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?

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.

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:

We’ve got another book giveaway for you.

I’m pleased to announce that we’re working with libertarian science fiction author J. Neil Schulman to give away copies of his classic dystopian novel Alongside Night.

Written over three decades ago, this Prometheus Hall of Fame Award–winning novel is a thriller set in an America facing economic collapse, a growing totalitarian police-surveillance state, and agorist counter-economic resistance. And now it is being adapted into a film starring Kevin Sorbo as Dr. Martin Vreeland.

We’ll be giving away the ebook in epub format for the rest of September, until 12:00am EST on October 1, 2012.

One lucky winner will also receive a signed paperback copy of Alongside Night.

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.

Apropos to my recent post on Google Docs, novelist Silvia Hartmann is embarking on a brave new experiment using Google’s office suite. She’s letting anyone and everyone watch her write a new fantasy novel in a public Google document. You can watch every word — every single character — appear on the screen as she types or just check on her progress whenever you please. It’s almost like being able to look over her shoulder as she writes the first draft.

It takes a great deal of courage to publish even a completed and edited novel. Even more to serialize a novel on your website or blog every week as you write it. How much courage does it take to let people watch your every keystroke while you write the first draft?

Established authors could sell access to this kind of inside look at how the sausage is made. But that might not be the best way to make use of this new opportunity. Even established authors, but especially new ones, could use this “naked writing” as a new way to connect with fans and gain publicity. No need to go for the direct sale. Foster a deeper connection with fans and attract more of them, then you might make more money from your writing in the long run.

From the Google Enterprise team:

Fantasy author Silvia Hartmann is reinventing the editorial process by letting her readers follow along as she drafts her new novel – The Dragon Lords – in a public Google document. Hartmann started writing last week, and has already drafted 20 chapters.

Read the story so far and follow along to find out how it ends: http://goo.gl/Bb6bF.

[via TechCrunch]

It sure seems like that’s what NASA is doing. NASA has to do something in order to maintain its relevance as the space age dawns in the era of commercial space flight. NASA is still running scientific-exploratory missions to Mars and elsewhere in the solar system, but even this role will be soon be overtaken by private enterprises like Planetary Resources.

From Space.com comes news that NASA has launched a private space taxi certification program. The program will consist of a two-stage “process aimed at ensuring commercial passenger spaceships currently under development will meet the agency’s safety standards, schedule and mission requirements.” Yay, NASA’s record of safety, timeliness, and priorities with minimal bureaucratic waste leaves me reassured.

Budget cuts no doubt have something to do with the certification program as well. “NASA expects to award multiple firms a Certification Products Contract (CPC), each of which will run for 15 months and be worth up to $10 million.” Restrict competition, rake in the dough, ensure the continuation of your own jobs, and retain control of the space industry — all in the name of safety, science, human progress, and protecting taxpayer “investments.”

The certification program appears to apply only to firms wanting to be hired by NASA — for now. Firms that want to ferry NASA crew to the behind-schedule and over-budget boondoggle that is the International Space Station (ISS) will have to get certified. But how long until NASA attempts to expand its regulatory reach beyond its own contractors?

NASA admitted in 2011 that it is not “fundamentally a public regulatory agency.” But that can change. We can be sure that the United States federal government will attempt to regulate space travel and commercial activity just as it regulates travel and business on Earth. The only question is, Which agency will be assigned to do the regulating? Will it be NASA, or some other new or existing agency? Surely the top bureaucrats at NASA would rather it be them.

What do you think? Is NASA positioning itself to become the regulator of space travel and commerce? Let us know in the comments.

On September 10th at 8 PM EST, Laissez Faire Books will be hosting what I assume is going to be a Q&A-type event on their blog. Wendy McElroy posted the announcement and will be moderating the event. J. Neil Shulman, Prometheus Award–winning author of Alongside Night, and graphic novelist Scott Bieser, will be participating.

The event is meant to celebrate and publicize commencement of the shooting of a movie adaptation of Schulman’s novel. Kevin Sorbo (Hercules, Andromeda, Kull the Conqueror) will star in the movie as Dr. Vreeland. Alongside Night is billed as “a prophetic movie about the economic and social collapse of society. At its core, however, Alongside Night is an optimistic vision of rebellion and the triumph of freedom.”

Head over to the LFB blog for more information and McElroy’s review of the novel. [Update: And her new interview with Schulman.] Come back to read our interview with Schulman.

Last I heard, Schulman was seeking additional funding for the film. Either he found it, which would be good news, or he started filming before fully funding the project and hopes to drum up new investors with this event, in which case I hope he finds what he needs.

The hype for both the book and the movie seems to me to be overblown. Alongside Night may be a good read, but is it  really well enough written to be considered a masterpiece? Is it possible to produce a blockbuster on a shoestring budget with a niche political message (libertarianism) within a niche genre (science fiction)? Many good and even great movies have been made on small budgets, but to be a blockbuster a movie needs to have a huge budget and wide distribution and become wildly popular and successful at the box office, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars.  However good a movie it may end up being, I just don’t see the film adaptation of Alongside Night meeting the criteria of a blockbuster. Color me skeptical.

Nevertheless, I wish Schulman success. It’s great to have more libertarian fiction being produced.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

What happened was that the Hugo Awards showed clips from some Doctor Who episodes and a Community episode prior to Gaiman’s speech. UStream’s copyright enforcement robots detected this and shut down the feed, as they had been programmed to do. io9′s editor-in-chief, Annalee Newitz, lays the blame on UStream. Its copyright enforcement robots are too dumb to realize that not only did the Hugo Awards have permission to show those clips but that, even if they had not, showing them would have been fair use anyway.

Is it UStream’s fault that its copyright enforcement robots are unable to distinguish between illicit copyrighted content and copyrighted content the user has permission or a fair-use defense for airing? Should UStream spend more money on smarter robots? if it’s even possible to code smart enough robots to do this? I don’t think so.

The bulk, if not all, of the blame should be placed instead on copyright itself — or rather, on the politicians who vote copyright protections into law, the bureaucrats who enforce copyright law, and the anticompetitive special interests who lobby for stronger protections and sue infringers.

Copyright law is a confused mess with a bogus rationale, and it is becoming increasingly draconian. Fair use is simply an ad hoc, abitrary attempt to paper over the absurdities and alleviate the evils of copyright law; it is risky to rely on it. Copyright, like all intellectual property, is an illegitimate and anticompetitive state grant of monopoly privilege that can only be enforced by violating the real property rights of others in scarce, physical objects.

Rather than blame UStream for covering their own asses from lawsuits with zealous copyright enforcement robots, we should abolish copyright. And, as libertarian philosopher Roderick Long points out, this case is an example of copyright coming back to bite those who support it.

Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Oops, he did it again.

David Brin, whom some think of as a libertarian science fiction author, and who styles himself as such, but who really isn’t even close to being libertarian, and who seems to spend an inordinate amount of time these days attacking real libertarians like a jilted lover, was recently interviewed on Wired.com via the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Brin has a controversial take on Star Wars. For example, he calls Yoda one of the most evil characters ever. Well, okay, Brin does have something of a point when it comes to Yoda. The Jedi as a whole are pretty much useless, meddling busybodies who are directly or indirectly responsible for the fundamental political problems in the Star Wars universe.

But Brin’s main criticism of Star Wars and George Lucas is premised largely on his fetish for state-democracy (my term for democratic institutions and processes ossified as formal mechanisms in the state apparatus). Lucas comes under fire for always protraying the republic as corrupt and nonfunctioning, which he does because he despises democracy and favors benign dictatorship.

But, of course, Brin has staked his entire nonfiction career on his Platonic ideal of radical transparency allowing perfect knowledge in a state-democracy. Only when this ideal is realized will freedom be protected and capitalism work properly, says Brin.

One of the gods of the right, Friedrich Hayek, founder of the Austrian School of Economics, who the conservatives claim to consider to be the greatest economist of all time, said that the absolute necessity of capitalism is for all the players to know all of what’s going on all the time, so they can make good capitalist decisions. Even a laborer in a factory, even a peasant, if that peasant knows everything that’s going on, then that peasant can make the best deal for the fish he just caught or the yam he just grew. The greatest hypocrisy on the planet right now is for those who defend capitalism to not be in favor of radical transparency, for all of us to know who owns everything. And that is my militant, radical, moderate, pro-capitalist, pro-Enlightenment, ferocious stand.

There’s so much wrong with this, it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ll try to break it down.

1. First, Hayek was not the founder of the Austrian School of Economics. That honor goes to Carl Menger, who published his Principles of Economics in 1871. If one wants to distinguish a modern incarnation of the Austrian School from its early days, then the founder of the modern incarnation would be Ludwig von Mises. Mises was a leading member of the Austrian School while Hayek was still a socialist. In fact, Hayek himself credits Mises for showing him the error of his ways with the publication of Die Gemeinwirtschaft (later translated as Socialism). “To none of us young men who read the book when it appeared,” Hayek recalled, “the world was ever the same again.”
2. Members of the Austrian School do not care who American conservatives consider to be the greatest economist of all time. Hayek is great, to be sure, but if anyone can lay claim to the title of greatest, it is Mises. If you think about it, and have some knowledge of the history, it is not surprising that conservatives have favored Hayek. He was more “respectably” moderate and therefore more popular politically than the radical and uncompromising Mises.
3. Wow, is it possible to get what Hayek said about knowledge more wrong than Brin does here? It’s difficult to imagine. Hayek said nothing even remotely like this perfect-competition-style Platonic ideal of perfect knowledge. What he did say was that economic planning is best done by individuals with (often tacit) knowledge of time and place, including the information conveyed to them by price signals in an unhampered free market, which depends upon the institution of private property (no offense, Brin). It has nothing to do with government transparency.
4. Government and corporate transparency is great and all, but it’s no panacea for society’s ills; it can’t legitimize the state or eliminate its evil. The root of the problem that Brin rails against is not lack of transparency but the state itself.
5. It is not necessary that every player know all of what’s going on all of the time in order for them to make good decisions or for capitalism to work. It is not even possible for any one player or group of players to know all of what’s going on all of the time. That was Hayek’s point and an important part of his critique of central planning and socialism. How this escaped Brin is beyond me.
6. The greatest hypocrisy on the planet right now is not the failure of those who defend capitalism to be in favor of radical transparency, but rather their failure to be in favor of abolishing the state. The radical transparency that David Brin favors is simply not possible with the state. States do not have any political or economic incentive to adopt radical transparency or anything remotely approaching it. As organizations that claim a territorial monopoly over the legal use of force and ultimate decision making, states are the means by which the plutocratic elites accumulate and maintain their wealth and power. If it is radical transparency Brin wants, he should embrace free market anarchism wherein the political culture and economic competition truly would give individuals and businesses incentives to adopt it.
7. “…radical transparency, for all of us to know who owns everything. ” Wait… is that all that radical transparency is for?
8. Brin ain’t no radical; he’s a reformer. And how could he be both a radical and a moderate at the same time?
9. Nope, sorry, not pro-capitalist either; he favors too many state interventions for that.
10. I’ll give him militant and ferocious. He is that. As for pro-Enlightenment… well, the Enlightenment came with benefits and pitfalls. It’s not a good thing to be militantly, ferociously, absolutely pro-Enlightenment. The Enlightenment screwed up a lot of things in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

Reason.com has had some interesting posts recently.

One is on the subject of fan fiction vs. copyright. Does fan fiction count as a copyright violation? What should authors think or do about it? My response to the first question is: Who cares? Copyright is an illegitimate government grant of monopoly privilege that gives people legal ownership over that which cannot really be property, ideas, and which cannot be enforced without infringing on the prior real property rights (in one’s body and physical objects) of others. My response to the second question is: Authors should embrace fan fiction as community-building and free advertising. Fighting fan fiction only makes you a dick, a criminal (in my view) dick if you sue.

Anyway, now that I’ve worked that rant out of my system, check out the post Fan Fiction vs. Copyright – Q&A with Rebecca Tushnet and watch the interview below. Tushnet is “a member of the Organization for Transformative Works, Tushnet works to defend fan fiction creators caught in the legal debate between protected intellectual property and fair use.” I’ve previously discussed how Angry Robot Books is embracing fan fiction, if not as much as we libertarians and fiction fans would like.

Go behind the scenes of Atlas Shrugged: The Movie, Part II. The release date is October 12, 2012. Check out a previous behind the scenes update and Matthew Alexander’s review of part one. Here’s a short clip on the set of the current film:

Gavin Polone, producer of  Curb Your Enthusiasm, Panic Room, Zombieland, and Gilmore Girls speaks his mind to Reason.tv about “the irritating and hypocritical preachiness of celebrities, why film subsidies are killing the entertainment industry and hurting the economy, the urgent need for the studios to adapt to new technology more quickly, and why he describes his politics as ‘more libertarian than anything else.’”

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.

So disappointing:

“We are watching capitalism destroy itself right now,” [Whedon] told the audience.

He added that America is “turning into Tsarist Russia” and that “we’re creating a country of serfs.”

Whedon was raised on the Upper Westside neighborhood of Manhattan in the 1970s, an area associated with left-leaning intellectuals. He said he was raised by people who thought socialism was a ”beautiful concept.”

Socialism remains a taboo word in American politics, as Republicans congressmen raise the specter of the Cold War. They refer to many Obama administration initatives as socialist, and the same goes for most laws that advocate increasing spending on social welfare programs. They also refer to the President as a socialist, though this and many of their other claims misuse the term.

This evidently frustrates Whedon, who traces this development to Ronald Reagan[.]

We have people trying to create structures and preserve the structures that will help the middle and working class, and people calling them socialists,” Whedon said. “It’s not Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal […] it’s some people with some sense of dignity and people who have gone off the reservation.”

Whedon obviously can’t tell the difference between laissez-faire capitalism (i.e., free markets) and the state-regulated capitalism we have today. Or the difference between democratic corporatism and tyrannical absolute monarchy. As with most on the left, he directs his criticisms almost exclusively at the market and big corporations.

To the extent that leftists criticize government, it is mainly to indict a particular White House administration or the existing crop of Congressmen for allowing themselves to be corrupted by Big Business, not the state as such. If only we could get the “right people” (read: Democrats) into power and eliminate corporate personhood, they think, benevolent government will be restored and all will be rosy again. Nevermind that the Democratic politicians, including Obama, are a bunch of corporatists too.  Nevermind that corporations would still exist and influence politics without state-granted personhood and limited liability.

To think Joss Whedon won a Prometheus Special Award in 2006 for Serenity…

But in Serenity the main villain was, properly and refreshingly, a tyrannical government.

If leftists like Whedon truly want to eliminate corporate influence in politics and help the poor and middle class, they should direct their ire at the state itself. The state is not inherently benevolent. The state is the great enabler of corporate evil. It is the state that enacts and enforces laws and regulations, often at the behest of the big corporations themselves, that have the effect of oligopolizing the market, entrenching the status quo, and squelching competition. It is the state that all too frequently sides with corporations, helping them get away with practices they otherwise would not be able to get away with.

To end corporate influence in politics and break any undue power corporations have in the market, the only viable solution is a complete separation of economy and state. Government intervention in the economy must be eliminated entirely. Only when the state lacks the power to do anything to help or hurt corporations will they lose the incentive to influence it to their advantage. To accomplish this, however, the state itself must be abolished. It will never be enough to get the “right people” into power or impose new constitutional limits on the state. The nature of the state is such that the worst among us rise to the top and constitutional limits inevitably prove ineffective and are even subverted to justify more power.

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).

In an interview on Geeks Guide to the Galaxy (Wired), econtard Paul Krugman discussed the relationship between science fiction and economics. He said that he was inspired to pursue economics by Asimov’s Foundation series. Quelle surprise! He also claimed economic laws change over time (I know, I know!), but he nevertheless embraces one unstoppable apriori economic law in the interview: greed.

Free online college course: Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World: Taught by Professor Eric S. Rabkin of the University of Michigan. Hosted by Coursera. The course will run 10 weeks and will cover Grimm, Carroll, Stoker, Shelley, Hawthorne & Poe, Wells, Burroughs & Gilman, Bradbury, LeGuin, and Doctorow (Little Brother). Click on over for more details and the registration form.

ISS astronaut impressed by private firm SpaceX’s Dragon vehicle: “Inside of the Dragon module. Beautiful. Spacious, Modern. Blue LEDs. Feels a bit like a sci-fi filmset. Of course it is from Los Angeles.” And “You could say a new era of spaceflight has begun. Soon private companies will take people to and from space.”

Continuum is a new time-travel scifi tv series with a familiar leftist B-movie premise. A cyborg cop chases a group of escaped criminals from the future into the present. The “twist”? The criminals are freedom fighters, “struggling to overthrow a corporate-dominated future after the world’s governments have all collapsed.” I grow tired of this willfully ignorant and unthinking ideological trope. If traditional nation-states have collapsed, leaving corporations as the biggest organizations in society, and the corporations are employing cops to aggressively maintain a surveillance-police state with limited civil liberties, then the corporations have become governments.

New Scientist has a new digital quarterly publication, titled Arc, featuring science fiction and intriguing, thought-provoking science-factual articles.

Your ebook is reading you (WSJ). Is this a bad thing? Some are concerned about their privacy. But are they clinging to antiquated notions of privacy? Libertarians are rightly concerned about government invasions of privacy, but should we be concerned about corporations having all of this data on us as well? Can you think of any ways businesses having this data will be beneficial to consumers?

Game of Thrones–style political attack ads (via SF Signal):

The July issue of Cato Unbound is on the topic of Liberty, Commerce, and Literature — more specifically, whether Western literature is anti-commerce, to what extent, and why.

Like Prometheus Unbound, Cato Unbound is an online magazine, unbound and free of the limits of the dead-tree format, although they maintain a regular monthly schedule while we do not. Each month they cover a different big topic and invite several eminent thinkers to discuss it.

Cato Unbound invites their readers to take part in the discussion on their own websites, blogs, social networks, and the like. Particularly good posts could be officially included in the issue.

Lead Essay

This month’s lead essayist is literary scholar Sarah Skwire. In “Birth of the Clichés,” she argues that — contrary to mainstream and libertarian perception — the evidence that Western literature is anti-commerce is actually thin. Instead, she presents a more nuanced view “in which critiques of the market stand side by side with favorable depictions and even sound, encouraging advice for would-be businessmen.”

Response Essays

The first response essay, “Three At-Risk Children of the Enlightenment,” is by William H. Patterson, Jr., the foremost scholar of the great libertarian science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein and himself the author of the authorized biography Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century (Tor Books, 2010). Patterson argues that liberty, commerce, and literature have a common root in the European Enlightenment and that “the fortunes of all three have risen and fallen over time.” He hopes all three will flourish in the coming decades.

In “The Economics of Shakespeare… and His Critics,” Frederick Turner, an accomplished poet and literary theorist, “offers a structural explanation for why literary scholars have been so eager to supply anti-commercial readings to the western canon. Literary criticism began among gentlemen; it then passed to the anti-commercial meritocracy of the universities. But alternate readings exist, and Turner even offers a startlingly pro-commerical reading of The Merchant of Venice.”

In “Stranger in a Familiar Land,” Amy H. Sturgis, a libertarian, intellectual historian, and active member of the speculative fiction community, “argues that much of the apparent anti-market bias in literature stems from elitism. By excluding genre fiction, mainstream literary critics also exclude many thoughtful and provocative treatments of markets and their place in political economy. Often the excluded works are highly sympathetic to libertarian ideals. Fiction shapes public opinion, including public opinion about markets, and popular fiction by definition reaches more than any other kind.”

Related at Cato

Book Forum: Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, discussion with the author, William H. Patterson, Jr., (video).

Essay: “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” by Robert Nozick.

Blog Post: “Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize” by Ian Và¡squez.

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.”

I have much to say about Brin’s attacks on “dogmatic libertarians,” by which he means followers of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand who worship property too much, but watch the video first and then continue on below for my commentary.

I’ll state right up front that I do not think of Brin as a libertarian, much less as a heretical one (as he describes himself). To the extent that he is right on anything, he’s not telling libertarians anything new. As for the rest, I’ve seen enough on his blog and various social networks to come to the conclusion that he doesn’t understand the actual positions held by principled libertarians (as opposed to the bizarre straw men he’s concocted and attributed to us) and that it’s impossible to carry on a civil, constructive conversation over the internet with him about libertarianism if you disagree with him on the subject. Although he says in the video that he doesn’t want to insult, after he’s already insulted, if you dare to challenge his views about “dogmatic libertarianism,” prepare to be mocked and insulted and misinterpreted and talked past.

Brin says, “The issue should not be government. It should not be unalloyed and unlimited idolatry of personal property,  which is the path that the libertarian movement has gone down.”

I have no idea what he means by “unalloyed and unlimited idolatry of personal property” and I’ve yet to see him give a clear explanation of this magic-talisman phrase he bandies about like a Hammer of Refutation. I can’t imagine what problem he sees in upholding private property rights. He seems to think our “unalloyed and unlimited idolatry” somehow leads to oligarchy, but I’m at a loss as to how it is supposed to do so. I can only assume he thinks it means we must uphold “rights” to even unjustly acquired property, but this is simply not so.

The phrase is also code for “Hey, man, let’s be practical; sometimes one has to make compromises, break a few eggs to make an omelette.” Those who want government solutions to perceived problems hate it when libertarians stand on principle and refuse to budge. It drives them into uncivilized fits of apoplectic, frothing rage.

Brin also seems to think that so-called “dogmatic libertarians” have lost sight of the importance of competition and transparency and whatnot. Uh… No. No, we haven’t. I don’t know where he gets this stuff from. We see private property rights as making fair and creative competition possible in the first place; and we value fair and creative competition greatly, especially those of us who see intellectual property as illegitimate government grants of monopoly privilege that can only be enforced by infringing on the pre-existing rights of others to their physical property.

“Libertarians need to be reminded that, across 6,000 years, the greatest enemy of free enterprise, of market enterprise, innovation, creative competition… have always been oligarchs,” says Brin.

No… No, we don’t. But mayhaps you need to be reminded that all forms of government, not just the one labeled oligarchy, are ultimately ruled by oligarchs. It’s in the nature of the state. You know… that organization you said we shouldn’t concern ourselves with. Theory and history show us that it is through the state that oligarchs acquire and exercise their power. Without it, they are impotent. It is the state, always ruled by oligarchs, that has been the greatest enemy of free markets, free enterprise, innovation, and fair and creative competition.

In the video, Brin lays out a plan to rein in government growth, corruption, and “abuse.” Here’s a summary: Let’s draft 10,000 average Americans into a pool every year. Excuse Brin’s poor choice of words; this “draft” is one that can be refused without penalty (although an opt-out system is an unnecessary hassle for people and is frowned upon by savvy Netizens). We’ll then do background checks on this pool of candidates to winnow it down to a list 1,000 trustworthy, loyal citizens who can keep their mouths shut. Give them security clearances and arm them with a badge that let’s them get in any door in the United States of America — you read that right, any door. They are tasked with watching the watchmen. There will be penalties for revealing “anything about anything the’ve seen.” Brin suggests a mere month in jail. The idea being that spending a month in jail will be a price worth paying to patriots in order to bring truly heinous acts of government out into the light so that they can be stopped.

What was interviewer Tim Cavanaugh’s response to all this? “Huh. Okay.”

That’s it?

This didn’t immediately strike him as a terrible idea? He didn’t think or, better yet, say: “Gee, this can’t possibly go wrong.” Not a single problem with the proposed system immediately sprang to mind that he could ask Brin to address? Or did Cavanaugh just not want to ask the celebrity any tough questions?

I’ll just toss a few ideas off the top of my head into the ring for consideration:

1. Who is going to administer this new system of citizen-watchmen — the lottery for the draft, the background checks, security clearance decisions, and so on? Oh, that’s right — the government. Despite Brin’s talk about non-governmental, or market, solutions to problems, his proposal is a government solution to a government problem (government failure).  What? You need me to flesh the implications out for you? Okay…
2. It means the creation of a new bureaucracy or ratcheting up an exsiting one. Either way, a WIN for big government and more spending! That’s what we libertarians are fighting for!
3. Who’s to say the penalty won’t be ratcheted up over time like the income tax? Thus decreasing the risk to government officials that their secrets will get out?
4. The selection process couldn’t possibly be rigged or gamed, could it?
5. No citizen-watchman would ever take a bribe to keep quiet,  surely.
6. Or stay mum in the face of threats to himself or his family… right?
7. Brin’s proposed system entails acclimating Americans to increased government surveillance of and deep-probing into their public and private lives. Oh, and revisit #4-6 in light of this. Worse, it might come to be seen as a patriotic duty to accept such scrutiny from the government.
8. Brin says there will be penalties for revealing “anything about anything the’ve seen.” I hope he’s only referring to classified or top secret, not unclassified, information here. Let’s take him charitably and assume he is; how much do you want to bet that this will lead to more and more aspects of government becoming classified so as to have the threat of the penalty for revealing what is seen hanging over the citizen-watchmen’s heads for matters of less and less importance to the “national interest”?
9. The system Brin proposes is likely to make people more complacent about government in the same way and for the same reasons that democracy fools them into believing they’re ultimately in charge and that regulations encourage them to abdicate responsibility for the quality of the goods and services they buy, for their own safety and security and that of their families, and so on. “Hey, man, there’s a system in place to make sure our representives and public servants do what they’re tasked with doing and to weed out corruption and bad secret policies and stuff. They have enough volunteers. I don’t need to waste my valuable Celebrity Apprentice–watching time worrying about it. Did you see what happened last night? Aubrey O’Day is soooo right. She’s the only one with any talent on her team. Nobody else every has a creative.”
10. Brin doesn’t  mention monetary compensation for being a citizen-watchman. Is it likely that as many as 1 in 10 draftees will not only accept being drafted but pass the background checks to qualify for a security clearance? A much larger pool than 10,000 might be needed. And might there not be a selection bias in who chooses to accept the responsibility after being drafted? No potential for abuse there?
11. What if the citizen-watchmen are generally okay with things libertarians would deem heinous? In light of the direction this country has been headed lo the past couple centuries, this isn’t much of a stretch, is it?
12. Brin says that citizen-watchmen will be able to get into any door in the United States. Any door. I hope he means any government door, not really any door.
13. Let’s face it, Brin’s proposal is a pipe dream. The Powers That Be will never let it happen and the American people are not really interested in that level of transparency in their government — not enough to make Brin’s plan a reality, at least. And Brin has the gall to mock and blame “dogmatic libertarians,” the lapel-grabbing (lolwut?) Rothbardian and Randian wing of the movement, for the Libertarian Party failing to make headway (more than 1%) at the polls in presidential elections.
14. Brin’s citizen-watchman program will be funded by taxes, and taxation is theft. Oh, sorry, did I grab your lapels too hard?

I could go on, but what’s the point of continuing to kick a dead horse?

[TLS]

It’s been a news-heavy month. Here are a few more tidbits:

• Yesterday, Tor/Forge announced that it will make all of its ebooks completely free of DRM by early July 2012. This is a momentous and welcome change. Tor/Forge is a genre imprint of Macmillan, one of the Big Six publishers. It’s the first of these publishers to cave to author and cusotmer pressure on DRM. It may have helped that Macmillan is not a publicly traded company. Cory Doctorow believes more Big Six publishers are sure to follow; he’s “had contact with very highly placed execs at two more of the big six publishers.”
• Last month, James Cameron promoted private deep-sea exploration. He’s also partnered with Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and Ross Perot Jr., to back private space company Planetary Resources. Immediate plans are to design and build low-cost robotic spacecraft for survey missions. The firm, founded and chaired by Peter Diamondis (creator of the X-Prize Foundation) and Eric Anderson, hopes to then build on this technology and begin mining Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) within the next ten years. For an extended explanation of how and why Planetary Resources can succeed, read Phil Plait’s post on the Bad Astronomy blog. We live in exciting times for the exploration and exploitation of space.

• Mike Masnick of techdirt has the story of some obscure author suing the developers of the game Assassin’s Creed for allegedly stealing his idea. What idea, you ask? Why, genetic memory, of course! This is such an old trope, it’s like those clueless people accusing Disney’s John Carter (of Mars) of ripping off Avatar and Dances with Wolves. Genre tropes are not covered by copyright, and even if they were — screw copyright. (Not that the illegitimacy of copyright somehow greenlights plagiarism.)

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.

Laissez Faire Books (LFB) is a seminal libertarian institution that dates back to 1972, six years before I was born. In its heyday, it played a central role in the libertarian movement as the largest libertarian bookseller, a publisher of libertarian books, and an old-school social network, hosting social gatherings and other events. This was before my time.

I’d never bought a book from LFB until yesterday (the 19th). By the time I became a libertarian in my undergraduate years at Louisiana State University, after reading the work of Ayn Rand (starting with The Fountainhead) at the urging of a friend, I was able to learn about libertarianism and Austrian economics from a large and growing sea of resources online. I bought books from Amazon and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI), read online articles and blogs, and took advantage of the growing library of digitized books and other media put online and hosted by the LvMI.

Laizzez Faire Books was fading into irrelevancy and, I think, in danger of being shuttered for good as it was passed from new owner to new owner. Enter Agora Financial, the latest owner of LFB, and hopefully the organization that will oversee its resuscitation and return to relevancy. With Jeffrey Tucker at the helm as executive editor, the prospects for profitability, innovation, and spreading the message of liberty are exciting indeed.

Many, if not most, of you know Jeffrey Tucker as the editorial vice president who led the LvMI into the digital age, building it into the open-source juggernaut with a vast online and free library of liberty and a thriving community that it is today. We were sad to see him leave that beloved institution, but eager to see what he would do in charge of a for-profit publisher and bookstore. Now we’ve been given the first taste.

Laissez Faire Books will of course be publishing and selling ebooks and dead-tree books individually. They’re a bit pricey this way, if you ask me.  The way you’ll want to get these books and the added value that LFB has to offer, however, is to sign on to the new business model that promises to return the company to the center of the libertarian movement as a book publisher, seller, and community (with online forums).

Yesterday, on the 19th of April, Jeffrey Tucker and LFB launched the Laissez Faire Club. This is an innovative subscription-based book club that offers a host of members-only benefits for the price of $10 per month, or $120 per year. Members will receive a 20% discount on all LFB products, a new ebook at no extra charge every week (in epub and mobi formats) as well as access to the entire archive of previously distributed ebooks, Tucker’s Take (short video book reviews by Jeffrey Tucker), free reports, live author interviews, a private online community forum shielded from search engines and prying eyes and drive-by trolls, and more now and to come.

That sounds like a good deal to me. I signed up last night for a free trial, which comes with some free content that’s yours to keep even if you choose to cancel your membership before the free trial is up.

In the information age, and in light of the illegitimacy of so-called intellectual property, how do you  make money publishing and selling books? Many are wailing and gnashing their teeth, rending their shirts, and lashing out in fear and lazy greed — unable to let go of their precious, state-supported publishing model, dependent on IP and an oligopoly over the publication and distribution of dead-tree books. The Big Six publishers don’t seem to have a clue. But I think it’s not really that hard to figure out:

You treat your customers right, provide them with valuable content that they’ll want to ensure you’re able to continue providing, and sell them added value built around the books: reasonable prices, great customer service with a personal touch, knowledgeable and engaged staff, early access, extra content like free reports on how to circumvent the state legally or Tucker’s Take, personal engagement with their favorite authors, a private and secure community comprised of fellow lovers of liberty, and so on.

Head on over to Laissez Faire Books to learn more about the new Laissez Faire Club and, if you’re a lover of liberty and books and books about liberty, become a member today.

[TLS & Is-Ought GAP]

• Amazon vs. Apple And The Agency 5: Let’s Get The Facts Straight (Indie Author)
• The Worst Article About The eBooks Anti-Trust Suit (Mike Cane’s xBlog) — Is it worse than the Mashable article I dissected? Let me know what you think.
• Don’t Be Fooled: Big Publishing Hates Competition (Let’s Get Digital)
• Publish and Perish – Clueless Publishing CEO’s Enjoy an Intimate Dinner (The Passive Voice) — Did you know 16 states also filed antitrust suits against Apple and the Agency Five (as they are apparently being called)? Hey, those AG’s gotta do something to get re-elected! Look below the excerpts for PG’s advice to CEO’s on how to meet without risking an antitrust lawsuit. Utterly ridiculous the obstacles and waste forced on the market by the state.
• Monopoly Power Makes You Fat, Dumb and Slow (The Passive Voice) — I like this one mainly for this quote:
  

  Absent stringent government protection or physical boundaries that protect the monopoly, the long-term effects of overly-dominating a market tend to weaken the company or companies involved. If competition is permitted, the bloated and inefficient monopolist can present an easy target for an innovative and flexible competitor.

  PG’s conception of monopoly is not rigorous, however, and he overlooks the fact that what made Microsoft an aggressive monopoly is intellectual property, that government grant of monopoly privilege that has no place in a free market.

• Cut in E-Book Pricing by Amazon Is Set to Shake Rivals (The Passive Voice) — The NYT article PG quotes is worthless, but read his observation at the end as well as the first comment on the post; they highlight an important characteristics of leftist critics of Amazon.
• The Agency Model Sucks (A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing) — J.A. Konrath does the math to demonstrate that authors make less money under the agency model. It’s bad for customers and authors.
• The biggest problem facing book publishing (The Domino Project) — Perfect for the publishers, not for anyone else, not even the authors they publish. Otherwise, I tend to like what Seth Godin has to say about publishing.
• Death To The Gatekeepers: Bezos Talks Innovation In The Publishing Space (TechCrunch)
• Jeff Bezos’s Top 10 Leadership Lessons (Forbes) — Big Publishers in particular, take note of how customer-centric Bezos’s leadership lessons are, and also how focused on adaptability and innovation.
• Live From Washington, DC: The Space Shuttle Era is Over (Thank God); Let the Private Space Race Begin! (Reason’s Hit & Run) — Good bye, space shuttle. Good riddance. So long, and thanks for all the waste. Amateur hour is over and now it’s time for the Space Age to really begin, led by savvy entrepreneurs and funded by visionary capitalists.
  
  
  Is it me? Or is this Reason piece trying too hard (TTH) to be hip and funny with all the pop culture references and whatnot?

Michael Stackpole, a traditionally published author who was one of the early champions of self-publishing ebooks, has an interesting post analyzing the settlement agreed to by three of the Big Six publishers — Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster — involved in the alleged ebook price fixing flap. If he’s right, the Department of Justice is going to be imposing more injustice than just preventing a little self-destructive collusive fixing of high prices. This is yet another among so many many many examples of the state stepping in to prevent something only to impose that very thing itself. Yes, it looks like the DoJ is going to prevent price fixing of one sort only to impose its own brand of price fixing. But hey, it’s only a bad thing when non-state entities do it, right?

Here is Stackpole’s breakdown of the settlement  provisions:

1. For a period of two years,
2. Publishers will not be able to set a restricted retail price for their product.
3. Retailers will be able to set their own price for an ebook, but they cannot discount the bookbelow their own discount. (In short, the retailer cannot sell ebooks at a loss.)
4. Publishers cannot “retaliate” against retailers during this time.
5. The “favored nation” status that prevented a publisher from selling at a lower price to one retailer over another is gone.
6. The Agency Pricing discount of 30% off the top that retailers pay publishers can remain in place.
7. There are compliance procedures being set in place (that I don’t bother discussing) so the government can make sure that the publishers are complying with the agreement.

That’s right. Provision #3 fixes an arbitrary minimum price —a price floor. Retailers like Amazon will not be allowed to sell ebooks below the price they pay publishers for them; they will not be allowed to sell at a loss. For two years. And apparently there is yet more intrusive bureaucracy being set up to monitor compliance with these new regulations for the ebook market. It’s another shovel-ready Obama jobs program!

The federal government is also going to prevent publishers from requiring retailers sell their ebooks for a certain price. In other words, it bans the agency model. Now, I’m no fan of the agency model, and I think it’s self-destructive for publishers to adopt it in order to screw their customers with high prices so that they can prop up their dead-tree book business model for a while longer. But I don’t think they should be prevented by law from doing so.

Stabilization is Chaos: “Monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown.”
— F.A. Hayek, 1932

The federal government is also going to prevent publishers from retaliating against retailers for the prices they set. Also, no more contracts that stipulate publishers can’t sell to other retailers at a lower price. In other words, the state is going to short circuit the market process by preventing publishers from putting any kind of meaningful pressure on retailers and vice versa. No jockeying for position in the ebook market. Forget letting consumers decide and the best business model win. The United States federal government prefers stasis — the maintenance of a status quo of its own making.

But wait, there’s more. Stackpole does the math and argues that far from preventing publishers from fixing high prices for consumers, the settlement will actually disincentivize both publishers and retailers from setting lower prices:

First off, the suit was brought because prices were too high to the consumers. Notice any relief/rebates to consumers? Me, neither. Your tax dollars aren’t getting you any return on your investment there.

Second, let’s apply numbers to the above. Amazon has tried, for ages, to keep ebook prices at $9.99, to make ebooks attractive. Under this settlement, then, a publisher releases a book at a $13 price point, Amazon discounts it to $10, breaking even on the deal, at the 70/30 Agency Model split level. Amazon could then say to publishers, any book priced over $13, we’ll only buy at a 50% discount. So, a $15 book drops to $10. In this latter case, the publisher makes $7.50 and Amazon clears $2.50. The $15 price point is more profitable for Amazon than the $13 price point, and it appears they’re giving consumers a greater discount. So, the impetus for Amazon to want books priced below $15 is exactly what? Zero. And for the publishers, their max profit potential is at $20 or above, so why would they price things lower?

So, the settlement doesn’t guarantee lower prices for readers. In fact, by doing the same math above that I’ve done, or by just reading this blog post, publishers can independently decide what the best price points are when selling ebooks. This isn’t changing business practices, this is just forcing folks to modify spreadsheets.

Hey, symbolic gestures and creative accounting that pretend to be for the good but in actuality cause disguised harm — that’s what the state does best, none better.

When you think about it, the very concept of anyone having a monopoly on virtual products in the information age is just silly. — Michael Stackpole

Stackpole follows up this analysis with an anecdote that shows just how little traditional publishers care about, or have an incentive to care about, their suppliers (authors) and their customers (the readers). He also touches on the “rising cost of paper” excuse for rising dead-tree book prices.

For those who will ignorantly or dishonestly claim that Amazon is the only winner in this and that the settlement will solidify it’s “monopoly” over the ebook market and allow it to suddenly, and uncharacteristically, start charging high monopoly prices for ebooks, Stackpole preemptively points out:

1. Amazon, in the past, has reacted very badly when faced with negative backlash from its consumer base. One might recall that the first time Amazon tried to raise a book price over $9.99, the infant Twitter community called for a boycott. News went viral and Amazon backed down. Moves to raise prices or lower discounts to indie authors would engender that same backlash.
2. Lowering discounts to indie authors would allow Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google and Kobo to appeal strongly to indie authors, offering them deals that include promotion. One must remember that the best of the indie authors are those who have built an audience and can carry that audience with them. Amazon would, in essence, be providing their competitors with the means to establish “exclusive content.” While it might not hurt Amazon’s bottom line for a long time, it would establish its competitors as the new darlings of indie publishing, and brand Amazon as being greedy. It’s literally more trouble than it’s worth for Amazon.
3. Hello Piracy! Piracy occurs when the perceived value of an item is much less than its actual cost. Were Amazon to jack prices, pirates and rival retailing sites would spring up all over the place. Authors would band together to create coop sites to sell directly. Webstore sites would establish dedicated and low cost author packages, and set up websites where they aggregate the author stores so they can promote books. When you think about it, the very concept of anyone having a monopoly on virtual products in the information age is just silly.
4. Though I do not think publishers will use the two years of the settlement wisely, they really should be thinking about establishing their own stores. I mean, if an author can do it, so can Random House. Moreover, publishers should secure deals with authors that allow authors to sell books from their own websites, returning to the publisher the same amount of money any retailer would send them. I’d happily retail books at their full MSRP off my website and send my publisher checks (just to have them send me a smaller slice back six months later); since the 30% I’d make now is a heck of a lot more than the eventual cut I’ll get through my royalties.

Unlike Lance Ulanoff, Michael Stackpole gets it. And Stackpole isn’t even a journalist! But maybe that’s why he gets it.

All in all I think the settlement, and any likely outcome of the lawsuit, is a badly done show of shadow puppets. The suit started for relief to the consumer, but nothing in the settlement provides any relief to the consumer.

Not only that, the settlement prevents relief to the consumer by preventing retailers from taking a loss on ebook sales and encouraging publishers and retailers to set higher prices in order to take advantage of this state-imposed price floor.

Michael Stackpole is right: the only true beneficiaries of the settlement are, as usual, employees of the United States federal government.

Read his full article: “The Anti-Trust Suit Settlement — A Layman’s Opinion.”

Jeffrey Tucker recently discussed the Department of Justice’s decided to launch antitrust litigation against Apple and five of the Big Six publishers — Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, but not Random House — for alleged price fixing. Three of them — Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster — decided on the same day to settle straight away. The alleged sin was that Apple and the publishers decided to go with the agency pricing model in which the publishers get to set the prices for their books in the iBooks Store, while Apple takes a 30% cut.

As you’d expect, I’m with Jeffrey Tucker in believing that price fixing, collusion, cartels should not be illegal. In a free market, these practices are not stable and will end up harming the companies in the long run if they dissatisfy customers. What I want to highlight in this news post is not what so much what libertarian justice has to say about the matter but some bad economic-tech journalism about the business side.

I recently read this article on Mashable by Lance Ulanoff, the site’s Editor-in-Chief:

“How Steve Jobs Got Apple Into Trouble Over Ebooks.”

Wow, is this guy clueless.

And if Steve Jobs really thought Amazon screwed up in alienating major publishers by not adopting the agency model, he was clueless as well. Amazon is WINNING.

Jobs pushed the agency model on the publishers? I don’t think so. They preferred that model but couldn’t get Amazon to go along with it without Apple’s help. It’s the screw-your-customers model and it wouldn’t have been good for the publishers over the long haul. They want high ebook prices so that they can hang onto their outdated IP-dependent business model of selling paperbacks and hardcovers in big-box brick-and-mortar stores for as long as possible.

That antiquated business model is particularly insane in the United States. The origin of the current wasteful publisher/brick-and-mortar bookstore relationship is fascinating. The strip-and-return system has its origin in the Great Depression (thanks Fed!).

Publishers wanted to encourage booksellers to buy more books and take a chance on unknown authors, so they stupidly started allowing stores to return unsold inventory for a refund. This system became entrenched and publishers became stuck producing massive print runs. The tendency to gamble on publishing and stocking potential blockbusters is tied in with this.

What the booksellers do — with paperbacks at least — is strip the covers, return those for the refund, and recycle the book bodies. Book prices factor in this waste. I think it’s something like one hardback is priced to pay for two, one paperback for three. Because so many are not sold. Sometimes, before being destroyed, a book will go back and forth between store shelves and warehouses in a purchase, return, purchase, return cycle until it is finally sold or destroyed. Lots of transportation and storage waste there in the interim.

This system has hurt small presses and indie and self-publishers because booksellers often insist on this strip-and-return policy and they often can’t afford it. And the small indie bookstores can’t afford to gamble on large inventories of books and to wait on refunds on the inevitable returns. So you get that concentration of power in a relatively small number of big publishers and bookstore chains.

Thankfully, the rise of POD and ebook publishing is disrupting this wasteful, cartelizing system.

“Over the years I spoke to numerous people in the publishing industry who were somewhat shocked and not necessarily happy with this turn of events [Amazon's low ebook prices and domination of the ebook market].”

Oh, boo hoo. Customers are happy. That’s what matters. Authors and publishers who find ways to make customers happy can survive these tumultuous times and even do well financially.

“[Best-selling author James] Patterson’s books have long been on ereaders, but back then he was clearly feeling the pinch of lost royalties as his bestsellers which once sold for over $20 at Barnes and Noble and were now selling for $9.99. Was it any wonder he was riding coach?”

I doubt he was riding coach because Amazon’s ebook pricing was preventing him from doing well financially. The guy writes (or lends his name to) and sells a shit-ton of books. If he wasn’t making out better on his ebook sales than he was on his hardcover sales, then he had a shitty contract deal with his publishers, because Amazon offers much better royalty rates for ebooks than you’ll get from a traditional publisher for hardcovers.

“Amazon’s $9.99 pricing insistence did not sit so well with government types, either. Back in 2010, the Connecticut Attorney General called Amazon’s $9.99 pricing scheme potentially anti-competitive. Certainly, undercutting brick and mortar competitors by more than half on new hardcovers made it difficult for anyone else to compete in the ebooks space.”

Oh, boo hoo. It’s not anti-competitive to offer your customers a better deal than the other guys; that’s what competition is! If you’re not going to call government officials on their ignorant bullshit, you’re not doing your job as a journalist. If you didn’t realize it was ignorant bullshit, then you shouldn’t be reporting on economic matters.

“Without Apple to force Amazon to rethink its pricing model, book publishers might have had to resort to draconian measures to stay afloat and deliver product (for all I know, they did anyway). Authors might have seen their publishing and sales platform opportunities shrink as fewer publishers took risks on unknown or no-name authors. Oh, and surely Amazon would be making less money on ebooks than it is today.”

So much FAIL in this paragraph. Might as well take it one piece at a time from the top:

“Without Apple to force Amazon to rethink its pricing model…”

Amazon didn’t “rethink” its pricing model. It reluctantly gave in to pressure from the Big Six and Apple. As soon as Amazon can ditch the agency model, it will — and customers will be better off for it.

“…book publishers might have had to resort to draconian measures to stay afloat and deliver product (for all I know, they did anyway).”

Book publishers will have to resort to draconian measures to stay afloat and deliver product anyway. They need to make radical overhauls of their organizational structure, business and distribution models, accounting practices, contract terms, and more. Apple was just helping them maintain the status quo a bit longer — for its own benefit at their long-term expense. This was neither a good thing for consumers nor for authors.

“Authors might have seen their publishing and sales platform opportunities shrink as fewer publishers took risks on unknown or no-name authors.”

Are you serious!?! That’s the situation today under the traditional publishing model! It’s been that way for a long time.

Amazon is disrupting the status quo, opening up new opportunities for publishers and authors. Small presses seem to be flourishing. And, thanks to Amazon, authors can now easily self-publish, reach a wide audience, and develop a steady income stream through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, Barnes & Noble’s Pubit, and various other platforms. The stigma of self-publishing is disappearing. Thanks to Amazon, traditionally published authors are able to put their out-of-print backlist back into publication (if they can get the rights back from their publishers) and generate a steady income stream from books that had long since ceased to generate any income due to an antiquated business model and publisher neglect.

“Oh, and surely Amazon would be making less money on ebooks than it is today.”

Wow. Just… wow. You think major publishers going out of business wouldn’t be a boon to small presses (bye-bye state-supported oligopoly!), lead to the creation of more small presses, and swell the ranks of self-publishing authors in Amazon’s KDP program and other self-publishing platforms?

I haven’t researched the precise timing of events, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the agency-model deal between Apple and five of the Big Six pushed Amazon into starting its own publishing imprints or accelerated plans it already had to do so. Likely this deal encouraged Amazon to go into direct competition with them on the publishing front, either period or earlier than originally planned, thus hastening their own demise. They can’t compete with Amazon on their own turf, at least not without radical changes. Amazon has lower costs, better distribution and marketing, better data, better accounting practices, better contract terms, treats its authors better, has better customer service.

I think Amazon would do just fine without the Big Six.

“Ultimately, this whole drama is just another little piece of Steve Job’s legacy laid bare. He was a hard-nosed business man who knew how to win — at almost any cost. Do we judge Apple or him more harshly for it?”

Was this a fluff piece? Or what? It’s not all about Steve Jobs. I think Mashable’s editor-in-chief over-estimates Jobs’s role in this. It’s not like the agency model had to be shoved down the throats of desperate publishers. They wanted to set their own prices. They just needed Apple’s help to create an alternative store and publishing platform and to push the agency model on Amazon.

[Earlier versions of this post appeared on G+ & TLS.]

Get this: The federal bureaucrat who last month started the litigation against Apple and book publishers for ebook pricing is the same person who, back in the stone age, represented Netscape in its lawsuit against Microsoft.

Recall that Microsoft was trying to give away its Internet Explorer to computer users for free. Netscape went nuts and got the government to clobber Microsoft for being so nice to consumers. It put the company through litigation hell and even demanded that Microsoft change its operating system code to untie it from IE.

The person’s name is Sharis Pozen, and she is acting head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division and a political appointee of the Obama administration. She claims that she is threatening state violence against Apple and publishers for pricing collusion — and that it’s her job to protect consumers.

Interesting. She began her career trying to protect the rights of an old-line company to rip off consumers. To her, a price of zero was unfair competition. She was sure that a browser should be a paid product. The progress of history flattens that argument. Today, dozens of companies beg you to download their browser for free. Browser use is all over the place, sort of like a free market. There is no Microsoft monopoly, contrary to the overheated predictions.

Given that history, one might suppose she would retire from public life and maybe go into flower arranging or something. Instead, she is still at it. Last year, she denied a proposed merger between T-Mobile and AT&T that would have improved your cell service. This year, she says that a deal between publishers and Apple is harming consumers, so she has to act.

Government had absolutely nothing to do with inventing the ebook. It didn’t invent the ereader, either. The Nook, Kindle, iPad, and all the others were purely the products of private enterprise. So too the distribution system that makes millions of titles instantly downloadable with a quick click, storing your downloads in the cloud. The whole apparatus has given new life to the book itself, and represents a bigger shift in publishing than even the printing press.

But we are supposed to believe that Sharis Pozen knows exactly what the prices of ebooks should be. She knows how the contractual relations between publishers and distributors are supposed to work. She knows when there’s competition and collusion. She knows how to protect the consumer against high prices because, of course, we stupid consumers are all sitting here completely clueless about whether $9 or $14 is too much to pay. We’d just mindlessly let go of our money, scammed by private enterprise, were it not for Sharis Pozen looking after our interests.

There is no arrogance in this world to compare with the government bureaucrat’s.

There is no way that any mortal can know in advance how ebook pricing should work. For years, people tried to create a profitable market in selling PDF downloads. Some firms succeeded, but only in a limited way by selling to large institutions, and even then, the product add-ons had to be pretty impressive: fancy searches, large collections, citation help, and more. This model never penetrated the retail sector.

Why? It’s hard to say for sure, but in hindsight, one might speculate that the PDF format just isn’t very consumer friendly. It is fine for many purposes, and miraculous by any historical standard. But in the end, it was not commodifiable on a mass scale.

Then came the ebook. It had an HTML structure that allowed fonts to be increased and decreased. It allowed instant search. Navigation was a snap. It mimicked the page turn of a physical book. It was lightweight. For all these reasons, and probably some reasons that I haven’t thought of, the ebook became commodifiable. I never would have believed it, but there it is.

I know that I’m hooked myself.

But how does pricing work? A conventional government model would examine costs and presume that prices are marked up along a preset path. This model has a superficial, if fallacious, plausibility with physical goods, but it is wholly irrelevant to digital goods. With digital goods, in which the marginal unit cost of each additional item is effectively zero, the price is, very obviously, nothing but a point of agreement between buyer and seller, having nothing to do with costs of production.

So it’s anyone’s guess what the final price of an ebook ought to be. The market dictates this. At first, publishers were selling on a wholesale model and letting the distributors determine the prices. As the distributors do with physical books, they were pushing prices lower and lower, and the publishers started to complain.

That’s when Apple shifted to an agency model of pricing. The publisher sets any price and the distributor takes 30 percent. That way everyone can make a profit. This also allowed smaller publishers to get involved. Even a sole proprietor can get involved and push out ebooks to the world.

So what’s the problem? Apple and Amazon have made it part of their contractual relationships with those using their services that they do not want to be undersold by another company. And why? Of course they want the business, but more tellingly, they are trying to incentivize producers to bring down prices in the interest of making deals.

This is standard procedure in Web pricing. If you are using a service, the service wants to be able to offer the best deal available. Actually, Amazon and others have been doing this for many years. The service user can accept or reject the deal.

Here’s the thing. If this is not the right model, it will hurt the service it delivers. Others can compete. Authors and publishers can establish their own systems. Markets work these things out for themselves. In this case, it appears that Amazon is the only complaining party: it does not want Apple to gain a foothold.

Stabilization is Chaos: “Monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown.”
— F.A. Hayek, 1932

The ebook market is brand-new, for goodness sake. It is going to go through many changes before it is settled — and actually, here’s to hoping it never settles! Ceaseless change in economics and life is a good thing.

But bureaucrats don’t see it that way. They want to freeze everything in place and make all things conform to their model. And if Sharis Pozen had her way, we would all be paying Netscape for the opportunity to surf the Web. So much for caring about the consumer.

[LFB]

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).

I just want to highlight a pleasantly surprising remark from Cameron:

“I think we’ve got to do better,” he told Nature News. “If it means getting private individuals together with institutions and bypassing the whole government paradigm, that’s fine. Maybe that’s what we need to do.”

Please, by all means, do.

Some interesting tales have been and still can be told in the depths of the ocean. Cameron’s Avatar sequel will be set under Pandora’s oceans. And I have a nostalgic fondness for  the show seaQuest DSV that aired when I was a kid.

Now, there’s a contingent of publishers and authors who fear change and have grown complacent and dependent on their IP-based, physical distribution model; they tend to see Amazon as an evil corporation out to destroy publishing, bookselling, and writers.

Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild — does anyone else find the idea of an authors guild disturbing, like modern-day feudalism? some would say the same about the Big 6 publishing houses — recently wrote an open letter speaking out against the antitrust investigation and in defense of the agency model. Quelle surprise! Though it’s ironic to see someone defending big corporations against antitrust investigations who, under normal circumstances (i.e., ones in which his bottom line isn’t directly affected), would probably be in favor of antitrust suits against monopolistic big corporations.

Anyway, Turow types some rather outrageous falsehoods about Amazon. Indie powerhouses Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath do a pretty god job of showing how ridiculous Turow’s claims are. Richard Lea summed it up on Twitter with question that makes up the first half of this blogpost title: “Can a bookseller destroy bookselling by selling lots of books?”

I do disagree with Eisler and Konrath on one thing, however, and that is their opposition to the collusion between Apple and the Big 6 publishers. As a libertarian, I don’t have a problem legally speaking with collusion, or price fixing. Without government support, cartels are unsustainable. Of course, believing some practice shouldn’t be illegal doesn’t mean I approve of said practice.

If Apple and the Big 6 want to shaft their customers with higher prices than their customers are willing to pay, then they’re only hurting themselves with lost sales and an increased incentive to engage in piracy. Indie and self-published authors, and Amazon’s imprints, benefit by being able to undercut the Big 6′s prices by an even wider margin. And, though I haven’t looked into the timing of it, the collusion and coercion of Amazon to adopt the agency model probably pushed Amazon to get into publishing itself. So the Big 6 probably just encouraged Amazon to become a direct competitor in the publishing biz (sooner), and let me tell you they are at a distinct disadvantage vis-à -vis Amazon here.

Legacy publishers still depend heavily on paper book sales. And since paper book sales depend so heavily on brick-and-mortar stores, the Big 6 and Turow seek to protect these traditional booksellers from the online bookseller Amazon’s superior competition for as long as they can. They are looking to prop up paper book sales with high ebook prices. That’s what the agency model is all about. It’s their final stand. Of course, if they succeed in imposing the agency model on ebooks over the long-term, I’m sure they’ll eventually throw their brick-and-mortar friends under the bus.

The Big 6 publishers and brick-and-mortar booksellers don’t have a right to their impose their antiquated business model on others by force. But their ability to do so rests in large part on the mistaken notion that authors have a right to be paid for their writing. Do they deserve to be paid? Maybe. Do they have a right to be paid? No. So say I, so say a growing number of libertarians who recognize that ideas cannot be property and copying is not theft, and so says Seth Godin.

In a recent interview with Digital Book World, the writer and creator of the Domino Project — a joint publishing venture with Amazon that he recently wound up — was asked about his advice that authors should give their books away for free and that they should worry more about spreading their message and building a fan base instead of focusing on how to monetize it right away. And how would he respond to writers concerned about their ability to make a living from their writing? Godin’s response:

Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? Poets don’t get paid (often), but there’s no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled with amateurs, and the truly talented and persistent will make a great living. But the days of journeyman writers who make a good living by the word — over.

I, for one, welcome this development and the freedom that comes with it. Market-driven destructive creation is a good thing; it shakes up entrenched interests that have grown complacent and enables progress. Now authors can easily publish their work and make money without having to win the approval-lottery of myopic gatekeepers.

With the increased competition will come increased innovation and creativity. Mechanisms will develop, and already are developing, to help readers sort the wheat from the chaff. Authors may still get paid, and even make a living off their writing, but they’ll have to do more to earn it because they won’t be able to rely upon a state grant of monopoly privilege and a state-supported oligopolistic industry in order to expropriate money from readers. Some people will feel driven to write even if they aren’t being paid, just as they always have.

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:

In addition to the novel itself, the app “includes some of Rand’s lectures, additional articles for further reading on Rand and her philosophies, a timeline of events in Rand’s life as well as the works she published, and other materials.” If you own an iOS device, you might want to check it out, but it will cost you $14.99.

In related news, filming for Atlas Shrugged: Part Two is scheduled to begin in April. The first film was not great (see Matthew Alexander’s review) and didn’t do so well financially. It doesn’t bode well that the second film will have a smaller budget and a new director and may have some central characters recasted.

~*~

But back to Apple-related news, one P.J. Rey over at The Society Pages: Cyborgology has an interesting article about “How Cyberpunk Warned against Apple’s Consumer Revolution.” There are at times anti-corporate progressive and Marxist overtones in the article — Rey even references Marx’s notion of “false consciousness” — but nevertheless Rey’s criticism of Apple in light of cyberpunk’s tendency toward individualist anarchism should be of interest to radical libertarians of all stripes.

Rey argues that “the values coded into Apple products are passivity and consumerism; it is at this level where it is most distinct from the Cyberpunk movement,” which “is characterized by the marriage of  a deep interest in (and embrace of) modern technology with pessimism regarding the potential social consequences of this technology’s pervasive use.”

Cyberpunk authors, Rey claims, almost invariably have the loss of individual liberty as their central concern. But he then proceeds to distinguish between anarchist and libertarian conceptions of freedom. Curious, I followed the link he provides to an earlier article of his titled “Julian Assange: Cyber-Libertarian or Cyber-Anarchist?”

Here it becomes clear that he conceives of anarchism more in the leftist, anarcho-socialist sense and libertarianism more in the minarchist, Constitutionalist, Libertarian Party sense. He defines anarchism as aiming at the abolition of hierarchy. But he seems wholly unaware that this dichotomy between anarchism and libertarianism is a false one, that is in fact a thriving tradition of libertarian anarchism (aka anarcho-capitalism or free-market anarchism) in the United States and even around the world. It is true that even libertarian anarchists generally do not aim at the abolition of all forms of hierarchy, but then not all forms of anarchism do.

In both articles, I noticed what I think is a common mistake among left-anarchists, or cyber-anarchists as Rey calls some of them, and perhaps also cyberpunk authors. For example, in the cyberpunk article, Rey mentions that in Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson

portrays worlds in which government institutions have become ineffective at regulation so that life or death decision are left to whims of market forces. In light of such conditions, Stephenson details a world with stark contrasts between those who have power and status and those left to languish on the margins.

And in the Assange piece, Rey writes that “cyber-anarchists tend to be as much against private consolidation of Internet infrastructure as they are against government interference.”

But see, libertarians (and libertarian anarchists) would tell him that “the whims of market forces” are not the only things deciding life and death absent effective government regulations, and that it is simply wrong that government regulations prevent the stark conditions described in Snowcrash and that their lack leads to such conditions (the truth is rather the opposite, actually), and also that the private consolidation of Internet infrastructure he opposes is actually driven by government interference.

Libertarians oppose corporatism too, but we understand the failures that markets are typically blamed for are usually caused by governments. Rey writes, ”Freedom for libertarians is freedom to individually prosper, while freedom for anarchists is freedom from systemic inequalities.” No, libertarians are opposed to systemic inequalities too, generally not because we are opposed to inequality as such, but rather because we understand that the cause of systemic inequalities is (usually) the state and that the state is most certainly never the cure.

Cyberpunk authors in general, and Stephenson in particular, also view technology as contributing to a decline in centralized authority, which is supplanted by a patchwork of various organizations that are, at the same time, both more local and more global (i.e., “glocal“) than traditional states. The lack of a central government produces a Wild West type atmosphere, where danger and violence are pervasive, creating the conditions for a particularly masculine breed of heroism.

I know a certain someone who may offer a conflicted nod in reluctant hope and private vindication at the belief that technological advances are contributing to a decline in centralized authority. I, for one, certainly hope so. But again, I don’t see why the absence of effective state power must necessarily result in a Wild West atmosphere (not that the Wild West was quite  as wild as portrayed by Hollywood, mind you). It’s a popular notion people have regarding anarchy, but absent power vacuums resulting from suddenly collapsing states, and provided the evolution of alternative institutions and a liberty-friendly culture, I expect an anarchist society would be quite peaceful and prosperous.

There is more to the cyberpunk vs. Apple article than I’ve touched on here, so do check it out.

In yet more Apple-related news, when Apple launched its user-friendly ebook creation app iBooks Author recently, there was a strong negative reaction when people realized that the EULA’s wording suggested that ebooks created with the app could only be sold in the iBooks store.

Well, Apple has just clarified, or rather caved to public pressure, by changing the wording of the EULA so that it unequivocally states that only ebooks produced in the .ibooks format have this restriction. Ebooks published in PDF or “Text” format are not limited to being sold in the iBooks store.

I don’t see this as much consolation, however. Who wants to sell PDF or “Text” files? I’d give those away. We want to sell ebooks in epub and Kindle/mobi formats, and we don’t want to be tied down to Apple’s relatively tiny iBooks store. It’s also disappointing that Apple pushed for the development of the epub3 format, but has now turned around and forked it to create a proprietary, not 100% epub-compatible, epub format with the .ibooks extension.

Even with Apple’s “clarification,” who is actually going to use the iBooks Author app?

~*~

And, finally, I’ve mentioned forward-thinking genre publisher Angry Robot Books a couple of times before. They are devoted to selling DRM-free epub versions of their books on their website and have adopted a subscription model as an option for purchasing their books. I recently got wind of another of their innovative entrepreneurial gambits.

They have launched WorldBuilder, a collaborative project between the author of a novel, the publisher, and fan-creators. Rather than threaten fan-fic writers and waste their time fighting piracy, as some misguided publishers and authors are wont to do, they are embracing fan creators. Think of it as a kind of shared-world project in which the fans, not just other professional writers, are encouraged to contribute. And if a fan’s creation is good enough, he might wind up receiving an offer from Angry Robot.

The first book, or shared world, in the WorldBuilder project will be Empire State by Adam Christopher. It’s got an interesting pitch: a superhero noir fantasy set in a parallel Prohibition Era New York City. I’m looking forward to reading it.

There are some restrictions, however. WorldBuilder operates under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, meaning that you can’t sell any of your fan creations independently and your derivative works must have the same license (i.e., you can’t drop the NonCommercial and ShareAlike restrictions). So the license is not as good as it could be from a libertarian perspective.

Further, and I’m not sure how this squares with the CC license they’e adopted, Angry Robot states “You may create any form of art or literature based on the world – and characters – of Empire State, with one notable exception: You may not create any direct narrative adaptation of the novel, or identifiable scenes within the novel.“ This means

that, while you are free to create film, comics, etc, these should be your own stories, and not – for example – a filmed version of the book, or of scenes within the book. The same goes with audio – you can write your own stories and record them, but not simply read from the book.

Still… This is a step in the right direction, and more than most publishers seem to be willing to do.

Prometheus Unbound operates under the least restrictive of the commonly recognized CC licenses: Attribution-Only . If we knew of a way to  effectively release our work into the public domain, we would do so. Unfortunately, at least in the United States, copyright is automatic and very sticky.

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.

Named after the first book the series, Game of Thrones is the best fantasy television series ever produced. If you missed the first season, get caught up quickly! But read the book first if you haven’t yet.

Season 2 follows the second book in the series (A Clash of Kings), with the first episode scheduled to air on April 1st. If the teaser trailer is any guide, it’ll be all about the struggle to acquire and maintain power; and the character of Tyrion Lannister, superbly portrayed by Peter Dinklage, will be at the center of it.

There’s an article by science fiction author Gregory Benford in the February issue of Reason Magazine (also available online at Reason.com). I hadn’t realized it, but Benford has written three other articles for Reason (see below for a list of the others).

In the article, Benford briefly discusses the role of Nazi SS officer and rocket scientist Wernher von Braun ((Benford doesn’t call Von Braun a facilitator of mass murder, but does mention that he ran “Adolf Hitler’s V-1 and V-2 programs, which sent more than 10,000 rockets into England in 1944 and 1945.”)) in the American government’s space program, from his popular promotion of his vision of man conquering space (interesting choice of war metaphor) to his running the Apollo program.

Benford discusses Von Braun’s vision for how man will conquer space, a vision that strikes me as impractical and expensive and that still lingers in NASA today. He also highlights the decline of NASA and its “ruinously expensive” nature of the American government’s space shuttle program, which suffered catastrophic failures and kept going long past its planned obsolescence.

Though Benford says that Von Braun’s vision lives on, I’m not so sure of that. If he means Von Braun’s  general vision of man “conquering” space, then yes, that vision is not dead. If he means Von Braun’s more specific vision of how this is to be accomplished, then no, I do not think that vision will live on.

He then goes on to discuss how science fiction authors have reacted to the rising and falling fortunes of the American government’s space program. It’s interesting how most science fiction authors couldn’t envision space exploration without NASA, equating the two, while a few others foresaw NASA’s failure and advocated private space exploration as a viable alternative.

Benford notes that science fiction “is becoming more economically literate, Stephen Baxter believes, because the history of post-1972 NASA has sobered the writers.” This is a welcome change as, contra Arthur C. Clarke, economics is a science. It’s a shame that so many science fiction authors have worked hard not to get the science wrong yet have ended up writing stories that make no economic sense.

More Reason Articles by Gregory Benford

• Choosing Our Own Future, Gregory Benford, April 23, 2009
• Theological Science Fiction, Gregory Benford, May 23, 2003
• Leaping the Abyss, Gregory Benford, April 1, 2002

Updated 2/2/2012

Reason also published a selected list of space science fiction compiled by Benford, ranging from Robert Heinlein to Joan Slonczewski:

As NASA’s manned space efforts shrank, starships became more the stuff of science fiction. The following envision different paths to expansion into space.

Voyage, by Stephen Baxter (1996): An epic saga of America’s might-have-been. If President John F. Kennedy had lived, we could have sent a manned mission to Mars in the 1980s.

Coyote, by Allen Steele (2002): Gallant misfits, led by a spaceship captain named Robert E. Lee, steal a starship. They flee a declining Earth rife with dictatorship and technophobia to found a new society on a new world.

Time for the Stars, by Robert A. Heinlein (1956): Identical twins are enlisted to be the human radios that will keep starships in contact with Earth, but one of them has to stay behind while the other explores the depths of space. Einstein intervenes.

Earth, by David Brin (1990): A small black hole escapes from the lab that made it, and Earth is in danger of being hollowed out. Wracked by gravity lasers from core to pole, Earth explores whether humanity and freedom can survive.

Hull Zero Three, by Greg Bear (2010): Interstellar planet hunting on an enormous damaged starship. Strange things have come to live in the starship’s vast corridors on the long voyage.

The Highest Frontier, by Joan Slonczewski (2011): College in an orbital space habitat. Global climate change and advanced social change amid an intriguing biotech future.

A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge (1992): Supersmart entities rule part of our galaxy. Human minds remain limited, but our lot is not as bad as that of creatures in the Unthinking Depths, where only simple animals can function. Add conflicts and stir.

Mars Crossing, by Geoffrey A. Landis (2000): Adventurers endure an agonizing trek halfway across the surface of Mars to reach a ship designed to carry only half their number. A rugged, inventive tale.

Red Thunder, by John Varley (2003): A Chinese spacecraft, Heavenly Harmony, threatens to land on Mars a few days before the U.S. shuttle gets there. A tribute to Heinlein, the space program, and American ingenuity.

Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson (1992–1996): A trilogy about founding a Mars colony. The settlers fragment into political factions which differ on how to alter the Mars environment and govern the first society independent of Earth.

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.

Over at Ars Gratia Libertatis (Art for the Sake of Liberty), ADUCKNAMEDJOE has a list of what he considers to be the five best free libertarian novels. The first novel of our very own Matthew Alexander made the list.

1. Alongside Night by J. Neil Schulman
2. Wĭthûr Wē by Matthew Alexander (Help out the author and Prometheus Unbound by buying a copy.)
3. Time Will Run Back by Henry Hazlitt (Help out the Mises Institute by buying a physical or digital copy.)
4. And Then There Were None by Eric Frank Russel
5. A Lodging of Wayfaring Men by Paul A. Rosenberg

ADUCKNAMEDJOE also throws in as a bonus a free libertarian short story, “Lippidleggin’“ by F. Paul Wilson, about circumventing food prohibition laws. Head on over to Ars Gratia Libertatis to read his descriptions of these stories.

What do you think of the items on the list? Is anything missing?

Also via Ars Gratia Libertatis, a couple of videos on the importance of art and culture for liberty:

J. Neil Schulman’s speech at Libertopia 2010

John Stossel on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, talking about the Atlas Shrugged movie

Learn out more about Ars Gratia Libertatis.

Here’s a list of the episodes so far:

• Amy Sturgis: General Themes of Liberty in Science Fiction
• Amy Sturgis: Firefly and Serenity
• Ilya Somin: Battlestar Galactica
• Ilya Somin: Star Trek
• Ilya Somin: Hunger Games
• Brad Birzer: The Works of J.R.R Tolkien
• Joseph Packer: World of Warcraft and Spontaneous Order
• Aeon Skoble: The Twilight Zone
• Amber Taylor: Game of Thrones

Now, when someone like myself says he is against intellectual “property,” as an illegitimate government grant of monopoly privilege over something that cannot be owned (i.e., ideas), the responses are fairly predictable.

A common one is “Well, then what’s to stop me from copying your novel, changing the name on it, and selling it as my own?”

Well, your customers could sue you for fraud, for one thing. No need for copyright to make that possible.

For another, in the Internet age, you run a very high risk of being found out and ruining your reputation.

In this case, fans of James Bond novels discovered the plagiarism first. As you can imagine, fans can be mighty protective of their favorite books and authors. Try to rip one off and some fan is bound to spot it, and soon they’ll all be royally pissed.

Simon Gardner, the son of John Gardner, said he hoped “the exposure of this act of plagiarism will act as a lesson to others that think they might try to dupe publishers and the public alike”. “Whether the authors are alive or dead, there are enough fans of popular fiction to come down fast and hard on anyone who tries to rip off their favourite authors. That is the power of fans and I salute and thank you all on behalf of John Edmund Gardner,” he wrote on Facebook.

Lisa Moylett, Gardner’s literary executor, also praised her author’s fans for uncovering the plagiarism. “You don’t mess with Bond fans: they watch and monitor everything and are a very well-organised community,” she said.

One of the reviewers, who had praised the book, was then alerted to the plagiarism and brought the bad news to the attention of the publishers. As you can imagine, they’re all quite embarrassed that they got duped and will probably be more careful in the future. Their reputations are on the line too, after all. The book has been pulled from shelves and customers are going to be reimbursed. And QR Markham, a.k.a. Quentin Rowan, is now known around the globe as a plagiarist.

[Cross-posted at the Libertarian Standard.]

From the Reason.com blogpost:

Vernor Vinge is a former San Diego State University math professor and a Hugo award-winning science fiction novelist. In Vinge’s 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity” Vinge wrote, “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

We sat down with Vinge to learn more about his influences, his novels and the coming singularity.

Vinge’s latest novel, The Children of the Sky, will be released in October 2011.

Produced by Paul Feine, Alex Manning and Zach Weissmueller.

Approximately 7 minutes.

Go to reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv’s YouTube Channel to receive notifications when new material goes live.

I’m rather late with this sad news, but I just read the obituary in the August digital issue of Locus Magazine a couple of days ago. Martin H. Greenberg died on June 25, 2011 after a long struggle with cancer. A political scientist like myself, Greenberg had a long, prolific, and influential career in genre fiction as an anthologist. He edited and co-edited more short fiction anthologies than I can probably read in a lifetime.

Greenberg’s death is particularly worth noting for libertarians because of two of his anthologies, co-edited with Mark Tier, that won the Prometheus Special Award in 2oo5: Give Me Liberty and Visions of Liberty, which have been collected into an omnibus anthology titled Freedom! The anthologies are stacked with top talent, including short stories by Vernor Vinge, Murray Leinster, A.E. van Vogt, Frank Herbert, Eric Frank Russell, Robert J. Sawyer, Mike Resnick and Tobias S. Buckell, Brad Linaweaver, Michael A. Stackpole, Jack Williamson, and more.

The back cover description of Freedom! reads in part:

As Thomas Jefferson put it, “That government is best which governs least.” And, as Will Rogers wryly quipped, “We’re lucky we don’t get the government we pay for!” In the future, eternal vigilance against our own government will be even more important than vigilance against hostile outsiders.

This stellar roster of writers consider how a truly free society could operate, how the Soviet Union might have fallen apart even earlier because of an apparently harmless device, how a low-tech society might throw off the influence of more “advanced” intruders, how the right to own weapons is fundamental to freedom, and more.

In the future, freedom may be even more threatened than in our present — and this volume suggests original and unusual ways of defending it.

I’m very much interested in publishing a review of Freedom!, or reviews of Give Me Liberty and Visions of Liberty, although I will review Freedom! myself eventually if I don’t receive any submissions.

I’ve reproduced the print/digital issue obituary from Locus Magazine below. There is a shorter version, published earlier, on the website. You can also learn more about Greenberg and his impressively long bibliography from his SF Encyclopedia entry.

Editor and author Martin H[arry] Greenberg, 70, died June 25, 2011 in Green Bay, WI after a long struggle with cancer. Greenberg was an influential and prolific editor and packager of anthologies, most SF, fantasy, and horror. Because he sometimes worked as an anonymous packager through his company Tekno Books, it’s difficult to determine exactly how many titles he had a hand in, but he certainly worked on more than 1,000 anthologies, published from the 1970s to 2011 (with more forthcoming).

The first anthology he edited, Political Science Fiction (1974, with Patricia Warrick) was meant as a teaching guide, and he co-edited several other educational volumes of SF in the Through Science Fiction series. He soon rose to prominence with more commercial anthologies, though, initially co-editing with Joseph D. Olander, Charles G. Waugh, and occasionally his wife Rosalind M. Greenberg.

Though he edited many volumes on his own, Greenberg was also the field’s most prolific creator of “team-up” anthologies, co-editing with an astonishing array of SF luminaries and newcomers, notably Poul Anderson, Gregory Benford, Orson Scott Card, Arthur C. Clarke, Damon Knight, Barry N. Malzberg, Walter M. Miller, Andre Norton, Frederik Pohl, Fred Saberhagen, Robert Silverberg, Connie Willis, Jane Yolen, and many others. His most frequent collaborator was Isaac Asimov: together the two edited more than 125 anthologies.

Greenberg was born March 1, 1941 in Miami Beach, FL. He attended the University of Miami, and got his doctorate in political science from the University of Connecticut in 1969. He was dean of the school of international studies at Florida International University, and taught at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay from 1975 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1996. He began editing under the name Martin H. Greenberg to distinguish himself from the field’s other Martin Greenberg, publisher of Gnome Press.

He wrote nonfiction in his scholarly field, including Bureaucracy and Development: A Mexican Case Study (1970), and some nonfiction about SF, notably Index to Stories in the Thematic Anthologies of Science Fiction (1978, with Joseph D. Olander and Marshall B. Tymn) and Science Fiction and Fantasy Series and Sequels: A Bibliography — Volume 1: Books (1986) with Tim Cottrill & Charles G. Waugh. He also co-edited (with Olander) many anthologies featuring critical essays on writers, including Isaac Asimov (1977), Arthur C. Clarke (1977), Robert A. Heinlein (1978), Ursula K. Le Guin (1979), Ray Bradbury (1980), and Philip K. Dick (1983), and edited numerous other anthologies of nonfiction on various SFnal subjects.

Greenberg won a Milford Award for lifetime achievement in SF publishing and editing in 1989. Horrors! 365 Scary Stories (1998, with Stefan R. Dziemianowicz & Robert Weinberg) won a Stoker for outstanding anthology, and Give Me Liberty (2003, with Mark Tier) and Visions of Liberty (2004, with Mark Tier) received special Prometheus Awards in 2005. Greenberg received a Life Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association in 2004, and a Solstice Award from SFWA in 2009.

Greenberg was predeceased by first wife, Sally. He is survived by wife Rosalind, a daughter, two stepdaughters, and a step-granddaughter. Rosalind will continue to run Tekno Books.

SF Gateway will be publishing online in ebook form a catalog numbering in the thousands of out-of-print backlist books from its authors. Including “the classic SF pulp writers of the Golden Age right through to modern award-winning authors,” SF Gateway purports to be “the largest library of digital Science Fiction and Fantasy ever assembled.” All of these titles will naturally be directly interlinked with author and title entries in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, so the encyclopedia will serve as a handy way to spur sales. The SF Gateway site will also serve in part as a social network, which is another clever idea — build up an online community around the encyclopedia and that large library of sf&f ebooks. You can read more about it in the pdf press release.

Also in the last news roundup, I mentioned some innovations in publishing. Here is some more info on a couple of them:

• One of those innovations is a crowdfunding model like Kickstarter but just for books, called Unbound. Business Week’s Bobbie Johnson has an interesting article on it. Unbound doesn’t seem to be doing so well, but that’s not because the crowdfunding model doesn’t work for books. It’s working fine on Kickstarter. Read the article to see what Kickstarter got right but Unbound got wrong: transparency, authenticity, less niche and more international.
• Angry Robot isn’t the first publisher to introduce an ebook subscription model. I had forgotten about Baen’s Webscriptions: currently $18/month gets you a minimum of 4 (usually 6 or 7) ebooks per month. Also, be sure to check out the Baen Free Library.

I also recently ran across an innovative marketing platform for those who go the indie publishing route. Moses Siregar, co-host of Adventures in Scifi Publishing, recently launched Indie Author Rockstar, which is intended to help indie-published authors showcase and promote their own and each other’s work. There is talk around the web about the need for gatekeepers or quality filters or curators in online publishing, to help readers find the gems amidst all the crap. A traditional publishing house is not the only way to do this. Perhaps Indie Author Rockstar will provide another successful model. Read about how it works.

Along the lines of helping readers find the good stuff, Gizmodo has an article about new software that can detect fake reviews with 90% accuracy. Here’s to hoping online stores like Amazon put it to use soon.

But author Dean Wesley Smith takes issue with the idea of traditional publishers as quality filters in “Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: New York Works as a Quality Filter.”

Finally, a list of interesting links:

• “It Was Never About The Money, Stupid” by Rick Falkvinge (TorrentFreak)
• “The Inevitability Of Techno Moral Panics: But Think Of The Children” by Mike Masnick (techdirt)
• “E-book Pricing 101” by Jim Milliot (Publisher’s Weekly)
• “The State of the Tablet and Ereader Market” by Jolie O’Dell (Mashable)
• Ebooks cause “Paperback Publishers [to] Quicken Their Pace” by Julie Bosman (NYT)
• “Why Borders Failed But Barnes & Noble Survived” by Yuki Noguchi (NPR)

• Best Libertarian Novel Winner: Darkship Thieves by Sarah Hoyt (Baen).
• Hall of Fame Winner: Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Alas, I didn’t get around to reading and reviewing Cory Doctorow’s For the Win in time for the voting, but I still plan on doing so. Matthew Alexander reviewed another of the finalists, L. Neil Smith’s Ceres.

Here’s the official press release:

The Libertarian Futurist Society will hold its annual awards ceremony for the Prometheus Award during Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention, to be held Aug. 17-21 in Reno, Nevada. The specific time and location will be available in the convention program.

The winner of the Best Novel award is Darkship Thieves, by Sarah Hoyt (Baen Books). The Hall of Fame award was won by Animal Farm, a short novel written by George Orwell in 1945. Sarah Hoyt will receive a plaque and a one-ounce gold coin, while a smaller gold coin and a plaque will be presented to Orwell’s estate.

Darkship Thieves features an exciting, coming-of-age saga in which a heroic woman fights for her freedom and identity against a tyrannical Earth. Hoyt’s novel, dedicated to Robert A. Heinlein, depicts a plausible anarchist society among the asteroids. Hoyt is a prolific writer of novels and short fiction, though this is her first time as Prometheus finalist.

Orwell won the Hall of Fame award for his novel 1984, fittingly, in 1984, the second year the award was given. Animal Farm has been a finalist for the Hall of Fame award multiple times. Animal Farm, a short novel, retells the story of the Russian Revolution in the literary form of a beast fable, reflecting the post-World War II disillusionment of many communists. The story introduced the phrase “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” which has been borrowed innumerable times to pillory many political movements that claimed to be fighting for equality. Orwell’s story is widely considered both a classic work, and a devastating critique of Stalinism.

The other finalists for Best Novel were For the Win, by Cory Doctorow (TOR Books); The Last Trumpet Project, by Kevin MacArdry (www.lasttrumpetproject.com); Live Free or Die, by John Ringo (Baen Books); and Ceres, by L. Neil Smith (Phoenix Pick (print edition) and Big Head Press, online publication at www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/). Ten novels published in 2010 were nominated for the 2011 award.

The other finalists for the Hall of Fame award were “The Machine Stops,” a story by E. M. Forster (1909); “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 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 Renovation 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/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.

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.

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 (BestNovelChair at the lfs.org domain) or via SnailMail at 3164 Plymouth Place, Columbus OH 43213.

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.

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 at the lfs.org domain).

I’m not privy to what angle the article or articles will take, but I presume the cover is referring to the retirement of NASA’s space shuttle program without a government replacement. But why need that mean the end of the space age?

Private space initiatives are picking up, though unfortunately at least some of them are being subsidized by the US federal government. But surely the relevant writers and editors at the Economist know this.

So what then is the cover implying? That without significant government involvement and decisive leadership, humanity can kiss the dream of space exploration and colonization goodbye?

Maybe they’ll also argue that the recent financial crisis, mounting government debts, and sluggish “recovery” are also factors in the premature death of the space age (thanks governments of the world!).

But still… There’s an awful lot of finality in that declaration: The End of the Space Age. Call me an optimist, but I don’t think the dream is dead yet — at least not for good.

There’s more than a whiff of sensationalist journalism here, I think, probably to drive sales and page views. Dare we give them the benefit of the doubt and suspect the motivation behind the declaration is to intentionally stretch the truth in order to shock people into saving the dream before it’s too late?

What do you think?

Update

So here’s the lead article: “The end of the Space Age: Inner space is useful. Outer space is history.”

And here’s another article from the issue: “Into the sunset:The final launch of the space shuttle brings to an end the dreams of the Apollo era.”

And here’s a retrospective: “From the archive: America’s shuttle shuffles towards launch.”

I might update this post again or blog a new one with my thoughts on the articles later on. But in the meantime, what say you?

From their press release:

Can you write an inspiring article from the future illustrating how seasteading has improved humanity? If so, we want your submission. The best stories will be featured on our revised website later in the year.

Here’s what talented writers need to know when they draft their entries:

• Inspirational: These stories should be written to inspire readers about seasteading’s opportunities to improve humankind. Therefore, every story should have a human element. That is, no matter what topic the writer chooses (i.e. macroeconomics, poverty, medical science, environmentalism, etc.), the story needs to focus on at least one character whose life is better because of seasteading.
• Quality is important: The overall goal of this project is to create written images of what the future could be with seasteading, and we will publish the best-written stories that capture our vision of the future.
• Length should be 200–2000 words: We will accept stories as short as 200 words and as long as 2000.
• Newspaper style: The stories will be presented as news stories from the future. Entrants can tackle human interest stories focusing on one fictional individual, or international matters of economic boons related to seasteading, or anything in between that could reasonably be conceived as plausible (so long as it has a human element).
• Wide audience: Stories should be written with a wide audience in mind and be as politically neutral as possible. We wish to promote seasteading as an outlet for anyone to create and test innovative governments and we will not choose to publish stories that are overtly offensive to a particular political disposition.
• Hypothetical year: Stories should be identified with a hypothetical year they take place. That is, does the story take place 5, 10, 20, 50 years from now?
• All stories will be considered licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. This means others will be free to share and adapt the work, so long as attribution is given to the author.

Before writing we suggest authors review our website, particularly our introduction, strategy and FAQ pages. Although it was not written in newspaper style, we have an example of a seasteading story from the future written by Patri.

We look forward to many submissions from our talented supporters. Please email your submission to randy@seasteading.org.

In this video, Prof. Burns explains three classical liberal themes in Ayn Rand’s masterpiece Atlas Shrugged: individualism, suspicion of centralized power, and free markets. These themes come to life through the novel’s plot and characters and give the reader an opportunity to imagine a world where entrepreneurship has been stifled by regulations and where liberty has been traded for security. Burns ends by reviving Rand’s critical question: do you want to live in this kind of world?

One of these days I’ll write an article on why fiction authors, especially science fiction authors (hellooo!), should study the “dismal science.”

In case you missed Round One:

From the announcement:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” —Nineteen Eighty-Four

Over sixty years later, 1984 has come and gone, but Orwell’s unsettling vision of the future continues to resonate throughout our culture, along with so many other great dystopian works of the last century, from Fahrenheit 451 toThe Hunger Games, Metropolis to Blade Runner, Harrison Bergeron to The Handmaid’s Tale…the list goes on and on and so, on this bright, not-so-cold day in April, we’re pleased to announce a weeklong celebration of a subgenre which has continually challenged the comfortable boundaries of our imaginations.

We’ve asked our bloggers and some of our favorite authors to weigh in on their favorite works of dystopian fiction and film, and we hope you’ll join us as we explore the continuing impact and influence of these worlds which have captured (and sometimes haunted) our collective imaginations. We’ve got an eclectic mix of posts in store—we’ll be covering some classics along with less obvious works, and while the list is by no means exhaustive, it should be fun, thought-provoking and doubleplusgood (and not at all dark and sinister and riddled with ominous pro-Stubby propaganda and subliminal mind control experiments…)

Enjoy!

Following the announcement, kick off dystopia week with editor John Joseph Adams’s introduction to the genre.

[Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.]

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 on our staff who only contribute occasionally. We’re even open to one-time contributors.

So if you’d like to read and review one of the other Prometheus Award 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 Award:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, April 4, 2011

2011 PROMETHEUS BEST NOVEL FINALISTS ANNOUNCED

The Libertarian Futurist Society has selected Best Novel finalists for the Prometheus Awards. Winners for Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) will be presented in an awards ceremony which will be presented at the World Science Fiction Convention, which will be held during Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention to be held Aug. 17-21 in Reno, Nevada.

The Prometheus Award finalists for Best Novel are (in alphabetical order by author):

• For the Win, by Cory Doctorow (TOR Books)
• Darkship Thieves, by Sarah Hoyt (Baen Books)
• The Last Trumpet Project, by Kevin MacArdry (lasttrumpetproject.com)
• Live Free or Die, by John Ringo (Baen Books)
• Ceres, by L. Neil Smith (Big Head Press, also published online at bigheadpress.com )

For the Win is Doctorow’s portrait of a future in which the world’s poor adopt entrepreneurial strategies and Internet/virtual technologies to challenge the statist status quo and achieve freedom through self-empowerment. Doctorow has been nominated several times for the Prometheus Award and won in 2009 for Little Brother.

Darkship Thieves features an exciting, coming-of-age saga in which a heroic woman fights for her freedom and identity against a tyrannical Earth. Hoyt’s novel depicts a plausible anarchist society among the asteroids. This is Hoyt’s first time as Prometheus finalist.

The Last Trumpet Project tells the story of a future in which virtual reality and uploading people’s minds into computers have merged. In this milieu, freedom struggle against a tyrannical government allied with religious zealots who will go to any length to ensure their vision of the future. The hopeful and utopian work is MacArdry’s first published novel.

Live Free or Die is Ringo’s rollicking saga of entrepreneurial humans using free-market capitalism and the spirit of old-fashioned Yankee individualism to defend Earth from imperialist aliens after first contact embroils us in galactic politics. This is Ringo’s first time as a Prometheus finalist.

Ceres, the sequel to Smith’s Prometheus Award-winning novel Pallas (1994), dramatizes a conflict between a libertarian society based in the asteroids and a statist Earth government. Smith also won the Prometheus Award for The Probability Broach (1982) and The Forge of the Elders (2001).

Ten novels published in 2010 were nominated for this year’s Best Novel category. The other nominees were Directive 51, by John Barnes (Ace Books); Zendegi, by Greg Egan (Night Shade Books); Migration, by James Hogan (Baen Books); The Unincorporated War, by Dani and Eytan Kollin (TOR Books); and A Mighty Fortress, by David Weber (TOR Books)

The Prometheus Award, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), 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 the winners.

The Prometheus awards honor outstanding science fiction/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.

For more information, contact LFS Board President Chris Hibbert (hibbert@mydruthers.com); Best Novel awards coordinator Michael Grossberg (mikegrossb@aol.com); or Worldcon awards ceremony coordinator Fred Moulton (programming@lfs.org).

For a full list of past Prometheus Award winners in three categories, visit www.lfs.org. Membership in the Libertarian Futurist Society is open to any science fiction fan interested in how fiction can promote an appreciation of the value of liberty.

because according to this quote cited by Gregory Benford in his happy-birthday letter in Locus Magazine (January 2008), he claims that “there are some general laws governing scientific extrapolation, as there are not (pace Marx) in the case of politics and economics.” Well, far be it from me to disagree that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but Clarke is wrong here. Sir Clarke, you may be 90 years old now, and happy birthday by the way, but it’s never too late to acquire a firm grasp of sound economic theory.

As disappointing as it is, it’s not surprising that he had a natural-scientistic bias against economics. Sadly, he died only a few months after my post.

In a more recent article in the Sri Lanka Guardian, more of Clarke’s economic ignorance is on display:

While researching for this article I came across a searing indictment by Clarke on the American capitalist system. After observing that the structure of American society may be unfitted for the effort that the conquest of space demands he continued, “No nation can afford to divert its ablest men into essentially non-creative and occasionally parasitic occupations such as law, insurance and banking”. He also referred to a photograph in Life Magazine showing 7,000 engineers massed behind a new model car they had produced as ‘a horrifying social document’. He was appalled by the squandering of technical manpower it represented. All this indeed makes one wonder whether he really was a closet socialist.

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. — Murray Rothbard

Maybe not a socialist, at least not of the Marxist variety, but there’s definitely a technocratic central-planner streak in there. Now, there may be government policies that divert more people to work in the legal, insurance, and banking professions (particularly legal) than otherwise would in a free market, but somehow I think Clarke has in mind here a more general dismissal of the value of these professions — which is just silly ignorance.

As for so many engineers working on automobiles rather than spaceships and space elevators, well, there’s just more money in it, bub. Deal with it. And, quite frankly, as much as I dream about space exploration and colonization, I’d rather keep driving ever-improving cars than make do with horse-and-buggy for who knows how long while the nation’s resources are diverted to centrally-planned space projects that will undoubtedly waste vast resources and trillions of dollars and may not come to fruition in my lifetime. So sue me for having high time preference.

But in my old blogpost I did identify some good quotes from Clarke, again reported by Benford:

“[F]or the one fact about the Future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.” Sounds more American than British to me.

“[E]xact knowledge is the friend, not the enemy, of imagination and fantasy.”

Here’s one that evokes, for me at least, the evils and waste of war: “All this effort, all this death, when we could be building the staging area for a seaborne space elevator.” But Clarke probably had in mind using the state to direct all that effort and money toward his pet space elevator.

In his May 2008 memorial letter for Clarke, Benford added two more quotes that I like:

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”

“New ideas pass through three periods: It can’t be done; it probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing; I knew it was a good idea all along!”

[TLS]