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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.

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?

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?

On the Monday we went to SFMoMA. Much good stuff. There was a really wonderful Rothko painting; normally I’m not as big on Rothko as, er, sara… but this one had a wonderful ethereal translucency to it. Rather like San Francisco fog.

I learned that Roy Lichtenstein actually painted all those little dots by hand. Later in his career he started using pre-made dots, but he still stuck them on by hand, individually. The mind boggles. Suddenly I admire his work a hell of a lot more.

At this point I had started to realize that all the stereotypes about San Francisco are basically false. It isn’t full of overpaid yuppies—or at least, it’s no more full of overpaid yuppies than Boston or Cambridge. It isn’t full of hippies either. It isn’t very gay at all, unless you head down to Castro. It isn’t perpetually summer. It isn’t full of flakes and freaks.

I’m not sure what it is, even now; I just know what it isn’t. If I’d had expectations, I probably would have been very disappointed.

Tuesday we took BART out to Berkeley. It’s about as you’d expect… very like Cambridge, MA in fact. I noticed that the copies of Socialist Worker actually used the ‘S’ word; ‘round here they rename it Revolutionary Worker. I guess “Socialist” has all the marketing power of the “Fried” in KFC.

The temperature in Berkeley was about 6 degrees warmer than SF, and students were arriving and joining frats and going to sports events. We met up with someone I knew from IRC, and had some lunch. In the afternoon we browsed Moe’s Bookstore. I was pleased to see an extensive selection of titles by Philip K. Dick, one of UCB’s most famous dropouts; there were even some I didn’t have. I bought The Simulacra and The Game Players of Titan. After all, you can’t travel to San Francisco and not get any Dick…

Returning to SF, we actually saw the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, not shrouded completely in fog.

A man in Oxnard, CA has been arrested and faces felony charges of animal cruelty. He was found to have tortured and dissected his daughter’s pet guinea pig because he thought it was a robot with a hidden camera in the back of its head, and that had been placed in his home by government agents to spy on him.

This curious belief may be related to his being wigged out on methamphetamine at the time.

John Johnson has forwarded me a pointer to a Washington Post article on Philip K. Dick which explains why everyone—even people who don’t think of themselves as SF fans—should read his work.

I watched Impostor last night. It’s a pretty authentic adaptation of the Philip K. Dick story, right down to making the “bug” ships look and work the way Dick described them. Production values are high, with some impressive sets that almost rival GATTACA, and good attention to detail. The making-of documentary mentions that they tried to avoid using CGI, instead using real sets filled with real equipment and video screens. A wise decision, as the CGI establishing shots somehow don’t work.

The direction, sadly, falls victim to cliché. Too much running around in tunnels, too many air duct escapes, too many fast cuts with musical stabs trying to keep the tension high, too much slow motion combat. Since it’s a Dick story there are several plot twists, but sadly there’s only one that you might not see a mile off.

The movie started off as a 45 minute short feature, and ultimately it still plays like an extended high-budget episode of The Outer Limits. Most of the plot holes occur as a result of trying to stretch it out to 90 minutes.

Overall, a reasonable way to kill an hour or two if you’re an SF fan, but it’s no Minority Report.

Was supposed to be going out on a boat last night, but there were storm warnings so the skipper cancelled. Mark called, and I ended up meeting him and sara downtown and going to see Minority Report.

As a huge Philip K. Dick fan, I had to see it. I’d gathered that it was good from the reviews, but I wasn’t expecting too much. In the end, though, it’s probably one of the best movie adaptations of a Phil Dick story. It doesn’t remove most of the plot twists, like Total Recall. It doesn’t skip all the religious content, like Blade Runner. It doesn’t have an incredibly irritating opening sequence that gives away the plot, like Barjo. It’s not quite as true-to-Dick as Screamers, but it’s pretty close.

I’ve seen some people complain that the humor is out of place. Well, Phil Dick’s books often contain humor; in fact, Galactic Pot-Healer is more of a comedy than anything else. What was intrusive was some of the mawkish sentimentality; but I suppose a Spielberg movie without sentimentality would be like a David Lynch movie without long tracking shots.

Anyway… it’s worth seeing, in spite of at least one plot hole so gapingly huge you could drive a truck through it. It’s a rare movie that I can’t predict how it’s going to end at least half an hour from the final credits, so bravo to Spielberg for at least keeping me guessing longer than The Usual Suspects or Se7en.

After the movie, we went to Chinatown to find something to eat. Buddha’s Delight was closed, so Mark took us to a place he knew. sara and I couldn’t help but notice that we were the only caucasians in the restaurant, but once I’d noted the fact it ceased to bother me.

The T was packed with suburban sports fans on the way home. I really wish the politicians had called the Red Sox’ bluff and told them to go move to Rhode Island if they wanted a handout.

Another incredibly elaborate SF movie dream last night.

The premise: Three friends driving home late one night try to take a shortcut. They take a wrong turning and enter an unmarked tunnel. It seems to be unfinished construction work. They reason that it must come out somewhere, and decide to follow it. After a long while, they are surprised to find some kind of checkpoint, like the US-Canada border station, where they can park their car and enter… where?

Curious, they park and make their way in. They discover an entire underground city, apparently a completely separate civilization. Although the people speak English, they have their own currency, their own peculiar social and political conventions, and so on. These people apparently visit our world from time to time, but mostly live in theirs.

The three friends make their way in, and try to blend in and see what’s going on. They soon discover that while the place is mostly inhabited by humans, it is seemingly run by a race of humanoid, possibly alien, insects. The humans are fully aware of this and apparently comfortable with it; humans and insects work alongside each other in positions of authority, though it seems that the ultimate authority is always insect. Perhaps the aliens do a really good job?

Our friends separate, and one of them discovers that all is not as well as it initially appeared. Unknown to the human population and its insect rulers, a sub-species or cult of the insects is making plans to take over. The cultists are gradually replacing people with insect doppelganger, in the usual sci fi manner. The rest of the plot was interesting but convoluted, involving philosophical questions of whether a duplicate can be a close enough duplicate that it unintentionally begins to pick up the attitudes and values of the original. Rather Philip K. Dick, really, and a cut above the usual way this theme is treated.

Interestingly enough, I dreamed that I was watching all this in a multi-screen cinema. Supposedly the movie was directed by Douglas Trumbull, who was now working with synchronized multi-screen presentation… So there were parts of the movie where I could turn around and see what was happening in a different direction.

The attention to detail was amazing. All of the vehicles in the underground city had a slightly alien quality to them, the buildings were futuristic—even the houses—and there was a hexagonal, insectoid quality to the layout of the streets.

This is a scene a couple of blocks from where I live. The curvature of the pole isn’t just distortion from the cheap zoom lens; it really is leaning over slightly.

When I first moved to America, one of the things I noticed was the ugly cabling everywhere. Not just cables, either—big cylindrical metal transformers are stuck out in plain view on the tops of poles. I’m not alone in noticing this; friends who’ve visited from the UK have also taken pictures.

If you’re American, you might be wondering what the alternative is. Well, basically you bury the cables under the ground. Or failing that, you string up the cables, but you bury the ugly complicated transformers and cross-connections underground, or hide them away behind bushes.

Burying cables underground costs more, of course—or rather, it costs more initially. New England is known for wet snow and ice storms, which have a tendency to rip down overhead cables. I can’t help wondering how much money is spent fixing broken cables that wouldn’t have been damaged if they’d been routed underground. It wouldn’t be practical to dig cable tunnels across (say) Arizona, but you’d think they could manage it for a densely populated area like Boston.

What I particularly like about this example of American craftsmanship is the horizontal rectangular metal box just beneath the second-lowest cable on the right. You can’t see in the picture when it’s scaled to web size, but the only thing holding the box in place is that it’s lashed to the cable above it with some kind of insulating tape.

This pole is a metaphor for America. You don’t notice it initially, but once you’ve been here for a while you realize that the entire country is lashed together temporarily until something better comes along. As you travel west, it becomes more and more obvious.

In Seattle, I went on the Seattle Underground tour. No, it wasn’t a secret political movement; for those who don’t know the story, I’ll explain.

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