I know, where do you think I saw them

Just finished JG Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition". It was more or less an assigned book, which usually are crap, but this one was pretty good. Very disturbing and confusing, but also very intruiging. Thumbs up!


So, anyone else got more book-ranting since last time this topic was active? I'm open for suggestions.

I haven't read much of anything lately besides a space opera. Got 'a scanner darkly' but haven't had a change to do anything with it yet. Currently working on a 3d rendering of Mars getting the shit blown out of it.

Last time i was in the library, i saw Salman Rushdi's "Duivelsverzen", forgot the english title, but the book was in english anyway. Was thinking of taking it with me but had plenty of other reading stuff. Anyone has an idea if this is an interesting book? Or is it really (too) deep into muslim stuff?

Only book i have here to read is "The Stand" from Stephen King. Dunno if you've read a lot of his work. "The dark tower" is for him what LOTR is for Tolkien, his earlier books have been revised and the new ones are coming out soon i believe. I've read the first one, twice btw, and it's promising.

English title is just about a direct translation , "The Satanic Verses". The book itself is good, but it's not very special, but that might just be me. It's about Islam stuff yeah. And the whole Fatwah-fuss was way out of proportion. There were some muslims who saw something he wrote as an insult to their faith, and declared him to be an anti-islamist. Then, the "fact" that he was anti-islam spread to the islamic world, and soon there existed this stigma, while there's like 3 ppl in the entire middle east who have actually read the book. Then, some high-placed religious leader, obviously also without reading the book (that seems to be a common trait of religious maniacs all around the world) decided that Rushdie should die for his attitude, hence the Fatwah.

I thought i'd give you the entire story, it's always good to have more evidence that in fact the majority of people aren't the sane ones, but that WE are.

I read the Stephen king trilogy or something with the "end of the world", with the good and bad cmaps, or something. Was 8 years ago or so, dfon't remember much.


Satis, let us know when you finished the Mars rendering. Mars sucks, it must die. And cool that you got a scanner darkly.

Well i'm just reading some very mushy girly type books at the moment... well they aren't THAT mushy, but all the same, I doubt you guys would want to read them
The authors name is Marian Keyes FYI

I think I've heard of the name, but other than that there ain't nothing popping up in my mind. Why would you describe it as girly-ish?

'ain't nothing'? Christ, aren't you studying English?

Kinda hehe


Apart from the fact that i suck horribly at English (reflected in my consistent use of a non-capitalized "i" ) i don't really care if i make mistakes or not on the internet. It's enough for me to know that i'm capable of writing very decent English, if i have too. Heck, i pwn quite a lot of native speakers. And English is my third language anyways so blah.

w00t, that sounded so arrogant, i rule!


P.S. i recently noticed, while i was watching a beavis&butthead re-run, that i seemd to have picked up a lot of b&b vocabulary... as there are: "that would rule", "that sucks", etc. I used to be a huge fan (well, used, rather like, AM) so i'm pretty sure that's where i picked it up...so much for me, the MTV generation. Does generation X like overlaps with the MTV generation? I think it does kinda, that would rule, it kicked so much more ass...*off in the distance ranting*

Uh.. huh huh... you suck!

*sigh*......those were the days...

Hehe..they sure were BJ

This is a piece of Philip Dick's introduction to The Golden Man. I liked it, a lot.




In reading the stories included in this volume, you should bear in mind that most were written when SF was so looked down upon that it virtually was not there, in the eyes of all America. This was not funny, the derision felt towards SF writers. It made our lives wretched. Even in Berkley--or especially in Berkley--people would say, "But are you publishing anything serious?" We made no money; few publishers published SF (Ace was the only regular book publisher of SF); and really cruel abuse was inflicted on us. To select SF writing as a career was an act of self-destruction; in fact, most writers, let alone other people, could not conceive of someone considering it. The only non-SF writer who ever treated me with courtesy was Herbert Gold, who I met at a literary party in San Francisco. He autographed a file card to me this way: "To a colleague, Philip K. Dick." I kept the card until the ink faded and was gone, and I still feel grateful to him for this charity. (Yes, that was what it was, then, to treat a SF writer with courtesy.) To get hold of a copy of my first published novel, SOLAR LOTTERY, I had to special order it from the City of Lights Bookshop in San Francisco, which specialized in the outré. So, in my head, I have to collate the experience in 1977 of the mayor of Metz shaking hands with me at the official city function, and the ordeal of the Fifties when Kleo and I lived on ninety-dollars-a-month, when we could not even pay the fine on an overdue library book, and when I wanted to read a magazine, I had to go to the library because I could not afford to buy it, when we were literally living on dog food. But I think you should know this--specifically, in case you are, say, in your twenties and rather poor and perhaps becoming filled with despair, whether you are a SF writer or not, whatever you want to make of your life. . . There can be a lot of fear, and often it is a justified fear. People do starve in America. My financial ordeal did not end in the Fifties; as late as the mid-Seventies I still could not pay my rent, nor afford to take Christopher to the doctor, nor own a car, nor have a phone. In the months that Christopher and his mother left me I earned nine dollars, and that was just three years ago. Only the kindness of my agent, Scott Merideth, in loaning me money when I got broke got me through. In 1971 I actually had to beg friends for food. Now look, I don't want sympathy; what I am trying to do is tell you that your crisis, your ordeal, assuming you have one, is not something that is going to be endless, and I want you to know that you will probably survive it through your courage and your wits and your sheer drive to live. I have seen uneducated street girls survive horrors that beggar description. I have seen the faces of men whose brains had been burned out by drugs, men who could not think enough to be able to realize what had happened to them; I watched their clumsy attempts to weather that which cannot be weathered. As in Heine's poem, "Atlas," this line: "I carry that which can't be carried." And the next line is, "And in my body my heart would like to break!" But this is not the sole constituent of life, and it is not the sole theme in fiction, mine or anyone else's, except for perhaps the nihilist French existentialists. Kabir, the sixteenth century Sufi poet, wrote, "If you have not lived through something, it is not true." So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.

If I had come forth with an analysis of the anger that lies within me, which expresses itself in so many sublimations, I would guess that probably what arouses my indignation is seeing the meaningless. That which is disorder, the face of entropy--there is no redemptive value of something that can't be understood, as far as I am concerned. My writing, in toto, is an attempt on my part to take my life and everything I've seen and done, and fashion it into a work that makes sense. I'm not sure I've been successful. First, I cannot falsify what I have seen. I see disorder and sorrow, and so I have to write about it; but I've seen bravery and humor, and so I put that in, too. But what does it all add up to? What is the vast overview which is going to impart sense into the entirety?

What helps for me--if help comes at all--is to find the mustard seed of funny at the core of the horrible and futile. I've been researching ponderous and solemn theological matters for five years now, for my novel-in-progress, and much of the Wisdom of the World has passed from the printed page and into my brain, there to be processed and secreted in the form of more words: words in, words out, and a brain in the middle wearily trying to determine the meaning of it all. Anyhow, the other night I started on the article of Indian Philosophy in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an eight-volume learned reference set which I esteem. The time was four a.m.; I was exhausted--I have been working endlessly like this on the novel, doing this kind of research. And there, and the heart of this solemn article, was this:

"The Buddhist idealists used various arguments to show that perception does not yield knowledge of external objects distinct from the percipient . . . The external world supposedly consists of a number of different objects, but they are known to be as different only because there are different sorts of experiences 'of' them. Yet, if the experiences are thus distinguishable, there is no need to hold the superfluous hypothesis of external objects . . . "

In other words, by applying Ockham's razor to the basic epistemological question of, "What is reality?" the Buddhist idealists reach the conclusion that belief in an external world is a "superfluous hypothesis"; i.e. it violates the Principle of Parsimony--which is the principle underlying all Western Science. Thus the external world is abolished, and we can go about more important business--what ever that might be.

That night I went to bed laughing. I laughed for an hour. I am still laughing. Push philosophy and theology to their ultimate (and Buddhist idealism probably is the ultimate of both) and what do you wind up with? Nothing. Nothing exists (they also proved that the self doesn't exist either). As I said earlier, there is only one way out: seeing it all as ultimately funny. Kabir, who I quoted, saw dancing and joy and love as ways out, too; and he wrote about the sound of "the anklets on the feet of an insect as it walks."

I would like to hear that sound; perhaps if I could, my anger and fear, and my high blood pressure, would go away

I have recently read some Iain Banks books. Quite disturbing sometimes, especially the Wasp Factory. I liked Complicity alot though. I recommend him.

Very nice books i can recommend: Otherland from Tad Williams (Anderland in Dutch), 4 volumes of which i`ve read the first 2 and just bought the last 2.

You could check his site if you want: http://www.tadwilliams.com/

Read the first three volumes, wasn't too impressed, but I want to read the fourth one too now, cuz I want the story to finish.
But I have no time, I also started in Ulysses by James Joyce last holiday, and that takes a lot of time, so I stopped reading that (and the book isn't one you can fall into easily after a year).