Hi, I would love the epub format of this so I can convert it to mobi to read on my kindle. my e-mail is mises.ghost@gmail.com. For those of you with a Kindle there is a free program called Calibre which can convert between different e-book formats, however pdf to e-book format seems problematic.
On another note, I think science fiction is probably the best way to advance libertarian ideas. This is a great thing because every political movement needs to create a set of familiar ideas and tropes that can permeate culture. Marxism has done this so well that it’s going to be very hard to root it out. THis is also quite true of Freud’s ideas. I, myself, have thought of writing a libertarian inspired science fiction story/novel but have not yet begun. Thanks again
It makes perfect sense. I hadn’t considered that perspective until now. The first draft of the book was nearly 400,000 words long. I needed to get it down to at least 350,000 (I think the final word count wound up being just over 318,000). Also, a friend of mine read it and commented that the beginning was a bit slow for him. Some have still mentioned this, but it is better now than what it was. At any rate, there was a scene in the first few chapters where Alistair and Oliver go to dig up an inheritance that Alistair’s grandfather left him when he died. In other parts of the book, you’ll recall that his grandfather was spoken of as being his teacher and guide growing up. Well, when they dig up the inheritance they find a bunch of banned books, two of which were Human Action and Man, Economy and State. So this would explain his vocabulary. I guess I never considered that in cutting this I might be leaving questions in people’s minds. The reason I cut it is because it does not advance the plot; it deals purely with Alistair’s background and in a book over 300,000 words long, I was really cautious about idling in neutral to deal with this sort of thing.
I tried to set things up so that it would be somewhat easy, like a window of opportunity where this could happen. I had a 750 page limit and did not want to spend too much time dealing with all the little details of what would indeed be a very complicated revolution. This is why I put them on an island, got weapons into their hands and so on. I hope it didn’t feel too forced.
I would expect a lot of small companies in an anarchist society. The reason first three then four big ones emerged in mine was because of their technological advantage early on. Over time, one would expect this to smooth out, but early on they were literally the only ones with guns. I do mention some smaller companies and neighborhood style enforcement agencies elsewhere, and given a longer timeline I would expect a greater number of agencies.
But… who knows?
That was a big challenge and the most important part: a novel still needs to be primarily a story.
Probably wouldn’t have the same feeling I had when I first read Atlas Shrugged: “Yes! Someone is actually saying this!” I have had some very positive reviews from people I have no reason to believe are libertarian. One man, a professional critic named Lee Gooden, wrote on his blog that Withur We was one of his favorite books of 2010, and this on New Year’s Eve several months after he had read it. I don’t whether Withur We is going to take off or not, but there have been some non-libertarians who have liked it quite a lot.
I can’t think of a better problem to have! There will be a sequel someday.
Muchisimas gracias!
Thank you! This is a very important point, for me. I feel like women tend to go more for character, while men tend to go more for plot. I feel the best stories excel in both, and sci-fi, being the most male of the genres, does often have good plots with somewhat threadbare and/or interchangeable characters (Ringworld comes to mind). Of course, Philip Dick can be cited as a counterpoint, but I think this is the tendency. I often wouldn’t go on writing a chapter until I had a good angle on a bit part that appeared in it, just something I could use to flesh him out a touch and make him, even if he was one dimensional, more than a mouthpiece for a few lines, more than just scenery.
It’s hard to imagine kinder praise than this. Thank you!
And with that, the whole book becomes worthwhile. That’s the point of the interplay between Alistair and Santiago… and there’s more of that idea to come in part III.
Thanks again, Adrian. It’s so nice to read something like this!
I’m enjoying this quite a bit already. I like the idea of batteries, that’s basically what they are right, as a kind of currency. A universal battery would make for a great currency, especially if it’s quite small. However, it probably wouldn’t be divisible, but that’s just one downside.
It’s not the batteries so much as their stored energy that serves as the currency. Credits being entirely unbacked - not even printed - and energy provision being desultory, it seemed to me that payments by way of energy transfers would be a real possibility. That would also have the advantage of being divisible.
Oh ok gotcha. It is a very cool idea. I liked how you juxtaposed the government instituting a price ceiling on food on some days against the government’s culpability in reducing the supply of food and restaurants.
I’ve been meaning to read this for awhile now and hadn’t gotten around to it. I have more time on my hands now so I went ahead and purchased a hard copy and am looking forward to reading it when it arrives. I’ll let you know how I like it.
Cheers!
The first draft went into so much more detail, but I was worried that it was becoming less of a story and more of an econ textbook, so I whittled it down. Probably a good idea, although the cut parts would likely go over well with this crowd.
I haven’t read the novel yet, but it was probably a good idea to cut. Cory Doctorow’s novels suffer from the textbook syndrome, Though he generally explains things very clearly, he spends too much time explaining things. He definitely sacrifices art for his educational aim.
I just got to the part where Allistar, while on the island, is bringing in spontaneous order by establishing a local capitalistic order. I just finished the first trial where the one big guy takes advantage of the small guy. Not to spoil anything I’ll just say that it was excitingly entertaining!
I especially like the character Taribo. “Polite Police!” Only one letter difference haha…
I give it 5/10. I’d like to have given it a higher rating, but took points off for tortured English (especially the constant misuse of “couple” as if it were an adjective) – hiring an editor would have got it 7/10 – and the story sort of fizzled out at the end.
Didn’t say I didn’t care for it. Your writing style got in a the way a bit: overuse of adjectives, odd sentence structure occasionally, quite a few homonym confusions (the two I remember are you used “break” when you meant “brake”, and “flow” for an ice floe), and the constant (probably at least one per page) nonstandard use of “couple” nearly had me tearing my hair out. Those are things that would have been fixed before publication if you had a publisher. There were a few details that didn’t seem to make sense (one character had her arms chopped off before arrival on Srillium because they didn’t allow ‘enhancements’, but Alistair and a few other characters had at least enhanced eyes, and got to keep them; he had to smuggle seeds to the planet (and nobody looked for that?), but the first person he ran into had pots and pans; some characters later were smoking and drinking wine, but there doesn’t seem to have been any way they could make those, etc.). Overall, it wasn’t a bad story, but you kind of wimped out on the ending – Alistair left Srillium just as it was reaching a climax, and after that you were pretty much telling an unrelated story.
I’ve had people say the opposite. In my own defense, I’ll just say that there are different styles and you seem to be more of a traditional minimalist. In my experience these people can be quite dogmatic about prose style.
I certainly use more than Kurt Vonnegut, for example, but then I’m not trying to do with my prose what Vonnegut did.
I don’t see why this should be a problem. I’m not trying to write at the level of See Spot Run. Part of what I like about language is what you can do with it, rather than always trying to slim down and simplify.
There are 176 uses of couple in 692 pages of the book. Many of these are uses as a noun. Furthermore, you can find plenty of discussion on the web about whether couple as an adjective is nonstandard, which would indicate it is far from a settled issue. In my own experience couple as adjective seems perfectly standard (some sites I looked at noted this was more of an American tendency).
The arms were enhanced with mechanical implants, parts of which could conceivably be used to make things they don’t want the prisoners having. Not the case with the eyes.
No one needed to look for it; cotton doesn’t present a problem for The Incarcerator. It’s capitalization and advanced technology that they keep to a minimum. Alistair took the seeds in his colon for lack of any other way of taking them.
What logical problem does this present?
Not true. This was discussed in the book. Srillium is not entirely devoid of consumer goods. Buildings are not permitted, with the half-exception of the cave cities which themselves are only permitted in return for services rendered to the Gaians.
Wimped out? Are you saying there was a tough decision I should have made and did not? I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
I would gently suggest that you may have missed some things along the way. Part III is the culmination of what the entire book was about and had been building to from Chapter 1.
I’ve never read Vonnegut, but “overuse of adjectives” is probably the single most common fault book editors find in new authors. I’m not talking about ‘simplification’; sometimes you use word order that’s more appropriate to poetry, which is sometimes OK in prose trying to set a particular mood, but just seems strange in this case; other times you insert a clause in the middle of a sentence in a way that makes it hard to understand. Re: use of “couple” as an adjective: it may be common in some forms of American English, but it’s still regarded and non-standard (one site calls it “slovenly”); i.e., it’s OK to use it in speech from (some) AmE-speaking characters, but not in non-speech text. (And it’s not even “non-standard” in not-American English; it’s just Wrong. And I’m not American. It’s extremely grating; I can’t dispute your numbers, but it certainly felt like every page.)
How did he get them there? Presumably not in his colon?
But they had to eat new arrivals because they couldn’t grow enough food, they arrived naked, with only what they could carry in their colons, and they’re constantly being attacked by other tribes … how do they maintain tobacco and grape plantations?
shrug Almost always, when reading science fiction, I’m left with a feeling of “there’s potentially a great story in there, but the author didn’t tell it.”
That is definitely something I would want to change. Do you remember any examples?
Believe me, it’s entirely common. And since I’m American writing in American English…
Not by Americans.
And another calls it “not non-standard”. Like I said, the issue doesn’t seem settled.
I’m going to guess that the slovenly quote comes from a British writer, or an American with pretensions. I have run many times into attitudes from the British that indicate that they (you?) view English as their language but are generous enough to lease it to the rest of us for free. Then they take umbrage if we change the wallpaper without permission. This simply is not how language works.
Is this some international law I don’t know about?
Listen, I have no right to tell you what your tastes ought to be; they are entirely subjective. If there is something you don’t like, it is neither right nor wrong, but as the author of the book, my goal is to get you to like it as much as possible. There are certain roadblocks that I think can be removed and I am trying to remove them. I don’t understand why the word couple as an adjective should so drive you to distraction that its very presence in the book loomed far larger in your imagination than in reality. Nevertheless, it cannot be called wrong, because language is arbitrary, subjective and always evolving. There is an entire society of people for whom the word couple has expanded in use and meaning; this process happens constantly in language and the market has chosen this meaning for couple. When an author from that culture writes in the way that culture uses the language, I don’t see why it should be unacceptable.
For instance, in England it is common to say, “It’s a good job” where in American we say “It’s a good thing”. Frankly, I don’t see that the British way makes much sense, but I don’t let it grate on me. It means what it means and if someone uses it, I can’t demonstrate that it is wrong, and I certainly don’t want any hang up I have to inhibit my enjoyment of what might be a good story.
There are some changes in language that I resist with good reason. For instance, I cannot abide the use of “literally” to mean the opposite of its traditional meaning. If a word means A and -A at the same time, then it is in danger of not meaning anything at all. Something like that is lazy thinking; couple expanding to become an adjective as well is not.
They were made on the planet. Srillium is not devoid of all goods and services.
But amidst squalor there are always those who have much. Witness the Soviet Union and Cuba. There are no large plantations on Srillium, but wine is a luxury good that can be had there. The wine you are referring to, I believe, was being smoked by rich industrialists, such as they were on srillium.
I thought the ending encapsulated everything the book was about. It was conceived from the very beginning, in fact.
How do you think the story should have been told?
Anyway, don’t take my post to be defensive. Originally, I just thanked you for reading the book. When you responded with more detail, I did likewise. I have no doubts that Withur We could use an editor; I found plenty of mistakes myself and there are obviously more in there. I do think that calling the English tortured is an exageration, and I don’t think the logical problems you see are necessarily problems. As I said before, I only point this out in the hopes that you will raise that 5/10 to a 6/10!
I thought it was someone in Issicroy, but I searched the PDF: it was actually the Singulatarians who had the wine. Issicroi had the cigars.
If I knew that, I’d write my own book
(At a minimum, I think the whole “overlay” thing should have been left out, and the Singulatarians shouldn’t have been able to build an FTL drive, so Alistair should have stayed on Srillium. Failing that, if the ending was supposed to imply that they’re doomed, they could have left the alien museum ship knowing that Aldra’s sun was going to explode any minute, and there was no time to get away, just go back to Aldra to wait it out…)
By the way: why is it called “Wĭthûr Wē” (why the title, and why the diacritics?)
