A follow up with a few favourites that I'd forgotten for a moment.

-Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle (alternate history that involves an alternate astronomy and physics, too. Sui generis).
-Wings of Flame by Nancy Springer
-Prisoner of Conscience by Susan R. Matthews (not an easy read for the torture scenes, but a very interesting main character and situation).

Honestly, I don't know how "forgotten" these are, but I liked them.

-Gareth

She, Hi. Rider Haggard
Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirlees
The Wallet of Kai Lung, Ernest Brahma
The Lost Continent, C. Cutliffe Hyne
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, Patricia McKillip
Micromegas, Voltaire
The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Stephen Mitchell (very readable, enjoyable)

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series should introduce you to a lot of good but often obscure work on the fantasy side.

-Gareth

"nobody is going to create a (quality) textbook for free."

http://www.lightandmatter.com/books.html
http://lightandmatter.com/french/
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/
http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/ (an extended, on-line version of the University of Toronto's long-time textbook "Representative Poetry")

Keep in mind that many of the textbooks assigned for English classes are classic books, now public domain.

Look at it this way: a professor is going to put together the equivalent of a textbook in handouts and lecture notes anyway, over the years. They don't necessarily think it will make them money in a crowded market. Many, in those circumstances, wouldn't mind sharing, and would keep it up to date for their own use. If they bring in a few like-minded souls, they could keep it up to date just like an open-source programming project.

Let's hear what Francis, Lord Verulam had to say about trusting only the guy with grandkids. "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which both in affection and means, have married and endowed the public." Anyone agree with him? Here's something: "[8] I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. [9] But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn." (1 Corinthians 7). On the other hand, the idea that we raise our kids as a duty of sorts to society sounds (Godwin forgive me) awfully fascist.

-Gareth

I would have agreed with you. Hey, just look at the seventy years of soviet dictatorship. And Arabs have never had a democratic government, ever. Brutal dictatorship, much as I hated to say it, just seemed to work. Then Prague Spring, Solidarity, the Berlin Wall's destruction, the end of Ceaucescu, the Tunisian Revolution, the Egyptian Revolution, and the panic among the other Arab powers stunned me. Contrary cases, disproving your point. Eventually, popular hatred of a government proved to be bad for the government.

I don't have a reason why dictatorships succeed until, suddenly, they don't. The best clue I found was in a Michael Moorcock novel, _The War in the Air_. A character tells Karl Marx that he's wrong, that oppression is not enough to lead to revolution. It requires a combination of oppression and hope.

-Gareth

I'm in shock that so may people here agree that Tolkien's prose is a problem. Far from that being the case, Tolkien is so sensitive to prose rhythm that I use it from time to time to teach how to appreciate rhythm in prose or poetry. Take, for example, the ride of the Rohirrim, at the end of chapter 5 of the Return of the King. It starts off at a walk ("Then suddenly Merry felt it at last, beyond doubt: a change. Wind was in his face! Light was glimmering.") picks up a bit to a trot ("But at that same moment there was a flash, as if lightning had sprung from the earth beneath
the City. For a searing second it stood dazzling far off in black and white, its topmost tower like a glittering needle: and then as the darkness closed again there came rolling over the fields a great _boom_.") a canter ("With that he seized a great horn from Guthláf his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm upon the plain and a thunder in the mountains."), and then a full-out gallop ("Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first _éored_ roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be overtaken.") Then, once the cavalry has bashed through the enemy lines and the fighting's intensity lags, we slow down to a walk again ( And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.") I could also point out the careful word choice for alliteration ("and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder") and assonance ("the host of Rohan"). Reading this page aloud is a joy. If you appreciate the King James Bible, or Old English poetry, you can appreciate this.

But he doesn't always write in this style. There are homely conversations between country folk, and orders in the field, and descriptions of landscapes, and "dropped in" details that suggest thousands of years of history that are simply not explained, but make Middle Earth seem real.

By the way, I would take Ursula Le Guin's opinion on prose quality pretty seriously. She is a fan of Tolkien's writing, too, calling it "a great wind blowing" that could have overwhelmed her own voice if she had read it earlier than she did. (http://greenbooks.theonering.net/tributes/files/ursula_leguin.html)

So, again, I don't get where this opinion that Tolkien writes badly. The man put more care into a sentence than others do in a chapter.

-Gareth

So there are only three categories of people: civilians, tyrants, and criminals? I thought there were others, such as members of the armed forces, security forces for legitimate governments, and police officers, too.

-Gareth
 

You are correct, they are not fundamentalists. Your unstated assumption is correct that it would be irrational to start a major war, although China has had small ones with, for example, India and Viet Nam, and a much larger one some time back in Korea. However, what does rationality have to do with such decisions when passions are at play? I believe that war between China and the U.S. is a possibility that could be triggered by the ambitions of both to have naval dominance leading to a series of incidents, or by the claim to Taiwan heating up, or by the claims to almost all of the China Sea leading to more friction with Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc. A BBC report a little while back speculated that the strong statements recently for these claims was to let the government seem to be leading the passions of the public, and therefore maintain credibility with the public. It sounds plausible.

-Gareth

Charging for news is a great way to drive readers to the BBC. That fine source of news makes its money through a mandatory fee and is, I believe, required by law to make its content available, at least to those who pay the fees, without further cost. Entering this kind of cartel would involve a big political debate.

If you haven't tried it, go to news.bbc.co.uk

-Gareth

You're right. I jumped on his comment with both boots on. Comments about Canada being less than a nation or less than a democracy because of our form of government do bother me, but I shouldn't have been so touchy here.

-Gareth

We've had representative government from the start. We got responsible government through negotiation. We achieved independence and ended slavery without a war for either. We just happen to split the function of "head of state" away from the function of "head of the executive branch," which allows us to think as witheringly as we please about the latter without having to show him any respect in his role as the former. The United States never figured out the advantages of that.

In short, we've got democracy. (Look up what happened to the Conservative Party after Brian Mulroney if you don't believe me). Take your cultural chauvinism home.

-Gareth

To tell the truth, I never minded having it called "OpenOffice.org" because no-one ever bothered to say ".org." On the other hand, you've got a good point that the names are stupid...but the names of the components. You've got Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, and Draw. These are, respectively, noun, contracted verb or noun, verb, contracted noun, and verb. Could we even be less consistent? We'd have to create a new component that was named with a preposition, participle, or conjunction...for example a mail component called Into, Mailing, or And.

I hope that this new start lets even something so basic get fixed.

-Gareth