The Improbable Libertarian Revolt

Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a classic sf novel about libertarians revolting against oppressive authority.

The libertarians in question are moon colonists, most of whom were sent there as political criminals (or, I guess, actual criminals) several generations back. So it's a sort of American Revolution parable set in Australia's frontier culture.

The oppressive authority is the Warden, appointed by Earth's government, and accountable only to them. This becomes an intolerable problem when the protagonists learn that the Moon is facing disaster in the coming years, and that (being governed by Earth) the Warden has no incentive to take the hard steps needed to stop it.

The most important revolutionary is a supercomputer named Mike; unknown to anyone but his repairman, Mike has spontaneously gained sentience and a personality. When the repairman joins the revolutionary movement, Mike is carried along with him, and ends up taking charge.

The characters are likeable, and I can see several popular sf concepts being laid out here- most notably, the idea of a national leader who's nothing but a TV simulation.

But what's really interesting in the book is something similar to Asimov's Foundation novels- practical politics is presented as an elaborate intellectual shell game, with brilliant people secretly controlling the course of society through their own cleverness.

In Asimov it was enthralling; but of course I read Asimov years ago. Now, it just seems implausible.

The rebel leaders spend some time talking about the importance of a cell network, since betrayal is inevitable and is the undoing of rebel movements; but once things start happening, nothing seems to come of it. Everyone does what's expected of them, and the only problem is that some of the low-ranking rebels think they should also have a chance at power once the revolution is over. They are shunted harmlessly into a fake government body where they can't get in the way of the real leaders, and they all buy it.

The book is described as "libertarian," which is true in a way; but a very odd way. The Moon colonists aren't libertarian out of any specific doctrine or political principle, but more as a matter of culture. Libertarianism is simply the way things are done up there.

Perhaps that's how libertarianism works best; as a political movement, it will always be prone to the contradictions of power.

Today's Geek Pleasure

It's Draco and the Malfoys, a two-man group that does Harry Potter songs from the perspective of Draco Malfoy.

"My Dad is Rich (And Your Dad is Dead)" is funny in a kind of appalling way. "Potions Yesterday" is probably the most listenable, along with "99 Death Eaters," which is based on the melody from "99 Luftballons."

I Heart Huckabee

This isn't a political blog, and I don't intend for it to become one.

But this left me moonstruck.

PAUL: No, we’ve dug a hole for ourselves and for our party. We’re losing elections and we’re going down next year if we don’t change it. It has all to do with foreign policy and we have to wake up to this fact.

HUCKABEE: Even if we lose elections we should not lose our honor and that is more important than the Republican party.

I don't know if Huckabee will get the nomination (okay, I'm pretty sure he won't; every poll I've seen says he's in single-digit territory) but I loved him at that moment. I loved the audacity of telling Republicans, in a Republican debate, that there are things more important than winning; things more important than the entire party.

Bad Fiction of the Apocalypse

James F. David's Judgement Day is a recent entry in the Left Behind subgenre: fictional treatments of the Book of Revelations. It has some good points, and many bad ones.

God has inspired a Christian scientist (um, a scientist who's a Christian, not a member of the Christian Scientist denomination) with the designs for faster-than-light antigravity spaceships. He and his church movement build the ships, explore space, and find an unspoiled new planet to move to. So (as one Amazon reviewer put it) they provide their own Rapture; which is good, because God keeps a very low profile in this novel.

Most of this novel's good points are, similarly, its innovations, which lend its characters a very human and fallible tone. Given this wondrous new technology, the Christians spend most of their time making money off of it. They're uncomfortable when black Christians ask to be part of their modern Exodus. And the Antichrist, far from being omnipotent, is clueless and rather inept for most of the novel.


The bad points: um. Well. Most of the characters are flat. The author sets up emotional, dramatic situations and then plods through them with astonishing clunkiness. Several of the names are pseudo-clever, reminding me of license plates: "Ira Breitling," for example.

This is apparently the first novel of a series; which is good, because the ending is appalling in its implications. (And if I could find a way of explaining this that wasn't totally spoilerish, I would.)

But I doubt I'll buy the second book. There's more Heinlein to be read!

Borges and Destiny's Library

One of the things I'm reading is Jorge Borges' Labyrinths, a collection of short stories. An internet friend lent me this as his part of a mutual book-swap, years ago, and I've always wanted to go back and reread it.

It rereads very well, unsurprisingly; Borges' ideas aren't compelling because of novelty, or surprise endings, but simply in their own intrinsic selves. It's as mindboggling as it was the first time around.

One of the most compelling stories- for a book-lover like myself- is "The Library of Babel." The Library of the title is a seemingly-infinite series of rooms, each filled with shelves, each shelf filled with books. Each book is 410 pages long, and contains a random arrangement of letters, commas, periods, and spaces.

Of course, this means that almost all the books are pure gibberish. But the implication is made that the library is a complete collection- every possible combination of letters is there, somewhere. So all of Shakespeare is there, as are the collected works of Plato, or the printed form of Warp and Wolf- you just have to find them.

It is a fantasy that appeals very much to my book-greed.

But further along, I came upon Borges' essay "A Note on (toward) George Bernard Shaw." And here he says:

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being; it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships... If literature were nothing more than verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book by essaying variations.

Suddenly, my whole understanding of The Library of Babel turned upside down, and I realized: it is a library of soulless books. The whole point of writing- of art in general- is for one human being to communicate a feeling or insight to another, and there is no author for the Library's books. They're just the mechanical iteration of every possible combination of letters.


At this point (Warning! The geek quotient of this post is about rise) I remembered another near-infinite library, the one run by Lucien in Neil Gaiman's Sandman. The premise of Lucien's library is that it not only contains normal books, it also contains books that authors have dreamed of writing. (The only one that I can remember offhand was C.S. Lewis' The Emperor Over the Sea, an eighth Narnia book. But Gaiman showed us many examples.)

The appeal of Lucien's library is the idea that authors had a chance, if only in dreams, to write the perfect books they wished for (and we wish to read.) It is a dream of a consummated literary relationship; the books have meaning precisely because of their authors.

And that is the difference in the two. Dream's world is all about meaning- all the human understandings and implications we bring to life inside our heads, in our stories. It is both free and ambiguous because of this.

His older brother is Destiny, and he is Dream's polar opposite- his world is all about irrevocability, undeniable fact, immutable causalty. It's the world of things which must be what they are. And Borges' library fits there perfectly: its only meaning is in its necessary completeness, which has no relevance to any human need or creative act.

My Latest Geek Pleasure

It's Evil Dead: The Musical!

Okay, first point: this is not as good as Fellowship, my last geeky-pleasure-turned-soundtrack. It's not even close, actually.

But there are moments of real gold here. "All the Men in my Life Keep Getting Killed by Candarian Demons" is a wonderful Grease homage. The moose in "Join Us" has Bullwinkle's voice. And "Evil Puns"... well, they are.

Meanwhile, Back on the Internet...

Whew! INSURV came, and went, and I slept for a week afterward. (That's the short version.)

But now it's over, thank goodness, and I can try to catch up on my reading, and my posting, and my posting about my reading.