Hey, if you like books.....

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!

Hopefully Attenborough's dead or attitudes have changed before he gives that voiceover! It did bring a smile to my face though!