books

Book discussion: Slan

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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

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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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Book discussion: The State Against Blacks by Walter Williams

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Economist Walter Williams died on December 2, 2020. As with my post on James Randi, this article is more a memorial to him than a discussion specifically of The State Against Blacks. If you haven’t heard of Williams, Thomas Sowell’s essay on him is a good place to start. It’s worth reading even if you have. (Sowell is 90 years old himself. I hope I don’t have to do a similar piece on him too soon.)
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End-of-year sale on Smashwords!

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I’ve joined the end-of-year sale on Smashwords. For the rest of 2020, you can get The Magic Battery and Files that Last for 50% off with the code SEY50. This code is provided right on the pages for the books, so you can just go over and buy the books or give the link to others. This sale is only for direct purchases from Smashwords.

This is a site-wide promotion on Smashwords, so you’ll find lots of other discounts if you head over.

If you’ve been waiting for an opportunity to read about Thomas’s magical inventions or learn how to preserve your data, and you have some free time this week, it’s a great opportunity to pick up these books.

Alice in translation 7

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After diving into Plato, I feel like doing something lighter for this book post. I’ve started on an article on Walter Williams, but that can wait a bit. For this article, I’ll look at two translations of Alice in Wonderland which are sitting in my library. Alice is a hard book to translate, with lots of wordplay and parody verses. That hasn’t stopped translators.

Aventures d’Alice au Pays des Merveilles is the original French translation. Henri Bué translated it under Lewis Carroll’s direction, and it was published in 1869, four years after the original. The Dover edition which I have includes a 1972 introduction discussing the translation process.

Alice im Wunderland is a 1993 German translation by Siv Bublitz. It’s one of many and just happens to be the one I have. A true scholar would look at a dozen translations or more, but no one’s paying me to do this.
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Book discussion: The Open Society and Its Enemies (1: Plato) 1

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A lot of people have never read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, yet they energetically cite one ambiguous note from it about the “paradox of tolerance” to enlist him as an advocate of censorship. I’m not going to waste more words on those idiots, but rather will comment on the substance of what he wrote.

It’s fashionable to say that what “dead white people” wrote doesn’t matter, but the philosophy of past centuries has shaped where we are today. The effects of European philosophy aren’t limited to white people.

The Open Society and Its Enemies is a two-volume work. The first, which I’ll cover here, is about Plato. The second is subtitled “Hegel and Marx.” While no one follows Plato’s ideas in their original form, his vision of an authoritarian, collectivist state is still highly influential. Some look to his Republic (which is anything but a republic in the modern sense) as an ideal of social stability. The idea of the “philosopher-king” still sounds noble to some. The idea that “justice” means whatever serves the state keeps coming back. The battle for freedom is still largely a battle against Plato. Brave New World, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, is an updated, technologically advanced version of the Republic.
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Book discussion: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

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Cover, The Moon Is a Harsh MistressRobert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is one of his most enduringly popular novels, especially among libertarians. Doing these book posts gave me an excuse to read it for the first time in many years.

I could write a dozen essays on different aspects of the novel. Can a computer “wake up”? What are the implications of Professor de la Paz’s philosophy of “rational anarchism”? Why did Mike go away at the end? For this piece, I’ll look at Lunar society, how it’s organized, and how tenable the idea is.
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Book discussion: Free to Move

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Darth Vader saying: Not happy with the Empire? Then move to Another GalaxyIt’s a curious thing that the people who say you should leave the country if you don’t like it are so often the ones who favor legal barriers to doing it. Having the option is a valuable freedom, though.

We take for granted the freedom of Americans to travel from one part of the country to another, or at least we did until 2020. Now governments are imposing interstate travel restrictions in a futile attempt to contain a virus which is already on both sides of every state line. Shortly before I started writing this, I learned that if I travel six miles to Massachusetts, I now have to show a recent negative COVID-19 test or quarantine for 14 days. I don’t know how they plan to enforce it. Putting checkpoints on every road that crosses the state line would be ridiculous. Maybe they’ll pull over cars with out-of-state plates and demand test documentation. Maybe friends and family members will start standing on opposite sides of the state line to talk to each other as the police watch to make sure they don’t step over the border.

The freedom to “vote with your feet” is the topic of Ilya Somin’s book, Free to Move. Somin is probably best known for his writing in the collaborative legal blog “The Volokh Conspiracy.” He presents an argument for maximizing the freedom to relocate from one country, state, or town to another.
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