For the month of September we are reading and discussing Emphyrio by Jack Vance:
“The plot revolves around a young man, Ghyl Tarvoke, who hails from from the city of Ambroy located on the planet Halma. Halma’s ruled by unseen, mysterious Lords who run the planet as a giant welfare state. Workers are paid a stipend for their labor and all forms of mass production or duplication (including printing) are strictly, and I mean strictly, prohibited.” When Ghyl’s father, a wood-carver, is executed for processing old documents with a camera, Ghyl rebels and decides to bring down the system.
A recent edition of the book can be purchased for Kindle at Amazon.com. Your purchase via our affiliate links will help support our work here at Prometheus Unbound. If you prefer, Barnes & Noble has the book as an epub. There don’t appear to be any dead-tree editions in print, but new and used copies of old editions can be found.
Join us as we read and discuss Emphyrio. I’ve already started a thread on Vance’s idiosyncratic prose style.
You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.
August Recap
Everyone enjoyed Matthew Alexander’s libertarian science fiction novel Wĭthûr Wē, both for its writing quality and for its uncompromising Austro-Libertarian content. The general consensus seems to be that Matthew did a very good job at the difficult task of incorporating the philosophical, political, and economic elements into the plot without coming across as too preachy. The novel rivals some epic fantasies in length, however, so it does take some courage to begin reading and perseverance to get through.
A couple of forum participants compared Wĭthûr Wē favorably to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. One observed that Matthew presented the other side’s arguments more fairly. Another liked that, unlike Rand, Matthew illustrated how our ideals could be realized and that the main protagonist in Wĭthûr Wē is a more fully realized human being than Rand’s concretized ideals, such as John Galt.
[continue reading…]
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In the interest of full disclosure, here are the books we received in August. One of them is a self-published novel by John Hunt, whose serialized thriller published by Laissez Faire Books we are reviewing weekly. The others are from forward-thinking Angry Robot Books.
I recently joined Angry Robot’s Robot Army program. It has the most reviewer-friendly system I’ve seen so far for distributing advance review copies (ARCs) of upcoming publications in multiple formats, arranging interviews with authors, and more. Reviewers are also rewarded with free copies of published books. [Update 10/01/12: Angry Robot switched to using NetGalley, which is not as convenient as the more informal proprietary system they had been using.]
[continue reading…]
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This review is part of a series covering each installment of the serialized novel Higher Cause, written by John Hunt and published by Laissez Faire Books. To catch up, start with the announcement, the book’s link-rich table of contents, and the first review.
In part 7, author John Hunt gives us two chapters. The first takes us to a ship on the sea, bound for The Island. The second chapter, through one of the investors, relates some of the tale of Captain Cook in Tahiti. We finally find out something of the nature of the mystery in the Pacific, and there are all sorts of possibilities to be taken advantage of. We shall see how it plays out.
There are some strong story lines going on in the book, but we’ve hit a couple chapters recently where we are left idling a little bit. After introductions are out of the way and the plot comes into focus, I feel like, especially in a book of this nature, we should be building up some speed. Unfortunately, the first chapter in this week’s offering slows down the story. This is extra confounding because there are aspects of the book that interest me that I want to get back to. A bit of separating the wheat from the chaff might be in order.
The first chapter gave me a similar feeling to the chapter with the cross-island race in the previous installment. There was a lot of set up and description and exposition for one important plot point at the end. It was a lot of time to spend on something that could have been mentioned in the next chapter as having happened, or perhaps be related briefly in a paragraph or two.
[continue reading…]
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This month we’ve been reading and discussing Matthew Alexander’s libertarian science fiction novel Wĭthûr Wē in our book club. Over the weekend, on Sunday, we held our first Lightmonthly Read Author Chat with Matthew. The turnout wasn’t quite what we’d hoped for, but it was our first event — a successful proof of concept that we will build on. Matthew read a couple of early chapters from the new novel he’s working on, The Preferred Observer, and then we had a nice, long conversation with Mike DiBaggio and Michel Santos. Thanks, guys, for joining us.
If you missed the Google+ Hangout for whatever reason, you can watch the YouTube recording below:
[continue reading…]
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