13. Ishmael

a person answers a personal in a newspaper:
Teacher seeks pupil
must earnestly want to save the world
apply in person

When he arrives at the office, he finds an overstuffed chair, a bookshelf full of books and a lowland gorilla behind a wall of glass. That can communicate telepathically.

Ishmael is a philosophcal novel, in the form of a dialogue, between the teacher-gorilla Ishmael and the protagonist-student. Their topic is human culture. Specifically two opposing cultures. In our cultures parlance these are called primitive and civilized cultures, or hunter-gatherers versus farmers. Or in the more neutral terminology of the novel "takers" and "leavers". These two opposing forces are traced through out our culture, through stories in genesis. The story of Adam's fall and the story of the conflict between Cain and Abel.

Abel was a herder, and Cain was the new revolutionary culture, the new culture of Farming. This story is turned on its head to illustrate the conflict between traditional semitic nomadic cultures and the new farming cultures that were beginning to emerge out of the fertile crescent. The farmers grew their own food, were ablo to store it against the risk of drougtht and famine, were able to grow an excess of food with intensive agriculture, this led to an exploding population, as the population grew it pushed at the borders and the caucasian tribes swallowed the lands around them, all of the tribes around them, the Leavers either abandoned their hunter-gatherer/hearder ways and were assimilated by the farmers or they were exterminated, because to the Taker culture there was only one way to live: their way, farming. Any competitor, whether it be hunter-gatherers or predators such as wolves or foxes or competitors to their crops such as other plants, forests, etc must be exterminated. They clear cut the forest and the plains and plowed the soil and planted their crops: wheat, barley, corn, rice. and pulled up any "weeds" that grew on their land.

The Taker world-view is: The world was made for man to govern. Before he evolved the world was in chaos, it needed Man to come and order things. The other view, the Leaver view is: Man was made for the world. Just like the birds and the trees and the foxes and the whales. All of life will continue evolving, Man isn't the final end of the world: the reason the world was created.

Wow, this novel's affected me alot, I nearly cried at the end, and it wasn't overly sad. The story does an amazing job, turning our cultural stories on their head as a warning about our Taker culture, by the previous Leavers cultures. Higly Recommended!

12. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Book 3 in my 60s Philip K Dick binge.

11. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Book 2 of my Philip K Dick 60s novels binge. I'll have to write the full review of this book later, another mind-bending story involving hallucinogens, shifting realities, religious epiphanies.

In the future the United Nations is colonizing distant planets and the moon. Only life in this colonies is lonely and dull, so the colonists spend their time and money taking the hallucinogenic drug Can-D and staring at "Perky Pat" doll-houses until they transform into Perky Pat or her boyfriend, who live back on Earth, go to the beach and have sex. This past time becomes a full-blown religion to the colonists with arguments over transubstantiation of the body into the Perky Pat layout, it also becomes big business and the Perky Pat Layout company hires pre-cogs to predict which fashion accessories will sell well on Mars. This all works well until the mysterious billionaire entrepreneur Palmer Eldritch suddenly returns to Earth from the distant star Proxima Centauri. Does he have a new religion/drug? How will it compete with Can-D?

10. Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Glen Runciter runs Terra's most successful prudence organization, a category of business designed to prevent pre-cogs and telepaths from reading your thoughts and future and gaining a business edge with your secrets. But business is bad: all of Runciter's main adversaries' talents are disappearing somewhere off-world and he has no idea where. So at the beginning of the story Runciter visits his wife Ella, who lives suspended in half-life or cold-pak storage a sort of limited-time limbo between life and death.

Philip K Dick has a way of starting his novels off with both wild ideas of the future and bland characters and then after he shifts the reality a couple times the characters suddenly go from poster board cut-outs to characters you care about. At the beginning this novel, with its rich boss and bumbling ever-broke employee, Joe Chip, reminded me of George Jetson and Mr Spacely of The Jetsons. But as the ideas of the novel took hold and the concepts, the crazy possibilities sank in I became entranced and my views about this world and life and death were called into question. The future world (of 1992) that Dick creates is one part Jetsons, with its rocket travel to Zurich and the Moon, chutes that drop you from the roof of your building to your office chair and Mortuaries that keep loved ones in "half-life" or suspended cryonic animation for monthly one hour visits; and on the other hand the future is one part distopia with pre-cogs that can see the future and telepaths that can read your thoughts and the worse of all, everything in the future is coin-operated! Your coffee maker, your refrigerator, and even your front door.

This book, first published in 1969, perfectly straddles the early PKDs obsession with the hard core sf ideas and concepts like telepathy, precognition, rocket travel, paranoia, shifting alternative realities with his later themes: life, death, the afterlife, gnosticism, things falling apart. Its a great book to introduce oneself to the amazing, mind-altering substance called Philip K. Dick. Highly Recommended.

9. Software by Rudy Rucker

A classic of the cyberpunk movement. A story about immortality, consciousness, the human soul, what makes us human, what makes us unique, our thoughts? or our physical existence? This whole book was a metaphysical trip, a trippy conversation over pot cookies.

I like any story where the robots are as sympathetic as the human characters, like Blade Runner, like the new Battlestar Galactica, like Star Trek's Data, like Aliens' Bishop. The robots, the boppers from this series while less polished, are just as compelling, and far more believable.

This novel was one of the fore-runners of the cyberpunk movement and its easy to see why. While rough around the edges (the writing can be a tad misogynistic and there is one nasty homophobic phrase that stopped me cold and reminded me this was written during Reagan's reign of terror and hatred) if taken with a grain of salt its a great story that stands with the best robot/human tales. In fact its inspired me to dust off my old nanpwrimo novel and rewrite it with robots. Viva la Boppers!

8. Eragon

I'm generally not one for dragon books, oh who am I kidding my last review was of a Star Trek novel, but I loved this book! One night I sat up and read entranced until I suddenly noticed the time when a roommate came home: it was 3 am. The story lines and short chapters kept me turning the pages and at the end of each chapter saying "just one more."

This is a beautiful fantasy novel, with an addictive plot and fun if a bit stockish characters. Yes, the dwarves and the elves feel lifted out of Lord of the Rings, but that can be said from most fantasy novels. The true junkie test is that I want to immediately jump into Eldest the next book of the series as opposed to the Golden Compass series, which I enjoyed but wanted to take a break from.

7. Star Trek, The Dominion War: Book One

I started reading this book as a lark. After looking for some other books in the boxes and boxes of books we have stowed away, I found Books 1-3 of this series. Since we've just started watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine from the beginning of the series, I pulled these books out. (The Dominion War was the climactic story line of the DS9 series.) Then one night, a couple days ago as a lark I started reading book one ... and I was hooked. It was very well paced and well-plotted. The story revolves around what the Enterprise crew was doing during the Dominion War. There are four plot strands that the story switches back and forth between and they are all interesting. Ensign Ro, Data and Riker are the highlights for me.

I recommend the book for any Star Trek nerds. At night I found myself annoyed when my roommates wanted me to put down the book and watch an episode of Star Trek--even when the book was written after the TV episode, the book, in this case, is still more satisfying.