Sunday, May 03, 2009

More Harald Podcasts

For anyone interested in my novel Harald, I have now webbed some more recordings of chapters. If you enjoy them let me know and I'll record more.

Current fiction projects are Salamander, which is complete but can use more revision, and its sequel Eirick, which is a bit more than half written. I also have written the beginning of a sequel to Harald but am not currently working on it. If you want to see and comment on any of them, email me.

7 comments:

J. V. said...

Mr. Friedman, is there any plans to release a 3rd edition of Machinery of Freedom? The work has held up surprisingly well, but could use an update with more modern examples and maybe some new puzzles. Thanks in advance.

David Friedman said...

There are no current plans to update _Machinery of Freedom_.

I'm not sure more modern examples are needed. It might be worth adding a discussion of encryption, and some of the material from my Positive Account of Property Rights article and my Anarchy and Efficient Law Chapter. But the former is already in my most recent book, and other two are available on my web page, so it doesn't seem particularly urgent.

On the whole, I think there's much to be said for a policy of fire and forget. Say what you have to say on a subject and then go on and do something else.

J. V. said...

Thanks for the response. The topics you brought up are exactly what I had in mind for a new edition. I'm sad that Nozick never circled back around to political philosophy to incorporate his other great ideas that were spread over his other books into it. I feel the same way about Machinery of Freedom.

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Jonathan said...

Looking forward to Salamander whenever it gets published.

I'd like to see a novel set in the kind of society envisioned in The Machinery of Freedom. Vernor Vinge attempted it in the 1980s, but in a sort of half-hearted way that didn't satisfy (although what he wrote was good in other ways).

Jonathan said...

I forgot to comment on the Harald podcasts. It's kind of interesting to hear you reading a small part of it, but on the whole I prefer to read books myself.

The Vinge books I was referring to above are The Peace War and Marooned in Real Time, later collected in one volume with an additional short story (The Ungoverned) under the overall rather poor title of Across Realtime.

The two novels are set in a future in which most people live in ungoverned societies, but this is mentioned casually as background information and relatively little is revealed about how these societies function. Vinge is mainly preoccupied with other issues.

The short story dramatizes the 'hard problem', in which an ungoverned society is attacked with military force by a government. It's quite a good story, but I don't think his ad hoc solution to the problem would satisfy most people.

John Lott said...

Awesome. I find the audio that you have done for this book more interesting than reading the book myself. I must say that the reverse is virtually always the case for me. Possibly, it is just you knowing what words to emphasize, but whatever it is I enjoyed listening to you read it more than reading it.