2013-01-14

Harry Harrison & Ramón Llull

Harry Harrison (March 12, 1925 – August 15, 2012) was a noted science fiction writer, also an Esperantist. Here is the Esperanto version of his Wikipedia entry:

Harry Harrison - Vikipedio

Esperanto appears in several of Harrison's works, particularly in the Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld series, according to Wikipedia. According to Vikipedio, several of Harrison's works have been translated into Esperanto.

I am not conversant with other references to the history of universal/artificial languages, but I was randomly alerted to this reference to Ramón Llull, the godfather of the ars combinatoria, a precursor of Leibniz and the philosophical language movement of the early modern period:

The Ethical Engineer - Chapter III by Harry Harrison (Deathworld 2)
(at The Linguist)

Here is the one reference:

"Shouldn't have thrown the Ramon Lull book," Jason said. "The ship can't stomach it any more than I could." 
How this fits into the chapter I do not understand. Perhaps one of you knows, and knows more about comparable instances of this sort of thing in Harrison's work. 

In any case, you can not only read this narrative, but you can listen to a reading of it thanks to LibriVox. There you will also find several recordings in Esperanto.

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