Robert Anton Wilson on politics

Continuing the political theme of the next couple of posts, the @Rawilson23 Twitter feed (recommended) had the following quote on Friday: "I suspect all lines exist only in our minds — especially political lines. Universe seems more like waltzing chaos than like an account book."

I traced the quote back to this interview. I wish I could tell who did the interview and get other context -- it seems to be poorly formatted.

RAW's two right wing parties

Jesse Walker has a fascinating interview with left-libertarian historian Thaddeus Russell in the March 2011 issue of Reason magazine. More on the interview later, but for a moment I want to focus on a quote from the interview, relating it to Robert Anton Wilson's comments that the U.S. has two right wing parties. Wilson also often said that he usually didn't vote.

Russell says, "Particularly during the Obama campaign, I felt like I was on a raft in a vast ocean. I was just the only person I knew in my whole world who felt that Obama was basically a neocon and just terribly reactionary in every single way. There's not one single thing I like about him. He represents every negative strain in American history I write about."

Yesterday, I posted about how Obama's Justice Department is prosecuting a retired college professor for advocating jury nullification. Here's an article about the Obama administration spying on a New York Times reporter.

Jury nullification activist faces jail time

Robert Anton Wilson's 1994 anthology, Chaos and Beyond, has a a stirring essay, "Jury Nullification: Freedom's Last Chance." Wilson says the doctrine that a jury may judge the law instead of the facts has "major potential" to help uphold the Bill of Rights. He cites the John Peter Zenger case (1734), which every well-informed journalist knows was an important First Amendment case.

This message evidently does not resonate with the federal authorities. The New York Times reports on the case of retired Penn State chemistry professor named Julian P. Heicklen who is an activist for jury nullification and hands out pamphlets on the subject outside a courthouse. Mr. Heicklen has been indicted for "jury tampering."

Here is an interesting paragraph from the Times report: "He said his activism on nullification dated back to just after he retired in the early 1990s, when he openly smoked marijuana in State College, Pa., to get arrested as a protest against marijuana laws. For this, he was arrested about five times. Mr. Heicken has said that otherwise he does not smoke marijuana."

Justin Bieber backs RAW up on this

One of Robert Anton Wilson's heresies as a libertarian was that he thought the U.S. should have a health care system that covers everyone, just like the rest of the developed world. Who knew Justin Bieber was a health care pundit? Pandagon defends Bieber in an amusing post. (Via Arthur Hlavaty,who probably doesn't listen to much Justin Bieber.)

A 'Widow's Son' bibliography

I thought fans of The Widow's Son might enjoy a bibliography of the real books cited in that fine novel's copious footnotes. Where possible, I have included a link for more information. I've also skipped shorter works Wilson cited, such as newspaper clippings and the First Surrealist Manifesto. I also have omitted apparently fictional books, such as Golden Hours by de Selby. The footnote at the end of Part One, Chapter 8, is not specific enough for me to provide a citation; I can't tell if it's a real book or a joke. I have verified that each of the below is an actual book (or at last a pamphlet) cited (or at least mentioned) in a footnote. Let me know about any mistakes.

Allen, Gary, The C.F.R.: Conspiracy to Rule the World.

Allen, Woody, Getting Even.

Bacon, Francis, New Atlantis.

Baigent, Michael; Leigh, Richard, and Lincoln, Henry, Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Bello, Nino Lo, Vatican Papers.

Bennett, J.G., Witness.

Bernard, David, Light on Freemasonry.

Carr, William Guy, Pawns in the Game.

Christiani, Dounia Bunis, Scandinavian Elements of Finnegan's Wake.

Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Milennium.

Crowley, Aleister, The Book of Thoth.

Daraul, Arkon, History of Secret Societies.

de Sede, Gerard, La Race Fabuleuse.

de Sede, Gerard, Le Vrai dossier de l'enigme de Rennes.

Durant, Will, Rousseau and Revolution.

Foot, Paul, Unsolved: The Mysterious Death of God's Banker.

Glasheen, Adeline, Second Census of Finnegans Wake.

Gordon, Thomas, and Morgan-Witts, Max, Year of Armageddon: Pope and the Bomb.

Gribbin, John, In Search of Schroedinger's Cat.

Hammer, Richard, The Vatican Connection.

Hammett, Dashiel, The Maltese Falcon.

Hoffman, Banesh, The Strange Story of the Quantum.

Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake.

Joyce, James, Ulysses.

Jung, Carl, Psychology and Alchemy.

La Barre, Weston, The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion.

Lernoux, Penny, In Banks We Trust

Nettl, Paul, Mozart and Masonry.

King, Francis X., Ritual Magic in England.

Knight, Stephen, The Brotherhood: The Explosive Expose of the Secret World of the Freemasons.

Knight, Stephen, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.

Legman, Gershon, The Guilt of the Templars.

Martin, Malachi, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church.

Masterman, John, The Double Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945.

O'Brien, Flann, The Dalkey Archive.

O'Hehir, Brendan; A Gaelic Lexicon for Finnegan's Wake and Glossary for Joyce's Other Works.

Oglesby, Carl. The Yankee and Cowboy War.

Paoli, Mathieu, Les Dessous D'une Ambition Politique.

Phipps, William E., Was Jesus Married?

Pound, Ezra, The Pisan Cantos.

Robison, John. Proofs of a Conspiracy. (Text is here.)

Shah, Idries, The Sufis.

Solomon, Maynard, Beethoven.

Spencer-Brown, G., Laws of Form.

Temple, Robert K. G., The Sirius Mystery.

Thomas, Gordon, and Witts, Max Morgan, Pontiff.

Waite, Arthur Edward, The Rosicrucian and Alchemical Works of Thomas Vaughn and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry.

Webster, Nesta, World Revolution. The Plot Against Civilization.

Wilgus, Neil, The Illuminoids.

Wilson, Colin, A Criminal History of Mankind.

Wilson, Robert Anton, The Earth Will Shake.

Yallop, David. In God's Name.

Yates, Frances, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.

Interview with Carl Oglesby

For years, I have read references to Carl Oglesby in the work of Robert Anton Wilson. (For example, Wilson often mentions Oglesby's book, The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate.)

Here is an interesting interview with Oglesby, from Reason magazine, which reveals him as a left-libertarian, now unlike RAW himself.

Who was Mathieu Paoli?

I have been working on a bibliography for the various books mentioned in the footnotes of The Widow's Son, which I'll publish here as soon as I can finish it. For the most part, this is a straightforward exercise — if I suspect a book really existed (Wilson includes some made-up books) I can find it on Amazon, Abebooks, etc. But I have been struggling a bit with Les Dessous D'une Ambition Politique, allegedly by one Mathieu Paoli, a Swiss journalist reportedly executed by the Israelis as a spy in the 1970s. He is mentioned in this interview, and there is information about him in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but it seems odd there is not more information about him. I also would feel better if this entry didn't say, "fake entry, this book doesn't exist." Can anyone help?

Fly Agaric talks to RAW

Steve Pratt aka Fly Agaric interviews Robert Anton Wilson in September 2002, and we learn that RAW doesn't like James Bond movies but does like Mahler. Quite a long interview, with some very interesting segments. Hat tip, Michael Johnson.

More Shea to read, it seems

It appears I have some additional reading to do. After I posted about how much I enjoyed Robert Shea's All Things Are Lights, Eric Wagner posted in the comments that he enjoyed it, but he liked Shike even more. So it seems I ought to try Shike and see what he means.

I have plenty of options for reading Shike. Shea is out of print in the dead trees sense, but his work is available electronically in multiple formats. Shike is available as a Kindle edition for $8 but also has a free HTML on the official Shea site.

I read All Things Are Lights by converting the HTML version into a QiOO mobile file and then toting it around on my cell phone.

An antidote for Ayn Rand?

The slacktivist blog publishes a rant about his daughter being assigned to read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (which I haven't read -- I haven't read any of her fiction.)

Down in the comments, Nick Mathewson remarks that in high school, "I found that the antidote for Ayn Rand for me was Robert Anton Wilson. No idea why."

Geds replies, "Because he's awesome? And, weirdly, when you consider the bit where all of the good guys in Illuminatus! were anarchists, you get a sense of the importance of working together from that book, rather than just saying, 'Screw it, I'ma get mine and you all can rot'."

Atlas Shrugged is satirized in ILLUMINATUS! as Telemachus Sneezed.

Awesome political rant on Fox News

The pleasure of this video goes beyond being able to unexpectedly write the headline I put on this post. I think Robert Anton Wilson would have enjoyed this free speech rant.

Robert Shea's 'All Things Are Lights'

I have just finished All Things Are Lights by Robert J. Shea, and I enjoyed it very much and recommend it to anyone who enjoyed ILLUMINATUS! Although superficially it is a straightforward historical novel with plenty of action and romance, there is rather more material than I expected about secret societies and secret occult teachings. The Templars and Cathars feature prominently in the book, and Gnosticism, paganism, sexual tantra and the Assassins also are referenced. The book's hero, Roland de Vency, has a skeptical attitude toward authority and an agnostic attitude toward religions. The Wikipedia article about Shea says that his novels include "a few sly hints about the subjects of ILLUMINATUS!" but in connection with All Things Are Lights, this seems like a strong understatement.

While this blog focuses on Robert Anton Wilson, I feel strongly that Robert Shea also should not be neglected or forgotten. Kindle editions of Shea's works may be purchased from Amazon. Free copies of many of his books also are available from the official site maintained by his son, Mike Shea, and from a collection of some of his work at Project Gutenberg.

Robert Anton Wilson on the Illuminati

Via the usual tipster, Michael Johnson, here is a video of RAW giving a quick overview of the Illuminati. (Michael says the video is not available at rawilsonfans.com.) For a continuation of the interview, go here.

Meditation lowers violence at Alabama prison

In an earlier blog posting, I noted that many of the teachings in RAW's Prometheus Rising resemble what I had learned studying Theravada Buddhism. A knowledge of Buddhism is one of the features of RAW's writing.

Here is an interesting story from the Associated Press about how Vipassana meditation has been used at an Alabama prison to reduce violence.

Free copies of 'Alien Abductee's Handbook' available

Joe Tripician has written to me to announce that The Official Alien Abductee's Handbook: How to Recover from Alien Abductions without Hypnotherapy, Crystals or CIA Surveillance has been released as a free electronic book as a PDF download. Get it here.

Mr. Triptician tells me that Robert Anton Wilson called his book "The funniest book I've read since the Warren Report." More information on the book here.

Adam Weishaupt in a newspaper blog

At the Wilmington Star News (in North Carolina), Ben Steelman writes about The Wizard's Handbook: An Essential Guide to Wizards, Sorcerers, Magicians and Their Magic, by Robert Curran. The book is aimed at "young readers," Mr. Steelman says.

"Articles cover the ancient shamans, the Celtic Druids (who used the Wicker Man as a means of sacrifice) and medieval alchemists. Short biographies introduce young readers to such well-known characters as Nostradamus and lesser known souls such as John Dee (astrologer to, and sometime secret agent for, Queen Elizabeth I of England) and Adam Weishaupt, the founder of that oldtime favorite, the Bavarian Illuminati," he writes.

"(If you don’t know who the Illuminati are, see “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown, or even better, the Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. But that’s for grownups)," he adds.

.

Timothy Leary's 'Mind Mirror'

Take a trip back in time to the world of DOS and try Timothy Leary's "Mind Mirror," now ported to Java so that you can try it on most any modern browser. I have not had time to do much with it myself (it looks pretty), but Skooter the Clown, who posted about this at alt.fan.wilson, wrote, "As it says on the back of my original box: TUNE IN, TURN ON, BOOT UP

"After trying out the first two exercises in Self Reflection, the analysis proved to be spot on and time well spent. I look forward to working through the other simulations."

'Prometheus Rising' makes top 50 for 'Weirdos'

Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising, a favorite of many RAW fans, has popped up in the "Top 50 Essential Non-Fiction Books for Weirdoes" a blog posting by Cheryl Botchick that has drawn considerable interest at other Internet sites.

About Prometheus Rising, she writes, "If that book cover isn’t enough to convince you to check this out, what is? Robert Anton Wilson (RAW to his fans and followers) was an icon of brain-altering philosophies, and his writing has lost zero of its power over time. The headline here is that Prometheus Rising is about meta-programming your own mind. The subheads are many. You’ll feel altered."

Her entire list is worth reading. One might wish she were a little less interested in rock music and lefty politics, and a little more interested in everything else, but her list reminded me about several books I want to get around to reading.

'Lost' Orson Welles movie may become available

Here's an item that RAW would have been interested in, so I will pass it along: The Other Side of the Wind, allegedly an "unseen masterpiece," is finally supposed to become available, the Guardian reports.

Interview with Kevin MacArdry

As I've noted a few posts ago, Kevin MacArdry's new novel, The Last Trumpet Project, is a new novel that explores many themes Robert Anton Wilson was interested in, such as immortality, libertarianism and rapid advances in technology.

I enjoyed the novel, and as I mention in the interview below, there is a chapter in the book which could be read as a reference to the ILLUMINATUS! trilogy. I thought it might be interesting to ask about that and to find out a bit more about MacArdry himself, an interesting person who resembles some of the oddball anarchist characters who populate ILLUMINATUS!

My interview with MacArdry was concluded on Feb. 3, when he returned his answers to my e-mailed questions. For more on his book (including how to obtain a copy), please go here.

Mr. MacArdry's book has been nominated for the Prometheus Award. A panel of judges will decide which five novels will go on a final ballot to be voted upon by members of the Libertarian Futurist Society. (Disclosure: I'm one of the judges.) One of the other books being considered is Ceres, by MacArdry's mentor and friend, L. Neil Smith.

When I wrote to Kevin and asked for the interview, he wrote back, "Glad to know that some RAW fans enjoy my book. I remember playing Steve Jackson's Illuminati card game that was based on his ILLUMINATUS! trilogy; it was a real hoot to play."

RAWIllumination.net: Could you tell me a little bit about yourself, i.e, where do you live and what is your "day job"?

I've been a software guy for more than 25 years now. I put in some 15 years working for corporate America, after which I "saw the farm," as Stefan Molyneux would put it. For the past decade I've been a professional agorist, still doing software but working on projects calculated to assist other livestock in getting off the farm as well.

What kinds of projects? Well, in the early 2000s I did a secure webmail service which was hosted on Sealand. I've always considered that the control of money and payment systems was the linchpin of farm control mechanisms, so following that I became involved in the digital gold
currency (DGC) industry. For the past several years I've been involved with a project related to the virtualization of stored value using cryptographically signed digital bearer certificates, aka vouchers.
This project (see http://www.voucher-safe.org) is now in beta test and will be deployed later this year.

Since you've read my book, you know that Aurumnet and DR.OS are what I see as the destination which we must reach if sustainable human freedom is to be achieved. The projects on which I work professionally are baby steps toward those goals. While we're pretty limited in what we can do today, as squishy moshes with only the current internet available, we
can at least move the ball a few inches in the right direction.

Due to the agorist (1) nature of my work I'm not terribly interested in discussing in detail where I live, though I will admit that I'm presently somewhere on the North American continent. I don't consider national boundaries or identities particularly important. Fences and ear tags.

RAWIllumination.net: Chapter 39 of The Last Trumpet Project takes place in the virtual world of Erisia, which has a capital city of Kalliste. Was that a reference to the ILLUMINATUS! trilogy?

Not directly, though quite possibly indirectly. To elaborate, the references to Eris and Kalliste were intended as a sort of homage to Doug Casey's Eris Society, whose annual meetings I used to attend in the '90s. As you can see here:

http://www.erissociety.org/about.html

no mention is made of RAW or his books. However the Eris Society was started circa 1980, so it is quite possible that Casey was influenced by the ILLUMINATUS! trilogy, which appeared some five years earlier. I suppose I could email him and ask, if you are curious.

In using Kalliste I was also thinking of the website formerly run by the late Orlin Grabbe.

RAWIllumination.net: Do you hope that a commercial publisher will become interested in your book and reprint it, or are you satisfied with the self-published approach?

I haven't regularly kept up my author's blog, but the first post from 8 July '08 should explain my thinking on this. I did revise the book and add a trade paperback option two years later, based on reader feedback that physical books were still preferred by many. The approach
I've chosen is probably the only one that makes sense for an agorist.

RAWIllumination.net: Have you read any of Robert Anton Wilson's books?

Robert Anton Wilson is one of those writers whose ideas came to me through third parties. There's a kind of circulatory osmosis which obtains in the freedom movement generally, as I'm sure you're aware. I knew about the Church of the Subgenius, Pope Bob, and understood what
friends meant by "Hail Eris!" even without reading his stuff directly. I do seem to remember reading Natural Law, or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy. If memory serves, there was a reprint in Loompanics magazine, and at the time I was buying a lot of books from their
catalog, as well as Laissez Faire Books'.

It may interest you to know that Ayn Rand was another such author for me. Although familiar with the tenets of Objectivism, and having read some of her non-fiction essays and numerous quotes and excerpts, I never actually read Atlas Shrugged cover-to-cover until the 50th anniversary edition appeared, in what, 2007? Anyway there are some things you don't really feel compelled to read, because you've already gotten the gist as it were. Or at least I find it so. I'm more likely to pick up something I know nothing about, than something I've already heard about in detail. Which doesn't mean it's not still good once you actually
break down and read it, though. ;-) Maybe one of these days I'll do
that with von Mises' Human Action.

RAWIllumination.net: Which libertarian thinkers have most influenced your own thinking? Who are your favorite SF authors (or for that matter, favorite authors?)

As far as The Last Trumpet Project goes, unquestionably the greatest influence at work was The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil, which I read in 2005. Kurzweil is a non-fiction writer, a futurist and philosopher who speaks and writes about technology, as well as a noted
inventor. He's recently done a documentary film called "Transcendent Man," but I haven't seen it yet. The idea of the Singularity is of course central to my own book.

An actual SF author whose work I respect a great deal is L. Neil Smith. (2) I've met El Neil a few times, even went shooting with him once -- must have been 20 years ago. Neil is a master of incorporating radical libertarian ideas into the plot of a novel, in such a way that those ideas appear to be the natural outgrowth of the characters and situations in the story. No 70-page radio monologues for him, just a compelling story with believable characters and a clear message. This is a methodology I've consciously attempted to adopt.

What I was trying to do in LTP is show that the only way that a philosophy of individualism, peaceful anarchy, and voluntary exchange can take hold and replace statism is if human beings become smarter; and that as soon as humans *do* become significantly smarter, the emergence
of such a dominant philosophy is inevitable. Kurzweil says: "Humans are going to merge with their technology and augment their intelligence." I agree, and add: "And in that case, church and state are both doomed."

Other authors I would list as favorites or who have been influences to some extent would include, in no certain order:

J.R.R. Tolkien
Henry David Thoreau
Frederic Bastiat
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Glen Cook
Ursula LeGuin
Murray Rothbard
Fred Saberhagen
Lysander Spooner
Roger Zelazny

Hmm, looks like the clear majority of my favorite writers are dead, how sad!

Footnotes:

(1) According to the Wikipedia article I link to here (at MacArdry's recommendation), Agorism was developed by Samuel Edward Konkin III. Konkin is one of the targets of RAW's Natural Law Or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy , which criticizes the "Natural Law cult."

(2) Apparent references to ILLUMINATUS! recur in Smith's work. For example, the email list that he uses to send out articles is called "Group 523."

The footnotes in 'The Widow's Son'

A considerable amount of the text in The Widow's Son consists of the footnotes, which often cite existing books but which also cite a number of nonexistent ones, such as Golden Hours by de Selby, the time traveling sage, and his intellectual colleagues and rivals. (See this post.)

The story in the footnotes about de Selby and his controversies mostly exists outside of the universe of the main novel — except in Chapter 22 of Part Three, where Sigismundo has an encounter with a man who appears to be de Selby.

It's not the only moment of apparent time travel in the Historical Illuminatus novels. At the very beginning of the first book, Sigismundo is "lost in the forest with a Red Indian, seeking the supreme Wakan," something that apparently cannot actually happen until the third book.

'The Widow's Son' — a missed opportunity?

It doesn't seem to be generally recognized, but The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is in fact the second novel to be largely inspired by Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. The first, as RAW fans will know, is The Widow's Son.

Without giving too much of the plot away for people who have not read the book yet, the Merovingian bloodline and the mythology of the Holy Grail play a large part in The Widow's Son. I looked through The Widow's Son after I finished reading it Sunday, and there are references to Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 11 different footnotes. In some of those footnotes, Holy Blood is cited more than one time.

Considering the amount of attention that The Da Vinci Code attracted, it seems odd that so few people have noticed that it is actually the second work of fiction to draw inspiration from Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The Wikipedia article does not even mention The Widow's Son. Perhaps this was a missed opportunity for Wilson?

News about Wilson's and Shea's former boss

The New York Times has a long story about Hugh Hefner, boss for Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea when the two writers were working as Playboy editors and working on ILLUMINATUS! At age 84, Hefner still has the same sort of blonde girlfriends in their 20s, although, the piece says, Hef acknowledges that "most of his girls have never listened to his kind of music — jazz and the big bands of the ’30s and ’40s."

I've asked for an interview with Hefner, hoping for memories about the two editors who wrote a popular cult novel that remains in print today. Both of my requests were ignored, but I'll try again. Sometimes patience and persistence works.

So, when does this guy perform at the Super Bowl?

From the Montreal Mirror comes a review of musician Genesis P-Orridge's book, Thee Psychick Bible.

The piece by Johnson Cummins explains, "This massive tome is indeed biblical in proportion and covers a lot of ground, with P-Orridge tipping sacred cows and refuting traditional Christian orthodoxy, gender roles and sexual taboos along the way. The author mounts his pulpit and helps spread the gospel according to Robert Anton Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare and other modern cultural engineers and contemporary seers."

The piece also refers to "hocus-pocus on how to correctly perform sex magick—which resulted in over 1,000 members of the T.O.P.Y. collectively masturbating on the 23rd hour of the 23rd day and sending their sperm to P-Orridge for safe keeping." (T.O.P.Y. is the "Temple ov Psychic Youth," which the article explains was a "think-tank/commune to coincide with his newest musical project, Psychic TV.")

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Was RAW interested in modern classical music?

Yesterday, I posted a video of John Cage, the famous experimental composer, and today I pose a question. Is there any evidence that Robert Anton Wilson was interested in modern classical music? It would seem odd if he were not. He was interested in classical music and he always was interested in new ideas and cutting-edge art. He lived for many years in the Bay Area, home to many modern composers. (Terry Riley's "In C," which launched a revolution in modern classical music, was first performed on Nov. 4, 1964, at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.)

And yet, when I read Wilson's work, I see no references to Terry Riley, or "In C," or Steve Reich, or Philip Glass, or John Cage, or John Adams, or any number of people who I would expect Wilson to be interested in. Have I missed something?

On a related note, I have a blog devoted to modern classical music.

John Cage on "I've Got a Secret"

Here is a wonderful video of experimental composer John Cage from the old TV show, "I've Got a Secret." Unfortunately, I have found no evidence that Robert Anton Wilson was interested in John Cage. Nonetheless, I believe RAW would have enjoyed this if he happened to see it, and showing it sets up the question that I want to pose tomorrow. (Hat tip: Jesse Walker, a Robert Anton Wilson fan who called this video to my attention by posting it at Reason Magazine's "Hit and Run" blog).

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Via Wired magazine's rather brief article on "Secret Societies," I found a Web site for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The site seems worth mentioning, particularly because it has a rather large list of links to further resources.

'My kind of stuff'

I think that the missing link between the apes and civilized humanity is Us (definitely including me.)

OK, I admit it: I'm a religious fanatic of the Post-Humanist faith. I think that humanity should become as gods or die trying, because the alternative is to die without trying. I don't think that being or being trapped in (I am also ontologically incorrect, drawing the mind/body distinction) doomed, raging, demanding Meat is enough. And while I am nowhere near silly enough to confuse acceptance of this view with literary excellence, I want to define science fiction as my kind of stuff...

— Arthur Hlavaty

This rather Wilsonian statement is excerpted from Hlavaty's Nice Distinctions 19 zine.

A couple of examples of the kind of SF which Arthur may be talking about: The Iain Banks Culture novels, and The Last Trumpet Project by Kevin MacArdry, the book I mentioned in my Jan. 30 posting.