John Milton in Outer Space by Terrance Lindall - 2017: Boldly Going Where no Poet Has Gone Before!

HARDCOVER, 120 pp, Fully illustrated by famed Heavy Metal artist Terrance Lindall

Signed in gold ink and numbered, limited to 100 copies, clear dust jacket and signed on cover also.

Burn Baby Burn!

An excursion into the dialectic

Conformity backed by coercion is how tribes, nations and cultures are formed. Meanwhile, revolutionaries in those groups envision a better way. Milton's Satan is the archetypal revolutionary. However, Milton's Satan was not searching for a "better way" for those he led, rather he was debased, blinded by jealously and ambition, monumentally tragic, yet courageous nonetheless.

If action is also a form of speech, then Satan's rebellion against God Himself was the ultimate in free speech. Today, the left-wing Antifa on campus justify their use of physical violence against conservatives rather than verbosity because "Fascism is not to be debated. It is to be smashed." Of course the right could say "Progressive Stalinist Mind Washing Liberalism is not to be debated. It is to be smashed." The use of force as argument is called an ad bachulum fallacy in logic…resort to the stick when words will not convince. Where then is force justified? Is war inevitable, ultimately leading to justice?

"Milton in Outer Space" envisions Milton being brought back to our time to assess precepts of free speech and the justice of violence in a multicultural, multiracial milieu. Would Milton advocate free speech to win over humanity to create a system of freedom justice and equality? Would he back a firebrand like Cromwell to bring about a just social order? Would he opt for the dictatorship of a philosopher king (possibly a supercomputer to indifferently mete out justice)? Would Milton abandon the current human condition as entirely untenable and beyond saving and go in search of a New Paradise? What would that New Paradise be like? Milton for moderns!!!