The Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged book app for iPad has been awarded the App Fiction prize in the 2012 Publishing Innovation Awards. The award was handed out at the recent Digital Book World Conference.
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.
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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.
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The Caryatids is the latest novel by Bruce Sterling, one of the founders of cyberpunk. True to his style, every page explodes with new ideas on technology, and its social and political effects.
One of the central themes of the book is catastrophic climate change. This is surely controversial among libertarians, but what is interesting from a libertarian perspective is how this idea is handled. Traditional nation-states, with the lone exception of China, collapsed during the climate crisis. In their place, two “global civil societies” emerged: the Dispensation, a flashy entrepreneurial capitalist society, and the Acquis, a global collective that is focused on rebuilding Earth’s shattered ecosystems. The relationship between the two is very complex; war is generally held to be obsolete, replaced by constant economic competition and espionage. However, both groups also cooperate on a number of projects. The state of China remains, although at the expense of millions of its own citizens. All three groups fully embrace high technology to try to rebuild the world, each in their own way.
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It’s not often a science fiction storyteller creates a new world for his story. Most tales in the genre, like Neuromancer or 2001, are set in our world a few years or decades in the future. Some, like Terminator II, don’t even bother moving the clock ahead. Movies like Star Wars and Avatar are relatively uncommon (while others like The Matrix are difficult to categorize). Tron: Legacy is one of those infrequent works set almost entirely in a fictional world.
Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), founder of a tech company and world-recognized innovator, disappeared in 1989, apparently on the verge of some life-altering discovery. Two decades later, Kevin’s assistant tells his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) he has received a page – as in pager, not book – from his late father. When Sam investigates, he is sucked into a digital world, presumably the one his father disappeared to, and finds himself in a fight for his life.
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