james_nicoll ([info]james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2009-04-15 23:42:00
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Entry tags:memetic prophylactic recommended

Things one discovers while not looking for them
CERES

A Novel

By L. Neil Smith

I don't think I've seen a novel from him since 2001....

The warning isn't for the book (which I just glanced at) but what you may find once you wander away from the book.


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[info]grrlpup
2009-04-16 03:48 am UTC (link)
Aww... he lives in my hometown and would come talk to all us seventh-graders, supposedly about writing but actually converting us all to rabid libertarianism for a few days! Later he helped one of my friends write a choose-your-own-adventure story about the Pony Express. Good guy.

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[info]caprinus
2009-04-16 03:55 am UTC (link)
I want to read that story!

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[info]badgerbag
2009-04-16 04:19 am UTC (link)
With my upper body strength from wheeling myself around I should be ending patriarchy and ruling the world any minute now. Something's preventing me... something like a slug, or a leech, or a mosquito... Wait! It's socialist vampires!

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[info]ckd
2009-04-16 04:52 am UTC (link)
A better (for whatever value of that word you want to use) starting point might be this overview of Ceres and the rest of the saga. (Yeah, it's a sequel to his 1995 book Pallas, which PW called "Not so much a novel as a stultifying political treatise".)

"What I hope to accomplish with this book, indeed, with all four, is to reintroduce the human race — especially Americans — to a future Robert Heinlein, George O. Smith, even socialists like Arthur Clarke once told them about, before we began to fear what appears to lie ahead."

I also noticed that he's so Web-enabled that he marks out book titles _Like This_.

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[info]wdstarr
2009-04-16 07:58 pm UTC (link)
I notice that in comment #2 there Smith says "I actually finished _Ceres_ on Xmas Day, 2005. [Insert long story about trying to sell it -- or even get an agent to look at it.]"

He used to be -- it seems to me -- very well-ensconced in the sf mid-list, and now he can't get published. That's sort of sad, even if there is a bit of schadenfreude mixed in.

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[info]james_nicoll
2009-04-16 08:15 pm UTC (link)
He used to be -- it seems to me -- very well-ensconced in the sf mid-list, and now he can't get published.

I seem to recall that it was noticed during my series of Old Tea Leaf Reviews that quite a lot of SF writers had their careers hit a serious road bump after 9/11.

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[info]james_nicoll
2009-04-16 08:28 pm UTC (link)
Comment 2?

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[info]wdstarr
2009-04-17 12:35 am UTC (link)
The second comment following the L. Neil Smith blog entry that ckd links to, above, is by Smith (as "Administrator").

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[info]johnreiher
2009-04-16 06:25 am UTC (link)
What I took from Pallas was that without government controls, one person could form a powerful monopoly (Fresh drinking water) and end up in control over the lives of everyone else in that community.

It was also a heavy handed strawman on collective/socialist societies that are know to work, like kibbutz in Israel, and that you don't need to have every citizen armed to maintain law and order... Oh sorry, libertarians don't care for laws per se, just agreements over how to conduct gunfights in the street. :-)

I met Mr. Smith once in Colorado, and he seemed to be a nice guy, right up to the point after the reading of one of his novels, he then pulled out a six shooter and showed it off to some of his more rabid fans. Yes it's perfectly legal in Colorado to be armed, and at the time, mid 1980's, but it surprised the Hell out of me at the time. What sane person goes to a book reading packing heat? And then pulls it out to show it off? And then he pulls out a gun case and showed off a pearl handled Smith & Wesson revolver with a bore you could put your little finger into.

For the record, I'm a lapsed Republican/Libertarian, currently middle of the roader with "Progressive" leanings.

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[info]mishalak
2009-04-17 01:11 am UTC (link)
I met L. Neil Smith at Bubonicon one year. He was talking about how AIDs was a myth. That told me all I needed to know about him.

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[info]burger_eater
2009-04-16 03:57 pm UTC (link)
"I know some voters, black, white, and otherwise, when they gave their electoral all to Barack Obama, seemed to be operating under the false assumption that they were voting for Denzel Washington."

Oh yeah. That's a real winner there.

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[info]james_nicoll
2009-04-16 05:41 pm UTC (link)
But no AIDS Hoax stuff [1]! I wonder if he changed his mind on that or if it just hasn't come up on this site?


1: " Meantime, we were among the first (not the first, I've been reminded recently) to expose AIDS as the cruel hoax that more and more have come to realize it is."

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle1997/le970615-01.html

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[info]burger_eater
2009-04-16 05:55 pm UTC (link)
But what would cause him to change his mind? Evidence? He doesn't strike me as vulnerable to that sort of argument.

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[info]bricklovinfreak
2009-04-16 10:56 pm UTC (link)
"In the not-too-distant future,
next sunday, AD
There was a guy named Neil,
not too different from you or me..."

Fuck, I'm outta gas - should the zombie corpses of Marx and Engels hold him captive in a bunker under Moscow and force him to memorize Das Kapital, or what?

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