The Anguished Dawn by James P. Hogan

No new holds waiting at the library, but did find James P. Hogan's The Anguished Dawn, sequel to Cradle of Saturn. He won the (Libertarian!) Prometheus Award for The Multiplex Man, which I've also read and enjoyed. Anyway in Cradle of Saturn he puts forward the Catastrophism theory, that Really Bad Things happen once in a while, suddenly, to this planet and all of Sol System, instead of more gentle, gradual changes over geologic time. And in the back of the book (and on his own site) he's got references and web links to evidence supporting the theory. I do so hope he's wrong. We ain't built no starships yet dammit. There's not even a permanent Human presence off-planet (anything that needs supplies regularly delivered by spacecraft is not "permanent").

And it's freaking me some with apparent advocation of Socialism. Is this the same guy who wrote, as I recall, Mirror Maze, with the Constitutionalist party abolishing the income tax? He's got some moneyless scientific utopia going in the moons of Saturn here and what little economics I've learned isn't showing me how it can work purely out of good intentions. Especially with an influx of Terran refugees. Where do all the consumables come from? How are they replenished? With money, what happens is, you buy raw materials, make a product, sell it, and use the money to buy more raw materials, making enough profit to, like, eat. How can anybody do anything but starve, in the long term, if everyone gives away the fruits of their labors without material compensation? Obviously in the short term some people will be well-fed but it runs out, ya know? He hasn't actually quoted the Marxist plank, "To each according to need, from each according to ability," but it's a flashing neon sign between the lines! This is not the Hogan I remember! -Well, I'm only at page 40, we'll see.

311 - Saturday, 4 October 2003:

Perusing Hogan's site, his bulletin board archives. Found this little item, and this one, and elsewhere he mentions Ron Paul. All righty then. But this Kropotkin stuff in The Anguished Dawn is still weirding me out. He goes into some detail, on an unrelated work, here.

314 - Wednesday, 8 October 2003:

Nearing the end of The Anguished Dawn, still not buying the moneyless society thing and not much of an effort being made to sell it, aside from a brief reference to "production guaranteed by high technology" or suchlike, which I could imagine working if the technology were high and reliable enough, but then people would be dependent on it and right there in the same book he's got the entire surface of Sol III laid waste by a near encounter with a rogue planet and primitive, non-technological skills are needed for survival, so is Hogan even on his own side here or what? I'm sure he's read Heinlein but has one of Lazarus Long's famous quotes sunk in? The one about specialization being for insects? He's built a society of naïve idealistic techno-dependent low-gravity weaklings! If this is supposed to be a "message book" there's not many pages left for the message. I can think of a message....

316 - Friday, 10 October 2003:

Finished The Anguished Dawn yesterday, kind of a weak ending I thought, not at all sold on Kronian society, though I wouldn't classify Kronians as "enemy", just "weak" and "unrealistic". The scientific theories put forward in the story were intriguing.

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