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

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

What We’ve Been Reading

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

Libertarian Speculative Fiction

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

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

Authors & Books Mentioned

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

Book of the Month

Coyote by Allen Steele

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s Tomorrows Writing Prompt

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

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

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

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

Writing Prompt

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

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

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

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

That’s your writing prompt. Now go write.

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

IP-Related Stories Mentioned

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

Recommended Reading on IP

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

Fiction Forecasts

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

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

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

Television

Returning shows:

• The Walking Dead
• Person of Interest
• Elementary

Ongoing shows:

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

Movies

January:

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

February:

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

Books (January/February)

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

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.

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:

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.

1. Over a decade ago, a Russian paleontologist wrote an alternative take on the War of the Ring from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Recently translated into English, Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer tells the tale from the point of view of Mordor, the bad guys in Tolkien’s epic.
   
   History is usually written by the victors, but now the truth of the War of the Ring has finally come out. Gandalf is portrayed as a warmonger bent on destroying a bastion of civilization dedicated to reason, science, technology, and industrialization because science “destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!” The elves are bent on world domination and Aragorn is a Machiavellian schemer whose strings are pulled by his wife, Arwen.
   
   If you’re intrigued, you can learn more about The Last Ringbearer from the Salon.com article “Middle-Earth according to Mordor” and, also on Salon.com, the author’s own account of why he wrote the novel. You can download The Last Ringbearer for free and give it a read. Here’s to hoping Christopher Tolkien doesn’t aggress against Yeskov by launching a copyright or trademark infringement lawsuit.
2. Finally, the print magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, is entering the digital age and switching from snail mail to an electronic submissions system.
3. In my previous news roundup, I posted the trailer of the upcoming movie adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as well as some reports from people who had seen an advance preview and an interview with the producer. Here’s more footage, the scene in which Henry Rearden returns home and gives his wife a bracelet made from the first pouring of Rearden Metal:
   

4. There are two new trailers available for Sucker Punch, about which I’ve written previously. Follow the link for the libertarian angle and the first trailer. New trailers below:
   

5. And there’s more preview footage and talk about what to expect from HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones:
   

Nothing in the world is the way it oughta be. It’s harsh…and cruel…but that’s why there’s us…champions. It doesn’t matter where we come from, what we’ve done, or suffered. Or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be. You’re not a part of that yet. I hope you will be.

Reminds me of Ayn Rand’s “Anyone who fights for the future, lives it in today” and her conception of Romantic Realism in fiction as a portrayal of life “as it could be and should be.” See, also, my Journal of Libertarian Studies article, “Atlas Shrugged and the Importance of Dramatizing Our Values (pdf).”

1. Will Thomas of The Atlas Society (formerly known as The Objectivist Center) argues that transhumanism is compatible with Objectivism.
2. Kylie Sturgess, in her Curiouser and Curiouser column for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, interviewed Scott Sigler. I hadn’t heard of him before, but apparently he’s known as a podcaster and now also as an author of techno-thrillers.

   Sigler describes skeptics as people
    

   who were spreading the other side of the information instead of misinformation. They are out actively encouraging people to think for themselves, and what’s been interesting is that they’re not necessarily telling people “this is bunk.” They are encouraging people to think critically about things and learn how to address things when you run into them.

   He goes on to mention how, among other things, evolution is being challenged in America. But there’s a flipside to long-accepted, fairly well-established science being attacked in knee-jerk fashion by those faith-based types leery of science in general and of science that challenges their religious beliefs in particular. Sometimes science can become corrupted in politically-charged fields, and scientists lose their objectivity. I’m reminded of an old post I wrote about scientific skepticism in relation to global warming alarmism. I riffed off of Clarke’s First Law of Prediction and Asimov’s Corollary.

   But to get back to Scott Sigler, has anyone read any of his work? If so, what do you think? Do you recommend it?

3. PalPal founder Elon Musk’s company SpaceX carried out a successful mission the other day, marking the first private space flight. The Dragon spacecraft, capable of carrying 7 astronauts, was launched by a Falcon 9 rocket, moved onto earth orbit, circled the planet a couple times, and splashed down in the Pacific. A successful test and (generally) a great day for private enterprise and private space flight, although it looks like the project was partially funded (I don’t know how much) by NASA which is not ideal. Check out the live coverage, complete with video, over at Gizmodo. Apparently in a nod to Monty Python, the Dragon capsule carried a wheel of Le Brouere cheese.
4. In case you hadn’t heard, HBO is producing a tv show based on George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy series of novels. It’s an excellent, gritty series told from tight multiple-character points of view (POV), with little magic (at least at first), in which little if anything is black and white, and realpolitik drives events. The show is titled Game of Thrones after the first book in the series. Here is nearly 12 minutes of behind-the-scenes and sneak-peak footage (via SFSignal):

Also, have a gander at this, I’m assuming photoshopped, image of a Jeffrey Tucker human action figure complete with plastic gold coins.

But it is a mistake to draw moral principles from emergencies and lifeboat situations for general application in everyday, normal circumstances. It is rather a function of practical wisdom to properly apply our principles in any given situation. Sometimes we are faced with what appears to be a no-win scenario (such as the Kobayashi Maru of Star Trek fame). But I think that often in real life, as in fiction, we are really just presenting to ourselves or being presented with two false alternatives. We can choose to take the easy, seemingly pragmatic, way out — the least unpalatable of the two options before us — and rationalize it. Or we can choose to look for another way. It is not always wrong to fight the hypo.

In Fringe, the characters are faced with two parallel universes collapsing into each other. We are informed that only one can survive. There is an ancient device that could possibly be used to destroy one of the universes and save the other. In the scene starting at around 37 minutes into 6955 kHz, the alternate Olivia asks the hero, Peter Bishop, on whose shoulders the fate of both universes seems to rest, a weighty question:

Olivia: If you knew that only one of our worlds could survive, and if it was up to you — you alone — to defend your side, you’d have no choice, right? You would have to do what you had to do, no matter the cost, to protect our world.

Peter: There are billions of innocent people over there…just like here…people with jobs, families, lives. I gotta believe there’s another way. And, whatever my part in all this is…I gotta believe there’s another way. There’s always hope, right?

He is not so eager to convince himself that the easy way out is the right thing to do. Like Captain Kirk, Peter Bishop does not believe in no-win scenarios. Do you?

I have official permission to provide a pdf copy of my chapter, “Freedom Is the Right of All Sentient Beings. Technically, I don’t think I really need legal permission; I don’t recall signing over to Open Court the copyright that federal law automatically vests in me as the author. Anyway, download it from that link and enjoy!

The chapter title comes from a quote by Optimus Prime in the first of the recent live action movies (see my review). The chapter itself is kind of a condensed and lite version of the Aristotelian-liberal theory of virtue ethics and natural rights explained in more detail in my dissertation, applied to the transformers and to artificial intelligences more generally.

~*~

Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP.