If there isn’t a dinosaur kid inside everyone, I think they might be dead inside…
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I’ve been enjoying Cat Sebastian romance, as well as various light novels; Reborn as a Vending Machine is probably the most notable. They’re good for taking my mind off things, but it can be hard to judge between ‘this will be enjoyably uncomplicated’ and ‘this will be tiresomely simplistic and lack tension’. There seem to be a lot going around where the protagonist either solves every problem immediately using their special talent, or is canonically the Most Skilled X in the World from the outset and faces no meaningful challenge.
Currently starting on a stack of geology books for writing reasons, and continuing a reread of Monsters and monstrosity in Liaozhai zhiyi for fun.
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When I was writing GURPS Furries, I came across Emily Willoughby’s dinosaur art, starting with a scene of a velociraptor chasing an early mammal. I really liked it, and earlier this year I ordered a print of that scene, intending to have it framed and put it up in our dining room. So I guess I must be something of a dinosaur fan. Unfortunately, the print, made by Zazzle, came out with low definition, lower than the image on my monitor, and C and I eventually decided that we couldn’t stand to look at it all the time. Since Zazzle is the only outlet for Willoughby’s art, that put an end to our interest in buying prints of it.
The Libertarian Futurist Society gives awards for works of science fiction and other fantastic genres that have pro-liberty themes: an annual Best Novel and Hall of Fame and occasional Special Awards. We’ve given awards to a number of works with anarchistic settings: predominantly anarchocapitalist/individualist anarchist works such as Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Russell’s The Great Explosion (for the novella “And Then There Were None” that was included in it), Vinge’s “The Ungoverned,” and recently Corcoran’s Aristillus novels and Longyear’s The Hook, but also Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which has an anarchocommunist setting. The last time I reread the Le Guin it gave me a curious feeling of homesickness for a fictional place. Fictional portrayals of imaginary societies are an interesting way to explore political philosophy, not least in that the weaknesses and difficulties in a view can be sources of drama (it’s not for nothing that The Dispossessed is subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia).
An older precursor of anarchism is early Taoism: the Tao Te Ching has some striking passages. Le Guin seems to have been influenced by Taoism; in one of her early novels, the two “canons” of a future Earth are the Tao Te Ching and Walden.
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At the moment I’ve just reread The Fifth Elephant and I’m starting on Night Watch. But it’s likely to be slow, as I’ve brought home several books from the city library and I’ve just bought the fourth volume of Arakawa’s Silver Spoon, all of which will be distractions.
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Some books I’ve read and enjoyed recently:
- Adrian McKinty The Cold Cold Ground [1/5] – Catholic detective in the RUC tries to catch a serial killer in 1981 Belfast.
- Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse– children’s fantasy, preachy at times but with excellent imagery.
- Kendra Elliot, A Merciful Secret [3/6+] – FBI agent (who’s also a survivalist) investigates small town murder.
- Sarah Caudwell, The Sirens Sang of Murder [3/4] – murder mystery among London barristers. Mystery’s all right, writing is beautiful.
- Ed Dover, The Long Way Home – non-fiction, the story of a Pan Am Clipper marooned in Auckland by the attack on Pearl Harbor, flown back to New York westwards.
- Jennifer Estep, Kill the Queen [1/3] – odd fantasy with a clichéd plot but interesting people and writing.
- Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry [4.6/5+] – Murderbot is great.
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How odd to title a murder mystery set in Belfast after a Stephen Foster song!
(But then, I’ve thought that if I ever wrote a murder mystery, its title might be “Never Ask Me Whose,” which comes from an A.E. Housman lyric set in Shropshire . . . and I would hesitate to write fiction set in rural England, as I would unavoidably get too much wrong.)
Sounds interesting. I’m always keen to give fiction-based wider-reading to my Politics classes, so that might be a good source to add a few more to it.
The intended reference is to Tom Waits (a song from 1987):
Now don’t be a cry baby when there’s wood in the shed,
There’s a bird in the chimney and a stone in my bed,
When the road’s washed out they pass the bottle around,
And wait in the arms of the cold cold ground.
@MichaelCule and I are available for consultation by Americans (and others!) wanting to set books/games in England.
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Of course the Libertarian Futurist Society selects only works from a certain range of points of view. I’m not sure if there is an award for socialist science fiction, or conservative science fiction (which in some ways seems like an oxymoron!). But for what it is it could be useful; we do view our award list as a kind of reading list. You can see it on Wikipedia (Prometheus Award - Wikipedia), and our blog has been doing a series of essays on award winners and why they’re of interest for libertarians, since not all of them are by libertarians (http://lfs.org/blog/). What you’re talking about seems like precisely the kind of use that’s intended.
Some years back we gave Vernor Vinge a Lifetime Achievement Award. During his acceptance speech he talked about being influenced by David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom (though he was already thinking about anarchism in 1968, in “Conquest by Default”), and Friedman, who had come down to San Diego for the ceremony, said during the comments period that he had been influenced by Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. So there’s an example for you of how political thought and literary imagination can influence each other.
How much do you know about 1830s Manchester, should that one win?
That’s a little after one of my periods (though I know “Beau” Brummell left the army after they posted him there in 1797), probably more Michael’s thing. Off the top of my head: the mills are all, cotton coming up the river from the port at Liverpool; the industrial halo is textile printing, bleaching, and of course general engineering and foundries. Early horse-drawn omnibus service, Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens in 1830 and by the end of the decade you can get to Birmingham or London by train. Irish immigration, though nothing like the level it’ll get to in the 1840s, and black African faces are no surprise. The place has grown from a small market town to a City of the Future in about two generations, which means lots of social mobility. (And it’s one of the first times in England, not counting the ends of decades-long wars, that people can clearly say “we are living better than our parents did”.)
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Robert C. Allen (The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective) maintains that the English standard of living and earning rate were already the highest in the world decades before then: 450 grams of silver a year, around three times what Asian laborers earned. Though whether there was ongoing improvement going on is of course a different question.
The Irish immigrants turn up in Gaskell’s North and South, though that may be set slightly later in history. But I hadn’t known about the black ones. Can you say any more about them?
Good to know… It might be worth letting her know as well, if you haven’t. She presumably wouldn’t want to be selling low-quality prints.
That’s a valid point. I haven’t gotten in touch with her because I couldn’t see how to do so without its coming across as accusatory or demanding. I don’t want, for example, to ask for a refund or a higher quality print; some purchases are disappointments, and this was one. But the way you frame it is helpful, and I’ll think about approaching it that way.
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Southern England, presumably.
Howling wasteland full of painted savages begins at Watford.
(Mike does come from North, you know.)
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Bah, the whole of the UK is barely bigger than North and South Carolina in the US, there’s not enough room for cultural divide! 
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My dad was a lecturer in history of science in UMIST in Manchester and knows a huge amount about the social and technological history of the industrial revolution era - happy to consult him if required.
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I have personally successfully straddled the vast cultural gap and an now considered a hated enemy by both sides.
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