Good article on the future of writing and publishing with Tim O’ Reilly, Stephen Abram, Douglas Rushkoff, and Frank Daniels:

“It’s a snowy February Monday in midtown Manhattan. Publishing magnate and tech guru Tim O’Reilly’s “Tools of Change” conference has just opened at a Marriott off Broadway. The timing is fortunate; publishers HarperCollins and Random House have just announced that they will be offering more book content online and au gratis. The affable O’Reilly—who has been urging publishers to go digital since the early eighties—refuses to gloat (much). “They weren’t even trying to keep electronic copies [of manuscripts],” recalls O’Reilly. “You look at these announcements today, they seem too little too late,… but it’s allowing them to start innovating, to become part of the technology process.” “Twenty years ago, people wouldn’t have listened,” says Sara Domville, president of F+W Publications book division. “They’ll listen now.”

As the publisher of an extremely popular series of computer manuals, O’Reilly is a bright star in a field of drab. Dubbed the “guru of the participation age” by Steven Levy in a 2005 Wired profile and a “graying hippie” with a “hostility toward traditional media” by author Andrew Keen, O’Reilly makes millions of dollars promoting open source at his conferences and selling do-it-yourself know-how to anyone who browses the computer aisle at Barnes and Noble. His message to the world’s publishing elite exudes a Wizard of Oz simplicity: Give more product away on your Web site, thereby attracting more people to sell on something pricier than a book— like a bunch of books or a conference ticket. The approach works for him at least. Some 900 publishing execs from Simon and Schuster, Norton, etc., have paid $1,100 apiece (on average) to learn how to give content away.

“I think I’m optimistic,” said Sonia Nash of Random House, echoing the uncertainty of the attendees, editors, and publishers from around the world eager to find some reason to feel good about the future of what they sell.”

(via The Futurist)

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“There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist. But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should. It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I’m not used to this.

As a fantasy writer I create fresh gods and philosophies almost with every new book (I’m rather pleased with Annoia, the goddess of Things That Get Stuck In Drawers, whose temple is hung about with the bent remains of bent egg whisks and spatulas. She actually appears to work in this world, too). But since contracting Alzheimer’s disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is that I really, if anything, believe.”

(via The Daily Mail)

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“Last Sunday evening at the Silent Movie Theater, a clip from the 1938 astrological murder mystery “When Were You Born?” was shown as part of an “Occult L.A.” program curated by the author Erik Davis. In the clip, legendary occult scholar Manly P. Hall, who had also written the movie’s script, appeared on screen to introduce the concept of astrology. With penetrating blue eyes, thick dark hair and a rakish mustache, Hall had the looks of a silent film star, and he radiated intensity as he explained the various personality traits of the different sun signs — Leos are loyal, Capricorns are brave, and so on. But that’s not all: “Astrology can solve crime!” he exhorted. “It has solved many crimes in the past.”

At this the audience burst into laughter: Yet another absurd Hollywood twist. It wasn’t the late Hall’s finest moment — in fact, he’d done the scene reluctantly. But afterward he held out hope that “When Were You Born?,” the first major motion picture to treat the subject of astrology seriously, might help “open the way for a great cycle of occult philosophy,” he wrote.

The film was a bomb, but the fact that this obscure clip was being screened before a sold-out crowd of artists, intellectuals and spiritual seekers shows that the cycle of Hall’s influence continues. And it may grow in the coming months, for Process Media has just published “Master of the Mysteries,” the first biography of Manly Palmer Hall, written by Louis Sahagun (who is a staff writer at The Times).”

(via Los Angeles Times)

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The celebrity atheist list is just what it sounds like: a large list of notable atheists. I recently commented at Dedroidify that atheists are not all jaded office workers and evil scientists, but many are artists, writers, etc. I think everyone will find a few people who enhanced their lives.

The Celebrity Atheist List

Here are a few of my favorites:

Douglas Adams
J.G Ballard
George Carlin
David Cronenberg
Warren Ellis
Brian Eno
Theo van Gogh
Eddie Izzard
Billy Joel
Milan Kundera
Bruce Lee
Sir Ian McKellen
Frank Miller
Friedrich Nietzsche
Gary Numan
Trent Reznor
Bruce Sterling

I would add to the list Haruki Murakami.

(And of course, one could write such a list for every major religion. My point here is that spirituality is not required for creativity and inspiration.)

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With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel’s 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Ms. Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany. Since its debut in February, the novel (“Feuchtgebiete,” in German) has sold more than 680,000 copies, becoming the only German book to top Amazon.com’s global best-seller list.

The book, which will be published next year in the United States, is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator’s body and mind. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel, and hard to describe in a family newspaper.

“Wetlands” opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident. It gives a detailed topography of Helen’s hemorrhoids, continues into the subject of anal intercourse and only gains momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and — here is where the debate kicks in — just possibly female empowerment.

Full Story: New York Times

Jezebel provides an amateur translation of an excerpt, since the book won’t be available in English until next year.

(via Tomorrow Museum)

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As a fan of the Myth Adventure series I was saddened to find out that sci-fi, fantasy author Robert Asprin died from a heart attack. He will be missed.

Via his website:

“On May 22, 2008, Bob passed away quietly in his home in New Orleans, LA. He had been in good spirits and working on several new projects, and was set to be the Guest of Honor at a major science fiction convention that very weekend. He is survived by his mother, his sister, his daughter and his son, and his cat, Princess, not to mention countless friends and fans and numerous legendary fictional characters. He will be greatly missed.”

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“Terry Pratchett has sold more than 55 million books worldwide. He was the UK’s best selling author until JK Rowling came along, he’s been awarded an OBE and won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for Literature. He’s a multi-millionaire and his fans love him - and he has an awful lot of them. But he hasn’t got his health. He’s been diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer’s Disease at the age of 60. For this week’s On The Ropes he talks to John Humphries about his life, his work and how he’s coping with a disease that - so far - has no cure.”

(via BBC Radio: On The Ropes. h/t SF Signal. Picture by Josh Kirby)

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Jennifer Stevenson is the author of “Trash Sex Magic”, and most recently wrote a trilogy of sexy, funny, romantic fantasy, the first of which was recently released called “The Brass Bed” (Ballantine Books). She’s been writing for 25 years and lives in the Chicago area with her husband of 30 years and her two cats.

The Brass Bed begins with the heroine, Jewel Heiss, a tough fraud cop investigating a fake sex therapist, Clay, who has been using an antique brass bed to lure his customers. Trapped inside the bed is Lord Randall (Randy), who in 1811 was cursed and turned into an incubus by his magician-mistress for being lousy in bed. The curse was this: satisfy one hundred women or be trapped in the bed forever. Lucky Jewel was number one hundred, and Randy becomes her personal sex slave. The choice: Clay or Randy? This is where the fun really begins.

I don’t usually read much fiction, but found myself flying through all three books (“The Velvet Chair” is the second [coming out in late May], and “The Bearskin Rug” is the third). There’s plenty of humor, sex and magic to keep anyone reading into the wee hours. The ending in the last book (“The Bearskin Rug”) was a bit of a surprise. If you like funny romantic fantasy, you’ll love this series.

I sat down with Jennifer to discuss her new book, and to get some of her views on magic, and sex demons.

See also:

Trash Sex Magic review by Wes Unruh

 

 Jennifer Stevenson interview by Tiamats Vision [13:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Photos of a Masonic handbook from 1920 called King Solomon and His Followers — A Valuable Aid to the Memory. The text is written in shorthand. (via kottke + clusterflock)

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One of my all-time favourite authors, R. Scott Bakker, is back, on hiatus from his trodden fantasy path to tackle the psycho-thriller genre. And while the cover of the book and the tagline you see there are an utter cliché of the genre (blame his publishers — bad Penguin Canada, baad), his content is terrifically intense and realistic, with beautiful doses of poetics and philosophy for flavour. (Read a prior bit about his literary-fantasy series, The Prince of Nothing.)

There is an insightful interview with Mr Bakker over at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist where he delves into the reasons for writing the book and what issues he wanted to tackle with this project. (I like that he started the project for his wife, aww.):

Scott: Are the muggles ready for Neuropath? That remains to be seen. The vast majority of readers will reject the vast bulk of the claims made in the book – that goes without saying, I think. Our incompetence as theory believers pretty much assures that people will refuse to acknowledge their incompetence as theory believers, and so muster all the power their myriad biases have to offer. Just for instance, you would think that encountering well-formed counterarguments would make people more skeptical of their own beliefs – after all, someone has to be wrong and it could very well be you – but research has shown that precisely the opposite is the case. Thanks to things like source bias, selective attention, confirmation bias, and so on, we almost always feel that we have utterly demolished those counterarguments, and if our position is so strong as to demolish well-formed counterarguments, well then, it simply has to be true! In other words, we draw the most irrational, self-serving conclusion possible. […]

Pat: The thesis underlying the novel is that there is no such thing as human free will and that consciousness as we know it is illusory. Do you believe that this controversial premise is the reason why it was difficult for you to find a home for this manuscript?

Scott: In the US, maybe. But I really think that the problem had more to do with the fact that the content was philosophical, more than the specific nature of that content. I had one very high profile NYC editor call me up to explain why he was passing on the book, even though he thought it was the most disturbing thing he’d read in 10 years! That’s literally what he said. What it came down to was that he thought the book was too cerebral to sell in the American market.

Pat: Given the subject matter presented in Neuropath, do you personally have any hope that humans can overcome their "hardwiring" (whether it be via social engineering or genetic manipulation)? Or is "rewiring" something that scares you even more than the present condition?

Scott: We’re fucked.

[Obviously continued… even with some new info on the upcoming Prince of Nothing instalment!]

Available in Canada on 6 May, U.K. on the 7th, France and Germany on the 29th, as an import in the U.S. on the 15th, et cetera.

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But still, he could gaze out of the window of his parents’ big American car as the chauffeur drove him and his nanny through the city, marvelling at the ‘bright but bloody kaleidoscope’ outside: ‘the prosperous Chinese businessmen pausing in the Bubbling Well Road to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telephone pole; young Chinese gangsters in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; beautiful White Russian bar-girls smiling at passers-by’. It struck him as ‘a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far behind’. Later, after the Japanese invasion of 1937 but before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the internment of American and European civilians in 1943, he would ride his bike for hours around the city. ‘Even as a ten-year-old who had known nothing else, the extreme poverty of the Chinese, the deaths and disease and orphans left to starve in doorways, unsettled me as it must have unsettled my parents.’ It is almost too obvious to need saying that the seeds of Ballard’s science fiction, of all his dystopian futures, were planted during his childhood in Shanghai. When Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, ‘sympathetic readers of my earlier novels and short stories were quick to spot echoes . . . the drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers.’

Full Story: London Review of Books.

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Andy Baio’s gotten a hold of an entire backup of an Infocom shared network drive from 1989, and it includes a look into the history of the aborted sequel, and a peek at what it would have looked like:

MILLIWAYS or RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

Takes up where “Hitchhiker’s” left off. Manufactured planets, Deep Thought, white mice, time travel, 1001 verb tenses, digital watches, the Frogstar, Total Perspective Vortex, the End of History! (Does Douglas really want to work on this at this time? Does it matter?)

1. It seems natural to include a scene in the restaurant, Milliways. Could be a bit of fun: strange parties, unctuous compere, self-introducing food. Perhaps there’s an object there that you need to get. (It could be a SPORK, a spoon with sort of forky tines on the end. Or would that be a FOON?) It could be a vehicle from the car park — Marvin has the keys. If you manage to re-enter Milliways at another time (oops! on another occasion), you will not meet yourself, “because of the embarrassment that usually causes.” What about a visit to the Big Bang Burger Bar?

Full Story: Waxy.

(Thanks Gabbo!)

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“Planning to open a bookstore in Indiana? Maybe a newsstand? How about a pharmacy? You may be officially labeled a purveyor of “sexually explicit materials.” Now, if you’ll just sign this registry, the secretary of state will accept your check for $250.

At the end of March’s legislative session, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed House Act 1042, which requires all new businesses selling “sexually explicit materials” to notify the secretary of state and pay a licensing fee. Failure to comply is a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and up to 180 days in jail.

Exactly who — or what — defines “sexually explicit” is the $250 question, and the crux of any test of the law’s constitutionality. One such test may come from the Media Coalition, a trade association representing publishers, libraries and booksellers in 1st Amendment cases.”

(via The Chicago Tribune)

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[..] Walt Disney’s King of The Elves, based on the Philip K. Dick story about a gas station attendant who receives a knock on the door one rainy night. It’s a group of elves. Small, maybe a foot tall each. They are all green, with leaves and foliage growing off of them. They beg him for shelter from the storm. Despite his better judgment he allows them to stay and as reward he is made king of the Elves.

Directed by Bob Walker and Aaron Blaise. It’s pretty far out from release, of course, but they showed some art. The elves I described a little above. The art was very painterly and the idea is that these little green buggers live in modern day Mississippi and have been undiscovered based on their appearance. With the leaves growing on their bodies if a human enters their domain they can just ruffle their foliage, duck their heads down and be completely undetectable.”

(via Ain’t It Cool. H/T: The Website @ the End of The Universe)

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This story, from the Mirrorshades anthology, was the first Gibson story I ever read.

Full Story: American Heritage.

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“A remarkable new discovery by international best selling author, Philip Gardiner, has revealed that Ian Fleming based his fictional character on occult knowledge he had accumulated over the course of his life.

The new book, The Bond Code, reveals how Fleming included special etymological and numerological codes within his Bond novels to re-create ancient sacred tales of deep psychological importance. Drawing upon esoteric knowledge and an understanding of alchemy, Ian Fleming produced a work no different to the tales of the Holy Grail or dragon slaying fairy tales, within which lay the ancient understanding of human wisdom.

The author, Philip Gardiner, is an expert on esoteric philosophy and etymology and realised there was a code at play when watching the film, Live and Let Die. For two years he researched Ian Fleming and read his novels, discovering vast amounts of information previously unrealised.”

(via PRLog)

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I’ve never read any of the His Dark Materials books, or seen the recent movie, but I thought some people would be interested in this:

Except from Once Upon a Time in the North by Philip Pullman in the Guardian.

(via Robot Wisdom).

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For all you aspiring writers out there, there’s a great project going on via LiveJournal with various authors who are posting their plot synopsis that they sent along with their pitches to sell their novels. Via Joshua Palmatier (jpsorrow):

“A few weeks ago, after I posted the question/interview about plot synopsis and my answers, Chaz Brenchley, desperance suggested that perhaps someone should post examples of the plot synopses they used to sell their novels, the ones that were for books already published and out there. I thought this was a great idea and with his permission (and participation) I set up what I’m calling the “Plot Synopsis Project”. Essentially, I gathered together a group of authors who were willing to post an entry about their own plot synopsis writing technique as well as a sample copy of one of their own plot synopses OR post an entry about how they got published without using a plot synopsis, to show everyone how different people write their synopses, and that it isn’t necessarily required to get published. There are other routes. I would say that MOST people have to write a plot synopsis in order to get published though . . . and most of us hate doing it. I personally do.

And just to clarify, by plot synopsis, I mean the (usually) 3-5 page summary of the book that is (usually) included in a submission package to the agent or editor, along with a cover letter or query letter, and sometimes with the first few chapters of the novel. This is not the one paragraph pitch, or even the one line pitch. Some of the other authors will talk about these other things as well in their discussion, but the main thrust of these posts is the 3-5 page synopsis.

So, what you have here is my entry in the Plot Synopsis Project. At the end of every participating post in the project, there will be links to the other authors’ blogs and their posts there. So take a moment to read through what I have to say, and then at the end, click on one of the links to find out what some other authors have to say about the subject. Hopefully, this will help all of the aspiring writers out there.”

Here’s a link of the writers involved separate from any plot synopsis, in case one wants to avoid an accidental spoiler, via Tobias Buckell’s site.

(Related: “Plot Synopsis Project, and the Problem with LiveJournal” via Uncertain Principles)

(Thanks Smoking Pigeon!)

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“Timothy K. Beal is Florence Harkness Professor of Religion and director of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. He has published eight books, including Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (Beacon, 2005), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and one of Publishers Weekly’s ten Best Religion Books of 2005; Religion and Its Monsters (Routledge, 2002), which was a Reviews in Religion and Theology Editor’s Choice; and The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, and Annihilation in Esther (Routledge, 2007).

He has published essays on religion and American culture for The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has been featured on radio shows including NPR’s All Things Considered and The Bob Edwards Show. He is co-editor, with Tod Linafelt, Georgetown University, of the book series Afterlives of the Bible with the University of Chicago Press. I was impressed with the perspective that Timothy brought to one of his books, Religion and Its Monsters, and Timothy made some time to discuss various aspects of the book with me.”

(via TheoFantastique)

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“Sponsored by Cornell University’s Institute for Digital Collections (CIDC) this image-bank provides a visual resource for the study of the Fantastic or of the supernatural in fiction and in art. While the site emerges from a comparative literature course on the topic at Skidmore College, it is also intended to open the door to consideration of some of the constant structures and patterns of fantastic literature, and the problems they raise. In this sense, the materials presented here may find a use among students in a variety of disciplines.

In order to take maximum advantage of the materials in the Cornell collections, it seemed best not to adhere to a strict definition of either the Fantastic or its predecessor, the Marvelous, as these have emerged in literary criticism and theory. It will be useful, nevertheless, to note some general markers which have informed the choices implicit in these pages. In the context of western literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Fantastic involves dread, fear and anxiety in the face of phenomena that escape rational explanation, or that reveal the notion of reality to be no more than a construct. A fantastic experience can therefore be likened to the breaking or shattering of a frame. While the literary fantastic is limited to the last 200 years, the Fantastic in art can be construed more broadly. This elasticity allowed us to choose images from works spanning a period from medieval manuscripts and printed incunabulae, to the early twentieth century.”

(The Fantastic in Art and Fiction)

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“I recently mentioned a new book that looked very interesting to me, Sith, Slayers, Stargates and Cyborgs: Modern Mythology and the New Millennium (Peter Lang Publishers, 2007), edited by David Whitt and John Perlich. Dr. David Whitt is Associate Professor of Communication at Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Dr. John Perlich is Associate Professor of Communication at Hastings College in Nebraska. I contacted David and John and they were were all too willing to discuss this fascinating book. After reviewing some of the chapters we had an opportunity to discuss aspects of the book.”

(via TheoFantastique)

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I got this email from my good friend Jason this morning regarding a series of literary fantasy novels I posted about a short time ago, The Prince of Nothing, by R. Scott Bakker:

You got read this on the Three Seas Forum, this cat Deadshade, is a phd physicist with a specialty in QM, his synopsis/interpretation is eloquent, elaborate, and utterly breathtaking. it essentially toches ground on alot of our dicussions on the subject/s, but his training and education enables him to elucidate in a way we were not!! check it out homes, if the link doesnt work just go to the forum and look for the topic “Inchoroi motivations & Quantum Mechanics”. I got so excited after reading it i had to print it off….

http://forum.three-seas.com/viewtopic.php?t=1287

For fans of the books, the post on the Three Seas forum will be of interest.

PS — SPOILER. While it doesn’t ruin the overall story, it’s a spoiler nonetheless.

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“[…] Environmentalists need to know something about basic storytelling in order to make their words effective. Samuel Johnson apparently said something I find very useful to remember: “The true aim of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Research is much easier than writing, so the temptation is to shove all the research in. But page after page after page of the stuff goes by and, of course, people stop reading. I suppose the real story, the basic story, the story I would like to hear, see, read, is the story about how connected we are, not only with one another but also with the place we live in. And how it’s almost infinitely rich, but it’s in some danger; and that despite the danger, we can do something to overcome it.

[…] Environmentalists also tell a story about us and ourselves and our place in the universe. In a sense it’s a religious story, because that’s the big question of religion. Why are we here? What is here, what does it consist of? What have we got to do now we are here? What responsibilities does being conscious place on us? And those are questions which the environmental movement, over the past 25 years, and certainly since the global warming issue has come up, has been very much engaged in. What does it mean to us to be conscious of what we are doing to the world? Some people attempt to maintain a state of denial: “It’s not happening”, or “It is happening, but it’s natural and it’s nothing to do with us”, or “It’s happening but we can fix it with technology.” All these are attempts to deny responsibility for it; to deny anything that they might have to do.”

(via Telegraph)

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…”hurld headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Skie with hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in Adam-antine Chains and penal Fire.” This was one part of “Paradise Lost” that I was asked to memorize for a course called “The Devil in Literature”. After reading the book we were asked to write an essay. Was Satan a villain or a hero? Guess which side I defended.

“Had it not been for John Milton, the hobbits might never have had their peaceful lives threatened by Sauron, Harry Potter might have completed his Hogwarts education untroubled by Lord Voldemort, and Lyra might never have received the unwelcome attention of Mrs Coulter or Lord Asriel.

Born 400 years ago, Milton is the poet who brought Satan into English literature. Though other writers had conjured up minor devils, none had dared recreate the arch-fiend himself. Even the Book of Genesis, which offers an introductory course in what Satan does and why he is to be avoided, but does not tell us what he is actually like. Then in 1667, an ageing, blind poet, whose books had been burnt by order of King Charles II, produced an epic that filled 10 volumes, and retold the story of Genesis as never before.”

(via The Independent)

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R. Scott Bakker’s The Darkness that Comes Before (Book One of The Prince of Nothing) is a deep meditation on philosophy, religion and the state of our world. At the same time it is a top notch exemplar of the fantasy romance sub-genre.

Bakker’s interest in philosophy becomes apparent from the start. He opens with an epigraph from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and the first character we meet, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, is an embodiment of Nietsche’s ideals. Nietzsche argued, among other things, that independence is for the strong, that “There are heights of the soul seen from which even tragedy ceases to be tragic,” and that the search for truth cannot be done humanely. Bakker’s Kellhus not only shares these views, they are the essential stuff of his character. That such Nietzschean attitudes exert a certain irresistible pull is undeniable, and this accounts for the exquisite darkness Bakker weaves through his story. As Kellhus, raised by the ascetic survivors of the First Apocalypse, the Dûnyain, begins his impossible quest, he proves himself a superman of Nietzschean dimensions, with a steely conscience and a heart made of brass. What, Bakker seems to be asking, would happen to a man who is physically and mentally superior when he, as Nietzsche puts it, assumes the displeasure of trafficking with ordinary men?

Yet Kellhus soon finds himself faced with another claimant to the mantle of the superman, the Scylvendi barbarian Cnaiür urs Skiötha. He, more than Kellhus, represents the Dionysian aspect of the superman Nietzsche dreamed of with great relish-a man for whom all is permitted, as all is permitted in nature. Kellhus gains his superhuman abilities from Dûnyain philosophy that attempts to master the deterministic principle of the ‘Logos’ and strives for a Schopenhauerian denial of desire that Nietzsche would have frowned upon even as he’d be marvelling at the supermen the Dûnyain had become. Cnaiür, on the other hand-as his “prize”, the concubine Serwë comes to realize-looks “down on all outlanders as though from the summit of some godless mountain.” Like Kellhus, he is beyond morality, but unlike Kellhus he indulges his “bestial appetites.” Bakker paints a picture of two supermen with divergent philosophical perspectives, and the reader is left to wonder which of these is the more monstrous-the one who is brutal in his appetites, a Dionysian beyond good and evil like a force of nature–or the one who manipulates those around him as if they were chess pieces while single-mindedly pursuing his own goal, committing and permitting acts of cruelty, heartlessly capitalizing on the hopes and fears of the “herd” around him?

(more…)

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