-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.16/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.16/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 16 </A> ----- The Laissez Faire City Times April 19, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 16 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Voyage from Yesteryear a book review by Don Lobo Tiggre Voyage From Yesteryear, by James P. Hogan, has long been one of the books I’ve most wanted to see reissued. This classic of modern SF has prompted many intellectuals to wrangle over whether it’s an argument for anarchy or whether the economic system depicted could actually work. Those are interesting questions, but the main value of the book is its detailed depiction of a truly free society. This book is the answer to people who just cannot bend their minds around the idea that things could be different. Voyage doesn’t prove anything, but it’s an interesting, exciting, and effective tool for prying open a mind that has been rusted shut. It can be the first stepping stone for a real voyage of discovery. How? Well, consider the premise: saber-rattling has people worried about the prospects for the survival of life on earth, but there’s no time to send out full-blown colony ships before things are expected to blow up, so a single seedship is launched. The ship finds a habitable planet, Chiron, and starts incubating embryos while robots go down to the surface and start up mining and manufacturing facilities. Many years pass and Earth fails to bomb itself back into the stone age. The Chironians develop a peaceful and free society, where "war" is a word only known from old history tapes of Earth. They don’t even bother creating a government. Of course, the new fascist governments of Earth are not content to leave the Chironians (or the valuable resources of their planet) alone, so a second ship—a huge habitat ship with thousands of people on board, including an army—is sent to bring the childish and naïve Chironians back under the "caring protection" of Earth. And so the stage is set for a conflict between peoples, weapons, and ultimately world-views. While the story is written with plenty of humor, with characters we’d like to meet in real life, battles in space, and all the elements of a great SF epic, all of these things are merely the means by which Jim Hogan entreats the reader to reconsider his or her assumptions about society, economics, and even what it means to be human in this universe. Interestingly enough, and in spite of the heroic Chironians never having invented government on their planet, Jim does not call himself an anarchist. He refers to himself as a Jeffersonian. He’s also referred to himself as "something of a lapsed anarchist" in conversation, which may explain the decidedly anarchistic content of Voyage, which was first published 17 years ago. Jim says that he now believes that there must be some form of ultimate authority in society, a place where the buck stops, or order collapses and bloody chaos ensues. Also, Jim has never been as supportive of pure capitalism (which he says isn’t what most people think it is) as, say, an Objectivist would be, and that does show in the economic questioning in Voyage. Jim’s stories vary widely in their intellectual content, some of them containing quite explicit examinations of social, political, and economic issues, and others seeming to have almost none. However, every single one of them has a strong undercurrent of general laissez-faire philosophy, even if it only shows in the attitudes the heroes have about life. The libertarian reader should therefore not read Voyage expecting to come away from it thinking, "what a great libertarian writer!" That’s not the value I’m saying the book holds, even though it is a past winner of the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Award. Instead, I suggest that readers think of Voyage From Yesteryear as being like a nut-cracker for hard cases who are so used to seeing things only as they are now that no idealism, no willingness to dare to dream of a better world, no hope for the future can enter their minds. This is why I’m so glad that Jim Baen has released a new edition of this long out-of-print masterpiece. First released in 1982, by Del Rey/Ballantine, Voyage From Yesteryear sold fairly well and went into a second printing in 1983. By then, Hogan had attracted attention with his pro-reason Code of the Lifemaker and anti-war The Genesis Machine, and had established himself as more than just a story-teller—this was a guy whose stories made people really think! One thing that may surprise some readers who’ve heard about Jim Hogan’s political inclinations, but haven’t yet read any of his books, is the amount of actual science in Voyage and his other science fiction novels. Many Sci-Fi readers complain that the genre has decayed greatly over the years to where most new so-called Sci-Fi novels are really fantasy novels with space costumes. Jim is perhaps one of the most staunch of the hard-liners who insist that science fiction should be based on real science. Interestingly enough, however, this isn’t just an expression of literary preference in this book. The difference between the Chironians and the Terrans in their approaches to the fundamentals of physics is an essential part of the clash of world views that makes Voyage From Yesteryear more than just a fun Sci-Fi story. The book is as challenging as it is fun. I’d even call it literature, but don’t let that scare you—I mean it in the nicest way. J The story of how Jim came up with the idea for Voyage is interesting too: he was having a pint in a pub (Jim splits his time between Ireland, where artists don’t pay income taxes, and the U.S.) when someone asked him how he would resolve the conflict in northern Ireland. He thought about it for a bit and answered that it couldn’t be stopped unless the children could be separated from the parents for a generation—disconnect them from their inheritances of hatred, and they should be able to get along as well any anyone. From this came the idea of disconnecting some children from all the inherited hatreds and prejudices and assumptions of our planet. This might make it seem like Voyage gets into too much heavy thinking to be much fun, but that’s just not so; the book had me laughing out loud as much as it made me stop and think. That’s quite an accomplishment for a single volume! Voyage From Yesteryear is not "The Great Libertarian Novel", but it is a great, thought-provoking read, and I recommend it heartily to all. Now that it’s back in print, this is the chance for those who have already read it to stock up on extra copies. They make great presents for people who are never going to read Rand or Von Mises, but whose minds could benefit from some new ideas just the same. For more information on Jim Hogan and his work, you can visit: http://www.global.org/jphogan/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don Lobo Tiggre is the author of Y2K: The Millennium Bug, a suspenseful thriller. Tiggre can be found at the Liberty Round Table and The Liberty Channel. -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 16, April 19, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved Disclaimer The Laissez Faire City Times is a private newspaper. Although it is published by a corporation domiciled within the sovereign domain of Laissez Faire City, it is not an "official organ" of the city or its founding trust. 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