Published on 12, July, 2020
Do you agree with this list by And of the top 20? Would you throw out some, or include other titles?
Look what I shared: 100 (Fiction) Books to Read in a Lifetime - AbeBooks.com @MIUI| www.abebooks.com/.../index.shtml
A pretty solid list. I'd have to include Frank Herbert's Dune series (especially God Emperor) and Clive Barker's Weaveworld. God Emperor is unique and I love the way Weaveworld mixes the ordinary with the fantastical, lots of contrasts that mix well.
I have read most of the SF on the list: 1984, Brave New World, Slaughterhouse 5, Never Let me Go...... at uni, we read Catch 22 and Middlemarch, there way have been one or two others. Middlemarch I found thoroughly depressing.
No Phillip K Dicks I noticed. And I was surprised that from the good Nevil Shute there was only a Town like Alice, rather than On the Beach? I read the latter at 17 and had nightmsres for weeks afterwards. I suspect a war like that would be much messier than depicted here - it is absolute extinction of all human life, but really everyone just keeps enjoying what they already enjoyed doing, the lie back with their favourite drink and the cyanide pill. I think it was the thoroughly 50's stoicism of his characters that got me.
Oh and I heard about and ordered the Connie Willis, The Domesday Book. Historians can travel on time but the girl student ends up witnessing the Black Death.
I did like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the time, though it might seem a bit flaky for nowaday's tastes. He could have been on the spectrum....
“Is it hard?'Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.”
I use the above Pirsig quote a lot with my students
Philip K *** is also a well noted omission...
No worries! Deckard's attitude to the Toad was kind of a transformation for Deckard for me. He found meaning in Mercer's reverence for the natural world and at the same time he had found empathy for the synthetic world because he kept it regardless of the outcome. He sort of found peace with the two aspects of sentience in that part. Out of all the fantastic things that happen in the book he finds his epiphany in something that we would take for granted.
Ok had a bit of a doh moment there. He thought it was real but his wife then found the control panel. I thought it pointed at a profound pessimism, in terms of discerning any difference between the real and the ersatz
Thank you for confirming my suspicions about the goat but the toad had a control panel. It was a real synthetic though. Are synthetics real? That brings us back to the start.
Hopefully Attenborough's dead or attitudes have changed before he gives that voiceover! It did bring a smile to my face though!
And I must say I wonder if it is all humans who are like that? Or just so-called humans from industrially developed cultures?
Remember in the states, Australia and New Zealand, the so-called called savages in fact had a far more evolved understanding of our place within Nature, that we are part of it, than the newly-arrived Europeans did. It was not they that overfished the seas, created polluting factories, over farmed the land, drive the buffalo into near extinction?
The mentality that allows humans to create machines, factories, to keys, computers alongside robots may be what is also behind that inability to Ree that we are also so good at cutting off the branch we are sitting in. There is s kind of of a myopia there.
I am not saying that I would rather live in a nomadic tribe in a teepee necessarily as slavish adherence to custom can mean horrors like FGM too.
Something is very wrong with s species though if it could justify having a nuclear war and push all other life into extinction beyondbtgat anywaylet alone with all the inequality that exists.
Actually the other androids are spiteful and cruel too. The fugitive Pris is more than happy to bait the chickenhearted Isidore once she realises he is a retard, thanks to the radiation.
I thought the pod people demonstrate better what it might mean to be less than human. In Invasion of the Body snatchers.
Yes, the toad was real and an android killed the goat
Does that mean the NTs that secretly (or otherwise) wish to destroy me, see me as of value...
mmmmm.....
... like a hunting safari to kill the last Aspie...
cue David Attenborough’s dolcit tones from a nearby shrubbery...
”... here we have the trembling figure of an Aspie, alert, poised, dumbfounded and overwhelmed by its surroundings.., it must run and be free or freeze in shutdown, the hunter hypnotising its pray with small talk, illogical sentences and crazy bodily gesticulations...”
....
the last Aspie.....think of that..
”All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
on the other hand... empathy to other individuals and working for the good of the community.
...you mean... hope? Quiet, mute acceptance that the current model is wrong? Or, not working, at least?