I am starting off the heros category of the website with a dedication to Voltaire. When I was a kid, the world had me thinking this was some boring old fool only the people who went to cambridge would be interested in reading about.

Like many of those dusty old books that "uncoolness" (fashionability) distracted me from looking, finding out about the life of Voltaire was quite an eye opener. His novel "Candide a la Optimo", is perhaps his own life story penned as a fantasy novel introducing the idea of an "El Dorado" which I believe most readers would have heard of, even if they don't know the origins of the phrase.

For those unfamiliar with "El Dorado", it is used in various art, including a 1990s British Soap Opera to describe a place where everyone has everything they ever dreamed of and all was for the best. This is depicted in Voltaires novel as a place surrounded by mountains making it inaccessible to encroaching European "civilisation" colonising the new world. In the land of El Dorada, the soil is filled with tiny little bits of shiny yellow particulates of no regard to the inhabitants and completely worthless, but in the experience of Candide, a colonist from Europe, these little yellow dots are actually gold, and the most valued thing to the world he comes from which are beyond the inaccessible mountains surrounding El Dorado which he has accidently found a way into.

The novel is punctuated with social absurdities and abominable ideas like women who choose to mate with gorrillas because there aren't any men for them to mate with. It pokes fun at the political system of his day by describing a situation where the warring tribes in Europe have Candide's home city under seige and in order that the soldiers guarding the beseiged city can have something to eat, the woman are legally required to chop one of their buttocks off to provide the soldiers with some meat while the seige continues unabated.

Voltaire's novel was written in Britain where he sought political asylum like a modern day Max Igan after having had the state sponsored dogs set on him by the ruling elite of his native country France.

The life of Voltaire may be a worthwhile study to the various people concerned about celebrity political prisoner Julian Assange starting to recognise as Candide does as the novel progresses, that not "all was for the best", and not "everything was as it should be".

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HEROS