I confess, I very occassionaly say things in order to elicit interesting email. I don’t say things I don’t believe or anything like that. But, I sometimes like it when readers fill in the blanks. My comments about Esperanto were a case in point. From a reader:
Hi, Jonah. You wrote:
> But was there ever a champion of, say, Esperanto, that was one of the
> good guys?
Maybe. What do you mean by “good guys”?
Wasn’t Zamenhof a good guy? Are any of the Esperanto-speaking Nobel
prize winners good guys? How about Bovet, who discovered
antihistamines? Selten, pioneer of Game Theory?
Tivadar Schwartz, who wrote in Esperanto about evading the Nazis in
Hungary? (and who, coincidentally, fathered American philanthropist
George Soros — which may or may not be a good thing, though one can’t
blame Tivadar.) William Auld, the Scot humanist and Esperanto poet who
was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Leo Tolstoy? Jules Verne? Pope John Paul II?
And:
Jonah,
I’m a big fan of yours, and I suspect that other dorks like me will be emailing you to let you know about the Stainless Steel Rat, a great science-fiction hero who a good guy (more or less) and a strong advocate of Esperanto. Not that I am strong advocate of Esperanto. I think it’s goofy nonsense. But the Stainless Steel Rat was one of my fictional role models when I was growing up.
“Slippery Jim” diGriz was the universe’s greatest criminal (specializing in ingenious bank robberies), who ends up captured by the law and offered a position in the Special Corps, a super crime-fighting organization staffed with other former criminals. Hijinks then ensue. The Rat first appears in a 1957 short story, and has had around 10 books to date since then. They’re all written by Harry Harrison, who wrote the book Make Room! Make Room! which was made into the movie Soylent Green.
Harrison himself is a sort of interesting guy. In addition to science fiction novels, he drew comics for EC comics in the 1950s and wrote the Flash Gordon newspaper strip for a while. The only problem I’ve ever had with his books (other than the militant promotion of Esperanto) is the fact that he’s a real militant atheist, and published a somewhat popular trilogy of anti-Christian novels that attempted to answer the question “What if the Vikings more violently resisted Christianity during the 9th century?” Oh well…..
Best,