Well, he endorses an anarchist novel, anyway.
Tag Archives | Science Fiction
Maybe TANSTAAFL, But TISATAAFB
J. Neil Schulman’s agorist science-fiction novel Alongside Night is now available for free online. (CHT Wally Conger.)
Plato at the Earth’s Core
I’ve been a big fan of Mike Grell’s Warlord since I was eleven. But I do have a gripe about a line in the latest issue (new series #3): “Plato had it wrong. Atlantis was no utopian society.”
Plato never portrayed Atlantis as a utopian society. In the Timæus and Critias – the only two places where he mentions Atlantis – Plato describes Atlantis as a wicked, arrogant, imperialistic society that fought a war against the utopian society of the Republic, here transposed to an antediluvian prototype of Athens.
Sword and Screen
As of this moment, John Carter of Mars, The Hobbit, Conan, Conan: Red Nails, Jonah Hex, and Pirates of Venus are all still on track for movie releases.
But Pirates of Venus is now puzzlingly renamed Carson Napier (after its protagonist). Note that the synopsis on the studio website now bears only a passing resemblance to the novel, and that it that oddly avoids any reference to space travel (though the background of the poster does at least show a Venus-looking planet). The project’s own website, by contrast, still lists the original title.
Dresden Dream
I’m oddly pleased (though as a reader-between-the-lines of Neil Gaiman’s blog, not especially surprised) to read that Gaiman and Amanda Palmer (i.e. this singer – I love that video!) are dating. (“Oddly” just in the sense that I don’t know either of them personally, and I ordinarily don’t much care which celebrities are involved with which; but they each have a kind of disarming charm that makes one care about them.)
Judging from her previous relationship I’d say she’s trading up.
Multiplications
Ken MacLeod’s left-libertarian “Fall Revolution” cycle, whose praises I’ve previously sung, is now back in print in two volumes: Fractions (comprising The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal) and Divisions (comprising The Cassini Division and The Sky Road).
If you like anarchism, Scottish pubs, intelligent computer programs, political subversion, high-tech immortality, libertarian in-jokes, government conspiracies, anti-government conspiracies, stuff blowing up, and endless debates among different flavours of political radicals – and of course you do – then check it out.