerry’s website to learn more about her and for links to some of her articles online.

~*~

This post is the first in a new series in which we will highlight new and recent fiction publications by libertarian authors. If you think there are any we might have missed, please do let us know. If you’re interested in reviewing any of these stories, contact me.

If you look at the makeup of the US Congress — which now has a 9% percent approval rating — or if you watch the Republican debates, you are not immediately inclined to label either the smart set.  In fact, you have to be a dim bulb to repeatedly say many of the things that seem necessary for electability. On the other hand, a certain amount of cleverness is obviously necessary to outwit the media and your opponents.

Which is it? Two films that explore the relationship between power and brains are Being There (1979) and Limitless (2011). The films came out thirty years apart but deal with the same issues. Being There suggests that being dumb as a chicken is a huge advantage for those who seek political success. Limitless suggests that politics is the inevitable trajectory of a person who is far more intelligent than everyone else. Which is more realistic?

I’ll state my own view up front: politics is a gigantic waste of brains. If a person really has a gift for high-level thought, almost any profession would be a greater betterment to society and probably more self-fulfilling in the long run. Whereas it was probably once true that the political life attracted some of the best and brightest, it no longer seems true at all today.

Being There is both hilarious and serious, worth sitting down with at least once every few election seasons. Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine star in this adaptation of a novel by Jerzy Kosinski about an illiterate and simple-minded man named Chance who happened to be in the right place at the right time. His utterances are few and most concern what he has done his entire life, which has been to tend one garden on one estate and otherwise watch television.

When his benefactor dies, he is turned loose on the world and is taken in by a wealthy and influential industrialist who is close to the US president. His new caretakers mishear his name and call him Chauncey Gardener, and they mistake his stupidity and space-cadet ways for discreetness and quiet dignity.

Wearing the right clothes borrowed from the attic of his old house, and otherwise seeming to hold himself well and convey the right messages, Chauncey inadvertently leads everyone around him to think he is brilliant, well connected, a great lover, a worthy successor to the great men of our time, and, in the end, is even considered for president.

When he does speak, it is about the only thing he knows, which is gardening. People around him imagine that he is speaking in high-level metaphors. This happens in private and even on national television. He rises to such social heights that he is beyond negative judgment. The only person who knows the truth decides not to reveal it because to do so would be such a crushing blow to people he loves.

Unrealistic? Not so much. The only reason we tolerate the blather from the political class at all is entirely due to power and position of its members. If you put the same thoughts and ideas in the mouth of your neighbor, you would find him tedious, annoying, and largely deluded.

You can try an experiment using C-SPAN. Watch any random subcommittee hearing sometime and replace the faces you see by imagining the same said by the clerk at the convenience store or the worker laying asphalt in a new subdivision. Only then do you fully realize: the real talent of these clueless people is the ability to fake it for extended periods.

Much of our perception of the relative weight of a person’s words is due to the significance of the person using them. How else can we explain how the chairman of the Federal Reserve gets away with giving several speeches and testimonies per week that consist of nothing but long strings of platitudes, buzzwords, and long-refuted fallacies?

And it is the same with every head of every main government agency. They only get away with this because the media play along, never really asking serious questions that deal with fundamental issues or call upon a serious use of brain power. The unstated rule among those covering Washington is to never challenge the stupidity of big government itself. This pertains in those political debates, in committee hearings, or in any press conference.

Being There has been popular for so long among smart film critics precisely because it seems to account for so many political successes. It was once said to apply perfectly to Ronald Reagan. I couldn’t say. All evidence suggests that it explains George W. Further, I’ve watched the presidency of Obama, and the Chauncey effect here is completely undeniable. The frenzy that once surrounded his presidency (but probably not so much anymore) was wildly out of proportion to the reality.

Being There is more of a commentary on those around Chauncey than Chauncey himself. He never really wanted all this attention and it was never clear that he even knew what was happening around him. He was a happy man just experiencing life as it came to him.

The trouble was that as soon as he entered society, he bumped into many needy people. An aging industrialist needed an heir, and he fit the bill. His wife needed a younger and similarly heroic new and virile husband. Match. The servants in the household needed a new and distinguished visitor, the media needed a star, the president needed an adviser without baggage, and finally the establishment needed a new president. Chauncey was there. He never wanted it, never sought it, but he was there.

The tendency to find vessels for our dreams and worship fakes of our own creation is a universal one. It happens in every sector of life. But no sector is more replete with this problem than politics. The entire show is based on fundamental myths.

The candidates talk about their “vision” for America as if one man can remake a country in his own image merely upon being sworn in. It is not possible and that’s fortunate for us. It is a despotic longing. And yet people cling to these visions as if this one person can somehow become a conduit for realizing all their likes and dislikes throughout the whole of society.

In this sense, every candidate is Chauncey Gardener — a complete fake that voters themselves construct as part of a national ritual. It is a ritual rooted in a lie that government is anything but what it is, which is an agency of force that enables us legally to steal from each other. Government is not wise, it is not compassionate, it is not a creator of anything. It is a stupid, clumsy, and malevolent agent of legal compulsion, and nothing more.

Limitless — starring Bradley Cooper and Robert Di Niro — turns the plot of Being There on its head. A failed and down-and-out novelist is given a drug that allows him dramatically heightened ability to think clearly and thoroughly. His IQ soars to four digits and, suddenly, he can make great use of every bit of data that resides in the recesses of his brain.

He turns his life around, finishes the novel in a few days, and it becomes a bestseller. He turns to stockpicking and becomes rich in a matter of days too. He is then recruited to mastermind the largest corporate merger in history. Eventually he turns to politics, and we are somehow led to believe that this is the culmination of his excursion into the realm of advanced thought. The plot is energized by the scarcity of the pills and his quest to find more.

One merit of this film is its focus on intelligence as the key to amazing life performance. As I thought about it, I realized that very few comic book heroes are known for their distinctive ability to think as the main source of their power. They have physical strength, the ability to fly, the capacity to stretch or freeze, x-ray vision, or whatever, but none are known for amazing intelligence alone. It’s usually the villains who are smart and they are always beaten in the end.

Kudos, then, for this film for recognizing that thinking is far more important in the scheme of things than power and might. This is an unusual message that speaks an important truth, and it is a rare thing to see this featured in a movie.

On the other hand, the film completely stumbles with this idea that someone in this position would naturally gravitate to becoming a senator. Anyone with a high-powered brain would likely steer clear of such a thing. If you could make millions in days of stock picking, outsmart every corporate attorney in the world, save lives through medical research, speak any language after hearing it once, and so on, that person would surely dedicate himself to being part of the flow of real life, not becoming a mime in the mythical world of politics, where they pretend to hold the world together through legislation and regulation while we pretend to believe in their ghastly “visions” for how we should manage our lives.

If everyone in government were like the smart guy in “Limitless” we should seriously fear for our lives. Fortunately for us, government is more like Being There in two respects: its power and ways attracts and retains people with neither vision nor distinctive intelligence, and, institutionally, it lacks the means finally to rule a world of seven billion people with their own ideas of how to conduct their lives.

[TLS]