Fiction recommendations

The Prometheus Award judging committee (on which I serve) is wrapping up work in choosing a slate of finalists; we'll announce the finalists in a press release (which I'll reprint here) and invite the members of the Libertarian Futurist Society to read the finalists and vote on a winner.

I won't discuss our deliberations, but I can talk about works of fiction I personally recommend. I've already written about Gnomon by Nick Harkaway and The Fractal Man by J. Neil Schulman; here are some other titles I liked.

All Systems Red, Martha Wells, first of the Murderbot Diaries series. About a security bot that calls itself a "murderbot" because of an unfortunate incident in its past.  It won the Hugo and Nebula for best novella, so apparently other folks liked it, too.

Causes of Separation, Travis Corcoran, very libertarian science fiction novel set on the Moon. Exciting and fun. It's a sequel to last year's winner, The Powers of the Earth, which you should read first.

Kingdom of the Wicked: Rules and Kingdom of the Wicked: Order, Helen Dale. Two-part novel alternative history novel, set in a Roman Empire which has undergone an industrial revolution, set in a Roman province where Pontius Pilate must preside over the trial of a Jewish holy man accused of terrorism. A really good work of fiction, with clever reworkings of many familiar New Testament stories.

Beyond Chaos and Beyond update

The new RAW book, Beyond Chaos and Beyond, is still only available as a Kindle ebook, but Scott Apel assures me it will available soon as a paper book. He writes, "Since I published the ebook of Beyond Chaos and Beyond, in January, I have been diligently working with my own books to transform the ebooks into Print On Demand books. This has taken a lot longer than I'd expected, but I'm plowing ahead, and learning more about how to create a good-looking POD version with each new entry.

"The upshot is that BCAB will probably be the next ebook I convert into a POD book, so (barring obstacles, of which I have encountered many while learning the POD format process), a print version should be available sometime around the end of April or early May."

Apel's book of interviews I have previously recommended, Science Fiction: An Oral History, which includes a RAW interview and which I recommended, is available now as a paperback, although you can still get the Kindle version for just 99 cents.

Big Think takes on Illuminatus!

Big Think, an online publication that purports to offer "Actionable lessons from the world's greatest thinkers and doers" which "make the Big Think audience smarter, faster," runs an article on the Illuminati and the Illuminatus! trilogy by Mike Colagrossi, "Behold, the '70s sci-fi book series that popularized the Illuminati conspiracy."

It's not a great article. When I read sentences such as "It wasn't until some two hundred years later that Robert Anton WIlson would resurrect this run-of-the-mill society and turn it into the conspiracy we know today," I wondered if Mr. Colagrossi actually had read the trilogy, or even the first few dozen pages of the first book, which cites many other writings about the Illuminati.

On Facebook, Richard Rasa wrote, "Well, I love to see any press about RAW. This is a little thin, but good for an audience that never heard of RAW. This line, 'Authors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's intent was to sow chaotic disinformation just for the satire.' is simply wrong. Illuminatus! is a lot of things, but one thing it is not is 'just' for the satire."

Thanks to Jesse Walker and Nick Helweg-Larsen for making sure I didn't miss the piece.

Douthat channels Jesse Walker

Many RAW fans have read Jesse Walker's The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (with good reason!). Walker is himself a RAW fan, and there's a chapter in the book on how Robert Anton Wilson uses conspiracy theories in his work.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat cited Walker by name and built his latest column around Walker's concept of the "radical center."

Jesse has been making the case for years that, as Douthat puts is, "a politics of paranoia can manifest itself not just on the far-left and far-right fringes but in the very heart of the American establishment." Douthat also makes interesting points about where most of the skepticism about Russiagate came from. I sometimes strongly disagree with Douthat, but this seems like one of his better columns. Would have been nice if he'd slipped in the title of Jesse's book.

'Tomorrow Never Knows'

I've been listening to the audiobook of Rob Sheffield's excellent book about the Beatles, Dreaming the Beatles, and I've just finished the section on Revolver, my favorite Beatles album (even better when you hear the whole album, not the truncated version originally released in the U.S.)

Revolver is the album that has "Yellow Submarine," which of course is referenced in the Illuminatus! trilogy by the Leif Ericson, and also the album that has "Tomorrow Never Knows," which according to Sheffield is a song John Lennon wrote after getting copies of three books at London's Indica bookshop: The Portable Nietzsche, The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience. 

Sheffield says that Revolver is the best album the Beatles ever made, which means, he explains, that it's the best album any band ever made.

A bit of synchonicity: Before I wrote this, I posted a comment by music person Oz Fritz, who mentioned Nietzsche.

Eris

Source. 

The Earth Will Shake reading group, Week Five

Mural of Venus from Pompeii. 

This week, please read from page 90, "The horror came quite unexpectedly, one day as he was returning from school," to page 103, the end of part one, "I tell you my three souls are all sick ..." That's only about a dozen pages, but I think it's logical to conclude part one. We still haven't gotten that far, so perhaps other readers can still be persuaded to join us.

Part One ends with some surprising revelations. I don't want to put any spoilers here.

But perhaps I can point out an interesting reversal of expectations: One of the "bad guys," the blonde man, sounds like RAW:

"Every national border in Europe marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty. Patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others." (Page 95).

The drug that Sigismundo is given is belladonna, about which RAW has a lot to say about in Email to the Universe, in the chapter "La Belle Dame Sans Merci."

It begins, "The four weirdest and scariest drug stories I know all involve belladonna, a chemical for which I now have the same sincere respect as I have for hungry tigers, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, the IRS and Dr. Hannibal Lecter."

What follows are four very frightening stories, three involving friends (one is William Burroughs), and one involving RAW himself, when he made the mistake of taking belladonna as a tea while living on Ohio.

It really sounds like something you shouldn't mess with. "Bella donna" means "beautiful lady"  and Wilson's title comments on the seductive and destructive power of the drug by referring to the famous John Keats poem.

Oz Fritz has been posting many comments to these chronicles. I recently read an article in the New York Times about classical conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and a quote from the article about how concerts have "the power of the ritual" reminded me of some Oz' writings about music on his blog.

The full quote: "There’s a certain moment when you go off line and someone curates a space, with a piece, and the power of the ritual. You have this moment, along with many others, but still a finite experience. It happens in real time, but it will never happen again, and you were there. You can let yourself go. And I think that’s actually a real liberation. We are going to need that more than ever before.”

Of course, that "finite experience" in the moment was the only way to listen to music in Sigismundo's day.

A new Silverberg anthology

Robert Silverberg

I like the idea of appreciating old SF masters while they are still alive. Here is a review of a new Silverberg anthology of time travel stories, written by Rob Latham and published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Via Arthur Hlavaty. 

My favorite Silverberg novel is A Time of Changes. When I read the review, I realized I need to read Up the Line. 

Silverberg is now 84. Years ago, when I was in FAPA, Silverberg was still active. I don't know if he's still there, or how FAPA is faring. 

More on the Rev. Raymond Broshears

Raymond Broshears

Adam Gorightly goes deeper into JFK assassination lore with the final installment of his series on Raymond Broshears, "The Raymond Broshears Files Part 00006: A FOIA Treasure Trove." This one explores the connection between Broshears and would-be Gerald Ford assassin Sara Jane Moore, among other topics.

One odd bit: Steve Jaffe, an unofficial investigator for Jim Garrison, was involved in the conspiracy movie Executive Action. Adam says he was a producer; Wikipedia lists Jaffe as a "technical consultant." Oddly, Wikipedia links to a Steve Jaffe is a composer, and apparently not the same person.

Physics experiment echoes RAW's thought

Eugene Wigner

Headline on an article from the MIT Technology Review: "A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality."

It could also have said the experiment suggested that observation can create a reality.

"Back in 1961, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner outlined a thought experiment that demonstrated one of the lesser-known paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The experiment shows how the strange nature of the universe allows two observers—say, Wigner and Wigner’s friend—to experience different realities."

The article goes on to explain how recent advances in quantum technology have allowed experiments to test Wigner's thought experiment, and that Massimiliano Proietti at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and some colleagues recently carried out an experiment in observing the polarization of a proton.

"The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted."

Wigner is mentioned in Robert Anton Wilson's Schroedinger's Cat trilogy.

Thank you to Roman Tsivkin for spotting this and posting on Twitter. 

Andrew Yang talks about the UBI

Andrew Yang, left, and Kmele Foster. 

Many people are running for president as a Democrat these days. Perhaps the most interesting candidate is Andrew Yang, who is making the UBI a central plank of his platform. 

As I drove to work today, I listened to an interview of Yang by Kmele Foster on the "The Fifth Column" libertarian podcast. Foster is a libertarian skeptic, but he gives Yang plenty of time to talk. 

You can learn more about Yang from his website and his Twitter account. You can follow Kmele on Twitter, too; that's where I found the above photograph. 

Wednesday links

Young Orson Welles. 

New documentary on Orson Welles.

Butterfly Language launches Patreon. 

Andrew Yang, the UBI candidate. 

"Some moderate, common-sense proposals I don't expect any major candidate to endorse." From Bryan Caplan.

W.H. Auden on no-platforming Ezra Pound. "This incident is only one sign—there are other and far graver ones—that there was more truth than one would like to believe in Huey Long’s cynical observation that if fascism came to the United States it would be called Anti-fascism."

Ralph Metzner has died

Ralph Metzner has died. He carried out psychedelic research at Harvard with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass.) Wikipedia bio here.

R.U. Sirius says, "I'm sorry to learn of the death of Ralph Metzner intrepid explorer of consciousness, author, environmentalist & part of the original Harvard psychedelic project w. Timothy Leary & Richard Alpert/Ram Dass. He used to drop by the Mondo house occasionally. A lovely gentle presence."

Here is a podcast that features Metzner.