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Buckell posted a few days ago that Arcitc Rising is now out, and I felt bad because I had the book for review but I was (unwillingly) dragging my feet on it. But now I will drag my fingers over it, and by “it” I mean my Macbook keyboard.

Arctic turns UNPG (United Nations Polar Guard) pilot Anika Duncan against various authorities and people in power when she stumbles onto a plot to sneak a nuke into the Arctic Circle. The nuke is supposedly to stop the Gaia Corporation’s plan to reconfigure the earth’s climate using a proprietary technology. The thing is, in Arctic‘s universe, the Circle has been significantly de-iced because of global warming and there was (and still is) a tensioning of political and economic interests involving the newly-revealed resources.

The novel is mostly sci-fi based action, but there is also the political and “balance of power” intrigue you would expect when dealing with natural resources and earth-altering situations. I don’t normally read much of this sort of thing—I did read Buckell’s Cole Protocol and enjoyed it—so I can’t say how it stands against its peers. Buckell did do his job, though, because the appropriate literary tension-and-release mechanisms are in place.

Notwithstanding one or two market theory speeches that were, that may reflect Buckell’s personal views, I found his idea of a seasteaded type of city, Thule, to be compelling. It was created by businesses for primarily economic reasons, and it’s almost a certainty that governments had a role in building it, even indirectly, so it’s not necessarily a free-market outcome. But within Thule itself we see a near example of Ancapistan or a panarchy, where people are free to choose (well, much more freer and easier than normal) under which form of law they’d like to live. Thule is divided into different sections, each under their own sovereign rule. Buckell didn’t drill down too deeply into the nature of these “desmenes” but it’s a great idea to be touched upon and it sets the stage for Arctic‘s final showdown.

Buckell in the midst of a book tour (a real one!), and unfortunately only comes dangerously close to Pittsburgh. If you’re into action with some sci-fi realism and world politics scenarios, it wouldn’t hurt to try Arctic and go see Buckell at one of his tour stops.

I’ve noticed a tendency of modern writers to write clipped sentences and paragraphs.

Like this. One or a few in each paragraph, for certain scenes.

Not even action scenes.

Ones where there’s supposed to be descriptive of a scene, or internal thought development.

I can understand if it’s first person from a certain kind of character.

Or in blogging, because reading online is different.

But even that is getting out of hand.

Maybe it’s just me.

I’m not concerned with “online readability” posting techniques, building a social media platform, hosting blog tours, throwing contests at you every week, indecipherable industry acronyms, graphical links and bolded words everywhere, marketing myself to hell.

See, even in that paragraph I used too many commas.

I don’t like screaming at people that come to this blog.

But in printed fiction this style gets aggravating. It reads like those Dr. Seuss’s Board Books .

Should I be blaming authors, readers, editors?

Functional, grown adults should not be writing like this for other adults.

The one named "Lucciola" here is not a girl. Also, these are two boys.

Dio comes from a high-technology society, the Guild, that antagonizes the rest of the nations in Last Exile. At the outset you take him as villainous because of his background but he ends up unofficially expatriating to do some weird, partially homoerotic/piloting fetish flirtation with the series protagonist, Klaus.

Basically, Dio acts like a toddler, though he is a skilled pilot and is constantly in the face of danger. He has an annoying whimsy about him that excessively-talented people tend to have in movies, where they consider life-threatening situations as gameplay and other people as playthings. Prodigies are supposed to get bored with their expertise easily in Hollywoodland, it seems. It doesn’t help that his English-cast voice hints at arrested development, which would fits nicely in with his history.

It all turned around for me one episode, where his oblivious demeanor is cracked and he executes a super-freakout during non-combat flying. It literally comes out of nowhere in a scene where lots of things come out of nowhere.

Dio’s story is pretty tragic because we learn the Guild’s method of selecting its ruling elite, the place in which his intended fate sits. It takes until the end of the series for his psychological history to sink in, but losing all control of your ship from a complete breakdown seemed to be an appropriate response when threatened with a destiny like that.

"It's okay, bro. We kinda knew you two would screw it up."

Another way to state this is that God prefers the returns of free moral agents choosing goodness than the non-existence of evil. There are physical, material-world analogies that can be drawn that demonstrate this, but I can leave that to your imaginations.

A common objector might ask why couldn’t God create free moral agency without the possibility of evil. Lewis addresses that as well but the objection is nonsense if you dig to its core. To paraphrase Lewis, who I believe was paraphrasing someone else, nonsense is still nonsense even when we talk it of God.

It’s important to remember that by “preference”, I don’t mean an affection for trivialities, like how I prefer cheesecake to pie, but it can be more weighty, an in how most humans prefer a safe home over a turbulent environment. Essentially, we have preferences and act on them, and the books of the Bible seem to portray God as such a being.

So, using Lewis’ explanation, the proof can look like this.

1. God is omnibenevolent.
2. God is omnipotent.
3. God is omniscient.
4. God prefers free moral agents over automata in at least one universe-instance.
5. God does not prefer evil.
6. Evil exists.
7. Therefore, God prefers prefers free moral agents over the non-existence of evil (4, 5, 6)
8. Therefore, an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God can exist alongside the existence of evil.

Another thing to remember is this does not prove any of God’s ombi-properties. It only concludes that such a God is not impossible.

As a bonus I’ve posted a video of an N. T. Wright sermon on a different kind of theodicy. It’s lengthy and not easy listening but it’s worth it for food for thought. And both of these guys have (or had) British accents so you know their engine has gas in it*.

*I was wondering if the first video was actually Lewis speaking, but I don’t think it is. This video, described as Lewis’ only surviving BBC address, has Lewis with his Oxford drawl so I don’t think the theodicy video is him.

I’m due for another one of these, and I kind of miss blatantly stealing images of beauty without attribution, from bloggers and websites that did the same (I did steal some of them from The Gentleman). Of note are the reprisals of Chesterton, looking as crabby as ever, and Alan Moore with his life-long imitation of a backwoods serial killer.

There are also two of Faulkner as he and his mustache enjoy a sound piping.

Not pictured below is the knock-down internal debate I had over Hugh Heffner’s status as an actual writer or merely a potboiling smut peddler that got a lucky break.

W. Somerset Maughm:

Uwe Johnson. I feel like buying an analog watch just so I can set time to his haircut:

Mark Twain:

J.R.R. Tolkein:

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

Steve Martin (he counts ):

P.J. O’Rourke:

Ian Fleming:

Goran Simić:

William Faulkner:

Dylan Thomas:

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

G.K. Chesterton:

Bob Monkhouse:

Bertrand Russell:

Alan Moore:

Hunter S. Thompson:

I'm totally sticking it to the man using this.

The concept of IP and the argument against it are complicated and it’s been hot news with the recent SOPA debacle. The entire Buzzgrinder incident brought to mind what the libertarian “solution” would be, sans the state monopoly on laws concerning non-physical property.

Entities practice some form of extra-legal ownership customs already, like what we have with Creative Commons. Twitter even has something in place with their “verified account” disclaimer, and Facebook does as well.

But what would’ve happened in a free market, when Seth wouldn’t have had a legal trademark on Buzzgrinder? For one, since Seth’s name has been associated with the Buzzgrinder name for so long, he carries the reputation of ownership with him. He would be able to prove to twitter, through ownership of the buzzgrinder.com domain, that he “owns” Buzzgrinder. Twitter could face a tarnished reputation if they, as owners of the physical servers that house twitter.com, allow some schmoe to squat on the Buzzgrinder twitter account. Twitter can simply hand over ownership to Seth.

This sort of thing happens already, without state involvement. Although there is some question as to whether or not people can own a common design, remember and consider the Etsy vs. Urban Outfitters state medallion controversy. People just “know it when they see it”, if something has been intellectually misappropriated, and people—the market—respond in kind.

Another thing to remember is that regulation is axiomatic. It will always happens—what matters is the origin of the regulation. If state involvement in intellectual property is removed, something is going to replace it in one form or another. It’s right-brain exercise to think up answers to decentralized, non-coerced IP “laws”. But imagination only goes so far. With billions and billions of people in the world, there’s no telling what market forces will come up with.

In Seth’s case, all this didn’t matter since Josh from Buzzgrinder had registered the twitter account. Smiley faces all around!

More reading (or watching) on free market IP solutions:
The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide by Stephen Kinsella
Intellectual Property at Mises.org
Rethinking IP Completely by Stephen Kinsella
The Evils of Intellectual Property by Jeffrey Tucker

Disclaimer: I write for Buzzgrinder. There you go.

Only non-believers believe in atoms.

I like that quote because it can stoke paranoid atheist fervor and gets religious people who are too stupid to entertain hypotheticals in a huffy, but the ingenious thing is that it’s an assertion, not an opinion. If someone doesn’t believe in God, then either because of our sensus divinitatis or because of humanity has been culturally entrenched with religious belief, the non-believer has to find the qualities of the divine we “sense” epistemically and apply them to something else. It’s not just a new morality from the demise of Christianity that Nietzsche described that we can reconstruct. It can be everything else.

The archetypal elements of all religions—flawed human existence, salvation, eternal life, a transcendant being—leak out and find their way into the cracks of some other construct. The more religion-minded of us might apply it to the atheism of Buddhism while the more secularized of us have an array of choices, one them being scientism.

Idolizing unscientific phenomena—even the morality found in natural law, if it impedes advancement—is mortal sin, religion is the devil, the apotheosis of the human soul (the Judeo-Christian soul or the classical Greek version, it’s sometimes hard to tell) is reached through arcane hypercomputerization, academics are the priests and the classroom is the temple. The paradox of induction, the dilemma of direct and indirect realism, for starters, which are written into the scientific method are articles of faith for scientists.

Just read Clarke’s Odyessey series, or Ghost in the Shell, Asimov, Disch, Ellison, Heinlein, Wells. I haven’t touched all of those but what I have so far is very telling.

For further, more organized, reading:
Atheism and Science Fiction at the Science Fiction Observer
Science fiction author asks, why are atheists who write space operas supposed to know best whether God exists? at Uncommon Descent
Does reading science fiction predispose people to atheism? at Wintery Knight
Why Reading Fiction Should Matter to Atheists at Friendly Atheist
Richard Dawkins Is Killing SF! at Jack of Ravens

Atom doodle by tonybaize.