Book discussion

Fanfic discussion: Banned from Argo 3

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged books fanfic filk on by

If it’s a stretch to call a fan fiction novel on the Web a book, it’s only a slight one. More than a few people reading this will be interested to learn that Leslie Fish’s Star Trek fan novel Banned from Argo is now available for reading.

Warning: When you follow that link, you may be required to agree to massive terms-of-service and privacy policy documents before you’re allowed to read the novel. There are ways to get around them, the simplest being to turn off JavaScript. I’m positive that Leslie would approve.

If you’d like to support Leslie, see her Bandcamp page.
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Book meta-discussion: Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy 1

This entry was posted in Book discussion Censorship and tagged Antifa books bookstores censorship on by

This will be the last of my regular Monday book posts for a while. In preparation for moving, I’ve put a lot of my books in boxes, and it’s getting harder to find the books that I want to reread and discuss. Naturally, this isn’t stopping me from acquiring even more books. This post is about an upcoming book by Andy Ngo, called Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Or rather, it’s about Antifa’s attempt to suppress the book. I have it on pre-order from Water Street Bookstore but haven’t read it yet.

There’s a lot of misinformation about Antifa. On the one hand, mainstream media articles keep claiming it’s an “anti-fascist” organization. It’s anti-fascist in the same sense that the Capitol riot was “patriotic”: not at all, but the people involved find it handy to appropriate a term which they don’t deserve. On the other hand, some people on the right have built it into a ten-foot-tall organization which is behind everything. It’s even supposed to have been the real people who invaded the Capitol. What it mostly does is disrupt speaking events it doesn’t like. It’s basically a gang of thugs who hate freedom and aren’t hugely important.
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Book discussion: Slan

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged books science fiction on by

Promotional note: I think I’ve finally got my social sharing buttons working, after switching to a different plugin (Kiwi Social Share). Please take advantage of them to let your book-loving friends know about these posts. Or copy and paste the URL of this article, which seems simpler to me.

Once again, my topic is eugenics in science fiction. It was popular and respectable in the early twentieth century. Numerous writers presented supermen, including Superman himself. A. E. Van Vogt’s Slan published in 1940, was a very popular instance. My copy has a 25 cent price on the cover and is about as old as I am.
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Book discussion: The Hero with a Thousand Faces

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged books mythology on by

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a fascinating book. It explores and compares stories from many cultures. Some people, notably George Lucas, have used the patterns he found as a template for their stories.

Cover, Hero with a Thousand FacesBut the attempt to extract a “monomyth” from all the world’s heroic quest stories doesn’t impress me very much. It has an intensely Freudian focus and plays down aspects of myth which don’t fall into that scheme. I’m no folklorist, so don’t expect expert analysis here, but to me the basic formulation seems forced.
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