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BarnerCobblewood
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It's clearly a young PKD writing, but I thought that the idea that living beings were always superior to machines because they represent another magnitude of complexity of response was pretty ground breaking for 1953 pulp. If I remember correctly th…
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Reading this something was niggling me, and I realized that it was that PKD had also written a short story, Mr. Starship, about this theme in 1953 (disabled people being extended through being placed in a Spaceship, although the disability is brough…
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An American writer is against slavery, but not the slavery that shaped their country, another slavery that has never happened. People aspiring to become elite have all kinds of ways of neutralising community to justify themselves. What matters about…
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@RichardAbbott It might also be because the divisions of chapters is not the same as short stories. E.g. the Holmes novels vary the narrator in ways that the short stories do not.
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I think it would make a good game. However the themes don't speak to me where I am right now.
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I think it's like the Sherlock Holmes stories - they hang together because they are about Sherlock Holmes, although the narrator is a sidekick rather than an abstract representation of the principal. The romance frame-stories made me think of the Br…
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It worked fine. SF this is not.
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The book was nice, and easy to read, but like @clash_bowley I wouldn't go out of my way to read more. If I fell on it, I think it would be a good way to waste an afternoon. As I mentioned last week, I've taken up reading aloud (not this book), and …
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> @Apocryphal said: > Moby Dick, The Isle of Doctor Moreau, The Call of Cthulhu, Doctor No & Goldfinger, The Thing, Alien, > The Hound of the Baskervilles, It… all named after antagonists that are meant to be destroyed (or their power…
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OTOH, the book is named after the antagonist, whose only function is to be destroyed. Not many books are set up that way, e.g. it's a Holmes story, not a tale of Moriarty. That part of it made think of the Lord of the Rings, which I think is the One…
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(Quote) Yes, like a reader as the reader understands his / her self and other selves, which simultaneously unites and disrupts their relations, and is disruptive of "mechanical" control and order, which truly does fail when facing reality.…
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So I read the book aloud to someone who hadn't read it. We read a chapter a session. I thought the voices were interesting because they were all individuals, but in the same way. Van Helsing didn't bother me. I saw it much more a story about a comit…
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I'm not sure I accept that it was just a story of the 1890s that everyone would identify with. It's a story justifying those who aspire to be members of a ruling class. This market is much larger than the actual ruling class, and with the developmen…
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This is a pretty complicated question. I understood that Mina was our narrator, she compiles and arranges the text of the tale for us, like a mother does when telling children about some horrific event whose reasons and motives cannot be faced. Of c…
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As I said earlier, I'm not sure Dracula is meant to be scary. I think it is more about producing a reader who lacks the squeamishness which would prevent them from performing the vivesection etc. that is a necessary aspect of modern war.
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I don't really see it. Dracula strikes me as more of a Wagnerian tale suitable to reassure modern audiences that the eruptions of traditional society will be beaten back by the heroic modern individual. BS, but nevertheless popular.
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They didn't bother me. I saw the use of the religion of a locale as a weapon part of a typical move by an Empire to appropriate a local knowledge system against a people by showing that they did not have the power to use it. They are vulnerable and …
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I'm replying only to the part of the question about the book. I'm not sure that Dracula was meant to be "scary." Stories of aristocrats abusing common people are long standing, and provoke strong emotions. Dracula seems to me to be more a…
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> @NeilNjae said: > I don't think we should consider Ulysee a character in the traditional sense: he's a mobile viewpoint for the audience as we are shown the satirical world of Soror. Not sure what you mean by traditional sense. My point …
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I had a more negative view of the story: It was the point of view of someone who is always the smartest man in the room, and who is indispensable for others to be of quality. If people don't stick with Ulysses, they degenerate. Other people are just…
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@Apocryphal that's an interesting take. Still, Boule wrote a story that is about a human who can resist humanity's fate, not about an ape.
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Good point about the flashback, and the function of memory in general.
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No I didn't forget them. I figured that Boule just wanted to make a point that most readers assumed Jinn and Phylliss were human, and then immediately experience that that assumption might well be mistaken. You know, in case they missed the "sa…
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I think it uses recursion (the ape societies are a simpler repetition of human societies), but isn't a recursive story because that is only a device for the points the author wants to make, which are not about recursion as such, but about stripping …
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Interesting. I thought the film-makers wanted a more sympathetic protagonist, so they removed how the apes were just like humans, but wanted to critique the direction of society, so they put it on earth. Wanted to have their cake, and eat it too.
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Haven't read the Aldiss, but in brief, I don't find this genre mash-up analysis contributes much to understanding. Planet of the Apes is pulp. It needs to stand on its own there. I suppose part of my response is because I didn't find its ideas or wr…
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As a satire I found it pretty crude. I think part of the problem was that only the narrator maintains his intelligence, but why? For me that "heroic individual" aspect interfered with the social critique, and it was just another John Carte…
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In Tibetan texts meant to be memorized for recitation the sign xxx or xx often means continue with the same words as used earlier. This is one of the meanings of etc.,, so in that context the idea that is necessarily an invitation to creativity or e…
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@NeilNjae this is my point. They are an institutional group. The intentional lack of institutional structure, oversight, and accountability is precisely what allows such authoritarian behaviour. As I understand it, they had rules about what constitu…
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> @RichardAbbott said: > To me, one of the key points was that the judges - predominantly western - did not actually base their decisions on explicit and clear guidelines from the Chinese government or anyone else, but on their own presupposi…