Newsgroup: it.cultura.fantascienza
Titolo: La divisione Cassini

E' l'ultimo Solaria in edicola.. 
a me e' piaciuto parecchio.. un po' (dichiaratamente) Bankiano..
con certe interessanti variazioni. (vedi postfazione.. non che ce ne 
fosse bisogno).
Un personaggio straordinario.. (anche se un po' discutibile .. 
ma a me e' piaciuto molto :D:D si .. insomma.. me ne sono riinnamorato 
come di un paio di personaggi(e) di Banks..)
Chi altri lo ha letto?
PS da qui a Dicembre le uscite di Solaria son tutte eccezionali...
almeno a giudicare dagli autori.. (non conosco, naturalmente , la prossima
opera prima(?) della vincente del premio Solaria.. ma ho fiducia.)
byez Diez

 fosse bisogno).
Ken McLoad (che fra l'altro e' entusiasticamente on line) e' un amico
d'infanzia di Banks. Vivono porta a porta ed e' stato lui a suggerire
come riscrivere Use of Weapons (la Guerra di Zakalwe) per farlo
funzionare bene come funziona. Ovvio che si siano influenzati a vicenda.
Cio' nonostante, hanno delle divergenze di opinione piuttosto radicali
sull'inteligenza artificiale. Non so come facciano a restare amici e a
non prendersi a bicchierate in testa, ma a quanto pare e' cosi'. Ken
McLoad e' una persona deliziosa, fra l'altro. (Anche Banks). 
Io possiedo due suoi libri... e prima o poi li finiro'. 
-- 
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
substitute tin for nit to mail me
http://www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/elethiomel
"Hello, my name is Anna, and I write trilogies." -- Anna Mazzoldi

 Chi altri lo ha letto?
magari se riuscissi a trovarlo in edicola!!!
e che ca77o anche l'anno scorso m'e' toccato aspettare che il volume di 
agosto fosse ridistribuito nelle librerie!
 
-- 
Gorgon attaccato al ventilatore come un koala ^_^;

Io possiedo due suoi libri... e prima o poi li finiro'. 
c'e' altro di suo in Italiano?
Byez Diez

 c'e' altro di suo in Italiano?
Non mi risulta.


non prendersi a bicchierate in testa, ma a quanto pare e' cosi'. 
Eheh, occasioni per interminabili discussioni di fronte a una birra...
-- 
Life's something u don't get out alive..
ObjectZone - 
http://space.tin.it/computer/csadun

agosto fosse ridistribuito nelle librerie!
Accidenti... ma dove abiti??
io sto parecchio in periferia.. vabbe' in campagna praticamente :D
ma non ho problemi..
Byez Diez

 ma non ho problemi..
vuoi ridere?
r o m a
o meglio abito vicino a roma, ma qua proprio speranze ZERO
a roma pero' nn lo trovo da nessuna parte lo stesso!



Strano, in mezzo alla lava fresca fresca, l'ho reperito facilmente. Boh,
forse i giornalai romani stanno ancora festeggiando...:-))

 c'e' altro di suo in Italiano?
Un suo romanzo per ragazzini per una di quelle serie tipo Animorphs e
Goosebump (sp?). The web, mi sembra.
Maurizio
-- 
Maurizio M. Munafo' / 
mmmu...@netscape.net
"Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you" (T.S.Eliot)

Goosebump (sp?). The web, mi sembra.
ah.. ne ho visti in offerta ad un ipermercato.. daro' una occhiata.
Tnx Diez.


Non penso che ne valga la pena. A meno, naturalmente, che tu non sia un
lettore di romanzi per ragazzi, o, ovviamente, un ragazzino decenne. :)


lettore di romanzi per ragazzi, o, ovviamente, un ragazzino decenne. :)
oh si.. svariate volte decenne!!
Byez Diez

 McLoad e' una persona deliziosa, fra l'altro. (Anche Banks).
Per chi fosse interessato, attacco questa intervista a McLeod realizzata dal
giornalista di Libero Alberto Mingardi, che si concentra soprattutto sulle
idee politiche dello scrittore scozzese.
Saluti a tutti
Highlander Ken MacLeod
an interview by Alberto Mingardi
Perhaps it is not the major theoretical system-builders who actually change
people's ideas, but rather the novelists.
An example of this is Ayn Rand, a woman who invented herself as a
philosopher, starting as a fiction writer. It was her great fiction--with
Promethean characters like John Galt and Howard Roark--which changed the
political views of 20 million Americans. The same can be said for the
science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, the author of The Moon is a Harsh
Mistress and Time Enough for Love, as well as for many other young,
libertarian-leaning writers of today.
With this thought in mind, Laissez Faire City Times has conducted previous
interviews with the libertarian/republican science fiction author Jerry
Pournelle, and the active and combative L. Neil Smith (whose Probability
Broach is a MUST read).
This time we're having a chat with Ken MacLeod, the Scottish winner of two
Prometheus Awards, who has been defined as "a major writer" by Iain Banks
(readers of science fiction will recognize the latter name). MacLeod
explores socialist, anarchist, and libertarian ideas in books like The Stone
Canal and The Cassini Division. From the Highlands, Ken MacLeod . . .
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
What is the relationship between you as a writer and the utopias you usually
describe?
In my books so far there are two free-market utopias (or libertarias, as I
prefer to call them) and one communist utopia. These places are settings for
stories, not utopias as such. I avoided the usual utopian pattern of a naive
visitor being given a grand tour of the privatized sewage-works or the
communal oil- refinery, while a local guide extols the wonders of the new
society. I also show them with flaws--in fact anyone for whom they are not
utopia could easily see them as dystopia.
My own sympathies are very much divided, between Libertaria and Utopia. I
can see the attractions of both of them, and the drawbacks. I'm very pleased
that libertarians have read my SF novels as libertarian, and socialists have
read them as socialist.
Who are the authors and the scholars that inspired these sympathies?
Well, taking Libertaria first: they say "it usually begins with Ayn Rand,"
but that's not how it was for me. The first libertarian ideas I came across
were in the science fiction stories of Poul Anderson and Robert Heinlein.
Many years later I walked into a book shop in London run by the Libertarian
Alliance. I read a lot of their publications and went on to read Robert
Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia, Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty, and
David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom. Later still I found the ideas of
the American individualist anarchist, Benjamin Tucker, very stimulating.
In particular, what stories of Anderson?
"The Last of the Deliverers"--a short story where the last conservative and
the last communist in America are both very old men! The scenario is that
cheap, decentralized electric power--something like cold fusion--has
resulted in the dispersal of the population across the country, so you have
a small-town, stateless America. Very attractive.
And of course the stories in "Trader to the Stars" and "The Trouble
Twisters" set in the galaxy of the Polysotechnic League.
What are the books that further influenced your thinking, and what would be
your position in the debate between utilitarians and natural-rights
advocates, between Friedman and Rothbard?
What first changed my thinking, in the sense that I started to take
classical liberalism seriously, were not books but the short writings of
Chris Tame and Brian Micklethwait, and David Ramsay Steele--a brilliant
writer and former socialist who fell out with Tame and Micklethwait. His big
book so far is From Marx to Mises. But for making people think--for jolting
them out of dogmatic slumber--Nozick has no equal.
I don't believe in natural rights, or in utilitarianism. I find Friedman a
more persuasive and engaging writer than Rothbard, that's all. Utopia is a
bit more complicated. For a long time I was involved in left-wing politics,
but I didn't have a clear idea of the socialist utopia until I read a book
about "non- market socialism"--which included a chapter on the Italian
communist, Amadeo Bordiga, as well as various anarchists, Situationists and
a very small organization called the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The
SPGB has been struggling along since 1903 and has developed an idea of a
democratic, non-statist, non-market socialism in opposition to Social
Democracy and Leninism. The classic vision of that Utopia is News from
Nowhere by the English communist William Morris.
What is the appeal of these ideas to you?
I like the SPGB and have a lot of respect for them.
They have made an attempt to answer the famous "economic calculation
argument" of Mises (partly because David Ramsay Steele rubbed their noses in
it). They advocate a socialism based not just on the consent but the
understanding of the majority, and they have a very penetrating
understanding of the drawbacks of capitalism even when it is operating at
its best, which is not often. If their utopia could work it would be a
pleasant place to live, unlike all too many utopias which would be hell even
if they did work!
And how can you reconcile Libertaria and Utopia?
At one level, you can't! Is freedom based on the market, or on going beyond
the market? That's what the dispute is about. At the moment the collapse of
official Communism (Stalinism) seems to have closed the book on it, but I
don't think so. The idea of a society based on voluntary work and free
access to consumer goods --which obviously requires a very high level of
technology--seems to me neither authoritarian nor "utopian" in the sense of
impractical. The cold war between Libertaria and Utopia will go on for a
long time.
But on a more down-to-earth level the whole question is empirical. If in
fact capitalism is as Marx analyzed it, and has a tendency over the long run
to make things worse--or less tolerable--for most people, then they will
replace it with some new system. If capitalism is as Mises and Hayek and
Friedman analyze it, and can provide peace and prosperity for all, then no
sane person could object to it.
In practice I just vote Labour.
Your last book is Cydonia, a sci-fi novel for kids. Why write for children?
The short answer is that I was offered the contract! The books in the WEB
series are all written by authors who usually write for adults, and it
looked like an interesting project. We're all writing within a shared world,
and a common story-line, but each of us gives their own angle on the world
of the 2027-28. I realized that the virtual-reality Web of the stories was a
perfect setting for some scenes I'd had in my mind for a long time--like the
Loch Ness Monster in a giant aquarium, or the conspiracy-theorists' bar on
Mars. I threw in all sorts of subversive ideas about guns, black
helicopters, paranoid cops, the kids' worries about Scottish independence
and so on, and it was all quite acceptable.
You're Scottish. What is your view about Scottish independence and your
opinion of the Scottish cultural world?
Last year there was a majority vote in a referendum to set up a Scottish
Parliament within the UK, but in the meantime support for independence has
grown substantially. It's even possible that the Scottish National Party
will have a majority in the first elections to the new parliament.
Scotland is not an oppressed nation. Culturally, as in other ways, it has
contributed a great deal to Britain and to the world. The Scottish cultural
scene is very diverse and lively--there's a great self-confidence and energy
in it.
I don't support Scottish independence, but it may be inevitable. Scotland
voted Labour through all the Tory years, and kept getting a Tory government.
Huge resentment built up. In the last election there was not one Tory MP
returned from Scotland. Now that there is a Labour government--with a
Scottish Prime Minister and a Scottish Foreign Secretary and Scots
everywhere in and around the government!--[but] it still seems to a lot of
Scottish people like another Tory government. Blair's New Labour certainly
isn't the social- democratic government that a lot of Scots want.
And there's also a subtle thing, a change in consciousness. The referendum
result indicated that Scots weren't afraid of the idea of political power in
Scotland, they weren't afraid of themselves or of each other. Once that
happens you have a nation, like it or not.
How do you see secessionist movements elsewhere?
It depends very much on the circumstances. I don't know enough about the
Padanian situation to comment. I was very sympathetic to the secessions from
the USSR and very unsympathetic to the secessions from Yugoslavia. In the
United Kingdom the key national question is Ireland. During the national
conflict there I always supported the withdrawal of British troops. It
seemed a basic democratic position. Today we have to accept that there is a
consensus for the Agreement, so it's a new situation.
Why "very unsympathetic" to secessions from Yugoslavia?
Unlike the USSR where in almost all cases a clean separation was possible,
which left open the possibility of future co-operation and even federation,
in Yugoslavia breaking up the existing federation meant a fratricidal
nationalist bloodbath on all sides. Re- balkanizing the Balkans was never
going to be a good idea.
What are in your opinion the criteria for a "nation"?
There are objective conditions which were--I still think-- quite accurately
listed by Stalin! Not that he was original, but his little pamphlet was
certainly influential. Common language, territory, economy, psychological
make-up and culture, wasn't it? But for a nation to form a national state
there has to be a subjective condition, and that's what I should have said a
moment ago about Scotland--that once people start to feel a certain way, you
have a potential national state, like it or not.
But it's very variable and depends on conditions - even in Iraqi Kurdistan,
some Kurdish people will say, "After all we are Iraqis."
Finally, a little question about science fiction: when, why and how did you
start reading and writing SF?
I started reading SF when I was about 14 or so, and until I was 21 I read
hardly any other kind of fiction. Then I almost stopped, and only started
reading it again about ten or more years later, when interesting new ideas
started to flourish. I remember reading William Gibson's Neuromancer and
thinking it was the first SF novel I'd really got excited about for years.
All along I'd had my own SF ideas, even ideas for novels, which I used to
annoy Iain Banks immensely by telling him about but not writing. Eventually
a mutual friend told me how much I was annoying him so after that I had no
choice--I had to write them, and that's what I'm doing!

 giornalista di Libero Alberto Mingardi
Hic sunt leones.
EF