LETTERS

By Victor Milán
September 10th 1991
Dear Tory,

Thanks for the letter. Go ahead and publish my addresses on both services; SFWA already pubbed my CompuServe address, and anyone on either service can find me in the Membership Directories.

At a flat rate of five bucks a month — provided you don't stray out of the so-called Star or Basic Services — Genie's hard to beat, though it's a little clunkier to use than CompuServe — CIS as it's officially abbreviated, CI$ as users universally do it. Anybody using GEnie should get hold of the free proprietary software ALADDIN, which helps you get around GEnie and saves you much time — and money, especially if you stray outside the Basic Services.

GEnie's SF roundtable — SFRT is the address, naturally enough — is among the Basic Services, which means you can read and leave messages on the bulletin board to your heart's content for nothing. Among other things we have a private Wild Cards Category where the WC mafia can discuss current and projected schemes, plus monitor the progress of the Wild Cards motion picture (contracts signed, treatment pretty much accepted, and it looks as if George and Melinda are going to get to go ahead with the script. Yay!)

Inasmuch as the SFRT sysops are so accommodating, it seems to me that it'd be possible to get them to give us a Prometheus or LFS Category to play around in, comment on books, recommend books (or shitcan them, whatever), that sorta thing. The message boards are neat — also addictive, which makes it fortunate the RT's covered by the monthly fee.

Melinda is online. Her GEnie address is MELINDA.

One place worth looking into is JERRY or JERRYP — yes, I'm very much afraid it's the Jerry Pournelle Roundtable. I mean, I know Jerry's a pill, but he's a fairly consistent libertarian (Larry's the authoritarian one; Jerry's just loud), and when he doesn't have his Asshole Cap on I find myself in frequent agreement with what he says. It seems to be the closest thing to a libertarian watering-hole on-line (Neil Schulman hangs out there) — which I suppose is compelling evidence of the need for a libertarian CAT on SFRT.

I was very impressed by the James Hogan piece on the space program; in fact, it's something that might be productive to upload so that non-LFSers can read it, maybe onto the JERRY RT on Genie. Is that James P. Hogan, the SF writer, or is it James sans P. Hogan who's somebody else? Either way, he did a good job. [Yes, that is the James P. Hogan - editor Bill]

I gather that I didn't win the Prometheus. I'm not really cut up about it. I seem to be in the minority on this, but I think Samurai's a better book than Shogun, as well as more explicitly libertarian. I don't know how it could've been any more libertarian without my repeating "Fuck the State!" on every page, Neal Wilgus' knock notwithstanding). I'd have been happy and honored to accept had I won, but I don't necessarily think I deserved it.

I kinda suspect from the editorial in the last newsletter that V for Vendetta won. I haven't yet seen it. If it lived up to Watchmen it was certainly of high enough quality — Watchmen was overrated, but still quite good. And if the message was as consistently anarchistic as the reviews I've seen indicate, hooray. Watchmen, on the other hand, ended with a sort of paean to World Government, which makes me wonder if people aren't blinded by the widespread acceptance of Alan Moore and trying to jump on the bandwagon — rather, I suppose, imagine that he's on our bandwagon.

Which brings up a problem that's bugged me for a while, and which was addressed by another editorial: how do some of these things get nominated for the Prometheus? I've never read anything by S. M. Stirling, but I know he is not a libertarian — he says so in print. I have read David Brin, Walter Jon Williams, and John Shirley. Brin's a pretty explicit totalitarian, Walter is explicitly not a libertarian, and Shirley is a vehement and indeed vicious foe of libertarianism. Yet all were recommended for the Prometheus.

I think the reason may be their popularity, or perhaps trendiness is a better word. Libertarians are a pretty fringe group, and anything that smacks of acceptance naturally quickens our little hearts. Brin's a big bestseller, Williams and Shirley were epiphenomenal to the Cyberpunk craze, now defunct.

Perhaps the element of rebellion in books such as The Uplift War and Eclipse misleads people. Uplift is ultimately about the revolt of the fascist Terragens against the Psychedelic Nazi Galactics; Mussolini versus Hitler, to remove it from an SF context. Cyberpunk, meanwhile, is not about the rejection of authority; it's a plaint that the jackboot is on the wrong foot. Shirley is no more a rebel than George Bush; he's merely pissed off that he's not Emperor of the World.

Now, in this era of Politically Correct witch-hunting, it's a little unnerving to be putting in a plug for doctrinal purity. But the Prometheus does not exist simply to extol good writing; there are already plenty of awards that do that, starting at the top with the Hugo and Nebula. It was my understanding, anyway, that the Prometheus was meant to applaud works which were both good and libertarian. Rather than trying to coattail whoever's got his picture in Locus this week, shouldn't we concentrate on recognizing works that serve the cause of liberty?

I thought the parody was more than somewhat slightly on the limp side. Satirizing satire is so intrinsically self-defeating that it's not really worth trying.

There's something else here, too. It's 1991, and even though communism is vanishing with an abruptness that shames the dinosaurs, other collectivist shams and scams — the Greens, “Third Way” social democracy, Ravi Batri communitarianism — are crowding forward to fill the perceived “power vacuum.” The US government, meanwhile, has never been so swollenly, arrogantly powerful — or intrusive. the media have never been so explicitly hostile to libertarian ideas. Even the bold P. J. O'Rourke, America's best-known near-libertarian writer, cannot bring himself openly to condemn the DEA, America's Securitate, instead taking covert stabs at it while flagellating himself for lack of civic discipline.

All of which is to say, we've won a battle against communism, but that masks the fact that we've never been closer to losing the war. Is this really a time to devote half your magazine to dumping on one of the best known works of libertarian SF? Where's the point? Do we believe that by making one of us look small, we magnify the rest of us?

Ah, well. After a screed this lengthy, you probably are glad I'm such a terrible correspondent, and devoutly hope I'll return to my negligent ways. Actually, it took me several years to get worked up to this outpouring, so you're mostly out of danger.

Hope to see you — and others — on-line. It really is a hoot, and might even prove constructive. It will almost certainly make LFS more participaTory. (All right, it's lame. So sue me.)

Best,
Victor Milán