text: So, assuming I haven't miscounted in the quick tally, that brings me to 52 of the works read, amounting to 28 authors. (I have, of course, read more of these authors than that, but in some cases I've read one or two works by the author that were not here listed.)
  * I once (a decade ago!) put together a list of 20 must-read science fiction novels, where the primary concern was a loose notion of 'centrality of influence' -- i.e., they were genre-building works, tying into and influencing large portions of the science fiction genre, and I also confined myself to one from any given author. All of them I had read, of course. Thirteen of those are on Wright's list. The seven that are not are:
  I would certainly today do SIRIUS for Olaf Stapledon instead of Odd John -- I almost did then, and I remember quickly becoming convinced after putting up the post that it would have been a better work. (Indeed, much as I like Starmaker, I think Sirius is easily his best work.) And I was convinced by commenters at the time (long lost on a commenting system that no longer exists) that Douglas Adams, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY was a good candidate. But allowing for the one change and the one addition, I would still stand by them all. So add them to the list. Of these, I think one could argue that Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are not 'essential science fiction authors' in quite the sense Wright means; they are good candidates for the diverse genre-building list I was going for, but the particular areas of the genre they build up and are highly influential for are arguably marginal to the genre as a whole. Stapledon and Dick are already authors on Wright's list, so that just leaves Sturgeon and Card and Adams as the authors not in Wright's list; given that he was arbitrarily capping himself at fifty, and explicitly notes in comments that he was primarily concerned with making sure that earlier generations of authors were not overlooked, that's pretty good coverage, especially given that my list, though smaller, was aiming to cover a very wide area of the genre indeed.
  * There are, of course, cases in which one could pick a different book -- Jules Verne's A Journey to the Center of the Earth is a good example. Lovecraft is perhaps the most questionable author on Wright's list. I was less bowled over by Hyperion than a lot of people, but I can certainly see why it would be a candidate.
  As I've noted before, there are few if any poems that do better than this one at conveying the sense of intellectual enthusiasms. (Byrom was thirty-six when he wrote it.) It's difficult for us to imagine shorthand being something to get excited about, but in the early modern period it was changing the way people did a great many things, and Byrom was one of the significant figures in that change. Byrom and Wright were part of a loose group of Malebranche enthusiasts during a period in which a wide variety of people in Britain were showing interest in Malebranchean philosophy.
  'Old Jim," as everyone knows him, has been responsible for issuing gun licenses for as long as his county job has existed. Jim is a well-liked, affable, and devoutly religious fellow who does his job efficiently and well; he rarely makes an error.
  But Jim's religious commitments have created something of a problem. The tenets of his faith, he has discovered, prohibit the possession and use of guns by women. So recently, when several women have applied for licenses, as is consistent with their Second Amendment rights, Jim has refused to issue them. His freedom of religion, he believes, exempts him from doing what is contrary to his religious convictions, and he feels that the county cannot require him to act against these convictions.
  The problem can be worked around so long as someone else can take over for Jim, but the county is small, and there often is no one available to step in - that is, no one who doesn't share Jim's beliefs. So the question of whether Jim can be forced to issue gun licenses is now before the county commissioners.
  This is a horrible analogy, regardless of what side one takes on the subject; the analogy is both somewhat defective in itself and not adequate to the use Panichas wants to make of it. When Kim Davis started in her position, it was not only not legally required to issue licenses for same-sex marriages, it was illegal to do so; it then became not only legally permissible to do it but illegal not to do so. She didn't go into the job expecting to be put in this situation. Thus the analogy would require that what was legally counted as a right has changed on Old Jim; in particular, that people whom it was originally forbidden to issue gun licenses for are now guaranteed the right to receive them, creating for Old Jim a religious dilemma that did not originally exist. With gun licenses, the groups that clerks most commonly cannot issue gun licenses for are felons. The only change with regard to Second Amendment rights that could have the actual parallel would have to be that the US Supreme Court one day asserted that Second Amendment rights require that gun licenses be issued regardless of criminal record. And then Old Jim, who had been completely law-abiding before, would, to keep the relevant parallel, have to stop issuing gun licenses at all on the ground that he could not now do so in religious conscience, due to the change in requirement.
  There is the double danger of analogies of this sort: that is, there is a danger on one side of simply rigging the conclusion into the analogy, and there is a danger on the other side of failing to get an appropriate analogy for the conclusion actually drawn. In this particular case, there are certain criteria an analogous situation would need to meet:
  (1) It has to provide a similar case with regard to rights and religious conscience, in all relevant details.
  (2) It has to be a case in which it is clear that right of religious conscience cannot legitimately be a reason for noncooperation.
  (3) It has to be a case showing that this is so as a matter of principle rather than due to peculiar characteristics of the case.