Look For Coal, Find A Diamond

      Today's blog post was going to be about the rising popularity (or at least the increasing prevalence) of authoritarianism in the world.  There are fads and cycles -- in the wake of the successful American Revolution, popular government through violent overthrow had a day, most (in)famously in France; the Russian revolutions spawned, quite deliberately, a series of Communist revolts and takeovers; then there's the rise of "strongman" (they usually weren't) rulers in the run-up to World War Two.  You can't make a convincing case that it's predictably cyclic (sorry, Toynbee; sorry, Spengler) but there are clearly fashions that rise and fade.

      John M. Ford's SF novel  Princes Of The Air uses this kind of shift as a background trope or hinge for the three characters the story follows.  It's a book I stumbled across in a used-book store, liked and resolved to look for more from the same author if any showed up, which never happened.  I went looking for a link to it to use as an example and stumbled onto his extraordinary life story. (No, not the director.)

      Mr. Ford is sixteen years gone now.  He rarely dipped into the same fictional universe twice, writing some eighteen novels over a twenty-six year career.  He was something of a "writer's writer," highly praised by his peers, including Neil Gaiman -- and it turns out most of his work is either back in print (and Kindle) or it's about to be.

      So there you go, a link to an interesting author instead of ruminations on how history's gone wrong.  I am reconciled to the probability of things going over a cliff and hoping to zig when the pogroms zag, and in the meantime, one might as well read.