Live from Austin!

There’s a meme going around: in 15 minutes, come up with a list of 15 books that “will always stick with you”. Since lists on their own aren’t all that interesting, I’ve added some notes about why I’ve chosen these books.

1. “The Man Who Folded Himself”, David Gerrold.

   One of the great SF time travel novels. Take one ordinary guy, a time machine, and the many-worlds hypothesis, and watch everything go completely nuts.

   I nearly chose “When Harlie Was One”, another Gerrold book which is probably better from a literary standpoint, but the plot doesn’t quite stick in my head the same way, perhaps because I read it in a single sitting because I couldn’t stop.

2. “Ubik”, Philip K. Dick.

   Not Dick’s best novel, not his most striking, but one of the ones which is most typical of his writing, and one of the first I read.

3. “The Chain of Chance”, Stanislaw Lem.

   I’d love to say more about why this is great, but the less you know about it, the better it is. Don’t even read the blurb.

4. “1984″, George Orwell.

   Also known as the UK/US government instruction manual, 1984 onwards.

5. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”, Douglas Adams.

   All of it. And the radio show scripts, if that’s not cheating.

6. “Obedience To Authority”, Stanley Milgram.

   Probably the most terrifying book in the world.

7. “Computer Lib / Dream Machines”, Ted Nelson.

   There’s a reason why this sells for outrageous sums second hand. Every page is full of wit, insight, and ideas. It set the direction of my academic and then my professional life.

8. “Alice In Wonderland / Alice Through The Looking-Glass”, Lewis Carroll.

   If there’s anyone who hasn’t read this: What is wrong with you?

9. “Getting Things Done”, David Allen.

   I don’t adhere to GTD religiously, but elements of it have been incredibly helpful to me. The only personal organization system that has actually worked somewhat for me.

10. “The Phantom Tollbooth”, Norton Juster.

    Like “Alice in Wonderland”, a book for kids that is smart enough to be entertaining to adults as well.

11. “The Book of the SubGenius”, Rev. Ivan Stang.

    The other face of religion in Texas. I bought copies for friends the first time I visited the USA.

12. “Principia Discordia”, Mal-2.

    While Subgenius is entertaining, I think that ultimately, Discordianism is the better religion, or the more long-lasting joke, depending on your point of view.

13. The complete short stories of Philip K. Dick.

    While Dick’s novels are often great, I think it’s in his short stories that he really shines as an author.

14. “The C Programming Language”, Kernighan and Ritchie.

    The first real programming language I learned was C. K&R set my expectations for programming language books; I look for the thin ones, not the doorstops.

15. “The Transparent Society”, David Brin.

    I was persuaded. I think this is our only viable choice. The way I live has changed accordingly.

If you’re a Douglas Adams fan, Robert Sheckley is probably a good bet. He wrote mostly SF with a satirical comedy bent, and was widely acclaimed for it.

I’ve found a few of his novels disappointing–”Options“, for example, seems to fall apart part-way through and meander around. “The Status Civilization“, though, is excellent. It does have a few visible seams from its original publication in magazine serial form, but they don’t detract too much from the story.

I read it on Kindle, via the wonders of Project Gutenberg.

Ten books on my bookshelf which almost certainly aren’t on yours.

1. "Threaded Interpretive Languages" by Loeliger. Describes how to build FORTH systems. Published by Byte back when FORTH was mainstream. (Why, yes, I am that old.)
2. A.R.T.H.U.R. by Lawrence Lerner. Poetry from an imaginary AI. Much better than RACTER.
3. "The Third Word War: Apostrophe Theory" by Ian Lee. Starts off as a catalog of grocers’ apostropes, mutates into a collection of photographic meta-references and arch puns.
4. "Fortran 5" by Simon Leonard. Three surreal stories by one of the guys behind the bands I Start Counting, Fortran 5, and Komputer.
5. "RCL20". A celebration of 20 years of the Handheld and Portable Computer Club. Contains the story behind the design of a number of classic HP RPN calculators. Gift of the editor.
6. "Zenarchy" by Kerry W. Thornley. One of the authors of Principia Discordia; neopagan, libertarian, friend of Lee Harvey Oswald and allegedly part of the conspiracy to assassinate JFK. This book is his often-overlooked approach to Zen Buddhism. Copies seem to be going for $95 and up on Amazon, but I’m keeping mine.
7. "Zen Without Zen Masters" by Camden Benares. Continues the non-mainstream Western approach to Zen theme. Apparently the author was a friend of Kip Thornley. Like Zenarchy, this book is frequently hilarious, and shouldn’t a true religion be funny?
8. "Think Tank" by Roger Langley. "The Prisoner" fan fiction.
9. "Nineteen Ninety-Four". Novelization of the radio series. Think "1984 meets the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy".
10. "Bad Shave: The Story of Baby Bird So Far". Compilation of articles about lo-fi pop god Stephen Jones, aka Baby Bird, aka Babybird (the band).

Previous entries, withdrawn because they are insufficiently rare:

1. "Twitching and Shattered" by Frank Key. The gentleman is an acquired taste, and this is a taste I acquired back in 1990 or so. His books for children, such as "Derek the Dust Particle", are truly inspired, and recommended if you want your children to grow up to be like me.
2. "Beat Your Relatives To A Bloody Pulp" by Maxim Décharné. A Narrative Concerning the Proper Chastisement of Personages Without Whom &c &c.
3. "Literary Machines" by Ted Nelson. Describes the design of the Xanadu system. Self-published by Ted.
4. Bob Black, "Friendly Fire". Compilation of articles by everyone’s favorite anarchist.

Dear Amazon,

You’re so almost there with your new Kindle e-book. There are just a few minor details you need to fix to get me on board.

First of all, you need Mac support, and preferably Linux support as well, both for content creation and for reading books. There’s really no excuse for not having reader support, as you have a working Mobipocket reader in Java that will run on Mac and Linux, you just haven’t taken the time to package it up properly. The creation tools ought to be a pretty simple task to port too; a command line version would be fine. I don’t even care if it can’t apply DRM; I just want a way to be able to package up free text.

Secondly, you need to either drop the DRM, or drop the price of the books. Let’s consider a real example here. I’m about to start reading Charlie Stross’s The Atrocity Archives.

Let’s get one thing straight here: because there’s DRM, I can’t sell the book when I’m done with it, which breaks the first sale doctrine. Therefore, you’re not actually selling e-books, you’re renting them to me for an indefinite period of time, a bit like Netflix does with DVDs. I’d respect you more if you admitted that.

Anyhow, If I go the Kindle route, it’s $9.99 for the book.

Suppose I go the paper route instead. I can pick up a new copy on amazon.com marketplace for $12 plus $4 shipping = $16. When I’m done reading it, I can sell it for $9 second hand. Total cost to me = $7.

So the Kindle is more expensive, and I can’t actually buy the books. That to me is a poor deal.

Oh, sure, Kindle prices include network bandwidth… but with paper books, I had to include the cost of physically shipping dead tree across the country, and I still came out ahead. If you can’t beat the paper book price-per-reading, you’re doing something seriously wrong.

We’ve all watched the music industry flail around overcharging for DRM-burdened files and get nowhere. Learn from their mistakes. Drop the DRM, or drop the book prices to $5 or so (comparable to a DVD or video game rental, plus some markup to cover network costs) and I’ll order my Kindle tomorrow.

Update: Of course, if you gave me the Kindle for free, I’d use it to buy books from you, and look on the extra cost as a convenience fee.

Washington Post:

Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.

The human in command of the exercise, however—an Army colonel —blew a fuse.

The colonel ordered the test stopped.

“Why?” asked Tilden. “What’s wrong?”

The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.

c.f. Second Variety.

See also Which Philip K. Dick Story Are We In Today?

I’ve decided that it’s really time I learned US history and passed the Citizenship Test. Most intelligent Americans seem to view the test as some kind of joke, but my attitude is the same as my approach to the driving test: I don’t just want to be good enough to pass, I actually think I have a duty to go beyond that and really learn properly.

The same can’t really be said of the average American. In January of this year, Synovate conducted a random telephone survey of 1,000 US adults, with a resulting margin of error of 3%. They found that fewer than 1% of respondents could identify the rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, 17% of them said it mentioned the right to drive a car, and 38% of them thought it gave you the right to “take the fifth”. Also, 21% of people thought the Constitution mentioned the right to own pets.

On the other hand, 20% of respondents could name all the members of the immediate Simpson family, which reminds me of a UK comedy sketch of years ago in which the US immigration quiz was revised to include questions that tested knowledge people actually need to know in order to fit in in the USA—like “Please sing the first verse of the Mickey Mouse Club song” and “Name three items from the McDonalds value menu”.

I have a copy of The Cartoon History of America. ‘m wondering what book to go with after that; suggestions are welcome. I’m also open to CD-ROMs, audio books, web sites, whatever. I’ve been thinking about Don’t Know Much About History by Kenneth C Davis as an audiobook; it seems to get slammed as “leftist” “liberal rubbish“, so it probably doesn’t just cover the politically correct history the US wants to believe.

Sentiment: sorrow
SF savant Stanisław
so sadly silent

[My review of Do As I Say (Not As I Do) : Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy]

What is a book? It’s not merely ink and paper, what makes it a “book” is that it imparts information.

Schweizer could have written such a book. He could have called it “Do as I say (not as I do): profiles in media hypocrisy”. He could have profiled hypocritical media blowhards of all kinds, and put his investigative journalism skills to good use.

Instead, he chose to write a book which makes plain at first glance that it is hopelessly politically slanted. As such, the information in the book is immediately suspect. It’s like reading a book about the history of World War II that pretends the war started in 1941 when the US joined in, or an oil industry environmental report on Alaska that doesn’t mention that it’s a wildlife refuge: you immediately know that the credibility of the book is near zero because of its blatant bias.

Hence–and this is the key point–Schweizer’s book will only be read by those who already take it on faith that liberals are all hypocrites. They already (think they) know that Michael Moore employs only Aryans and that Al Franken strangles kittens. In short, nobody who actually reads this book will gain any knowledge from it; it will merely reaffirm that which they already know and believe.

Therefore this is a book, but at the same time it’s not a book; it has the form of a book, but even if every fact in it is accurate, it will impart no knowledge to anyone, trigger no discourse, contribute nothing to the sum total of human knowledge. Frankly, Schweizer could have just set up an Amazon payments ID and had right wingers send him money directly, and avoid wasting so much ink and paper.

A couple of decades ago I read an SF/horror short story that scared the hell out of me. So much so that the memory of the story stayed with me, nagged at me. Recently I decided I wanted to track it down again and re-read it, to see if it really was as good as I remembered.

That’s when the trouble started. I knew the plot—which to avoid spoiling the delights of the story, I won’t discuss further—but I didn’t know the author, or the title. Clearly it was going to be a tough task.

I remembered that the title was a single word, and meant something like ‘gate’, ‘portal’, or ‘window’. I hoped that I’d be able to search on keywords relevant to the plot that people might have discussed, and then narrow down the possibilities based on whether the title was approximately right.

Fat chance. I spent a few fruitless hours searching, including browsing through databases of SF short story synopses. No luck. Eventually I gave up.

Tonight, by chance, I watched an episode of Dangerous Visions that the TiVo had picked up. The first story was remarkably similar to the plot I remembered, so I went back and watched the opening credits again and picked out the author name: Robert Leman.

More searching, more nothing. Then, a revelation and success: the TV show changed the title of the story, and the name of the author—they called him Robert, but he writes under the name Bob. A minute or two later I had the full details of the story I remembered.

It’s “Window” by Bob Leman, written in 1980. It was a Nebula Award finalist, but didn’t win. It has been published in at least two anthologies: The 1981 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald A. Wollheim, and The Best Horror Stories From The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume I (1989). I read it in the first of those, and there are copies going on Amazon dirt cheap.

So, my recommendation to anyone who likes SF and/or horror: pick up a copy of World’s Best SF 1981, even if only for that one story. Don’t look up a synopsis of the story or anything, just spend $1 on a copy on the off chance. If it has stuck in my mind for 20 years and almost won a Nebula, it must be worth $1.

There’s also a Bob Leman anthology, Feesters in the Lake, but it’s about $36, which is a bit much.

The story was retitled “A View Through The Window”, if you want to track down the Night Visions TV version. I recommend against doing so, though.

As regular readers know, we’re moving, so we’ve been trying to clear out excess junk. When I put together a list of all the books we had to get rid of, I thought it would increase the chances of shifting them if I linked each one to its description and reviews on Amazon.com. As sara put it, “You have way too much time on your hands.”

As I worked through the list, I discovered something strange. One of the books was from an obscure independent press out on the west coast, and was long out of print. However, Amazon had two rare book dealers listing that they had copies. They wanted about $200.

I looked at the book and pondered this. It’s a book I was sent to review for The Internet Infidels; it’s about how the language of the Bible may actually be full of coded references to drug use, and how early Christianity might have been heavily into marijuana and ’shrooms. It talks about how one might be how to get the authentic mystical experience of God that the first Christians had by getting really smoked up.

I read the whole thing and wrote my review. I said that it was interesting enough, in a Philip K. Dick, Timothy Archer kind of way, but that the same mystical experiences could be obtained without the drugs, as anyone who had tried Buddhist meditation will tell you. I wasn’t keen on the amateurish fake typewriter typography either.

Since then, the book had been sitting quietly in a pile of other excess books, pretty much in mint condition minus the dent in the cover it had had when it reached me. It seemed implausible to me that anyone would be that keen to get a copy of it; but as sara pointed out, dedicated pot-heads have plenty of cash, and if they were keen enough they might cut down on the weed for a week or two and buy the book. So, I listed my copy on Amazon for $150.

That was last week. Yesterday, someone bought it.

Man, forget the Mary-Jane, I’ve had a genuine religious experience of the Internet kind! Now I want to go find all my other books on Amazon—because yeah, I have a shitload of books, but I have very few that I wouldn’t part with for $150…

And as for the buyer…I sincerely hope that the book is everything he’s hoping it will be. Maybe he needs it for his PhD or something?