What are we Reading Now: Conan the Librarian

[Prospernia]

Reading a book about Gypsies; it turns out, they pretty much sprang up in Europe at the 15th-century.  They're considered refugees from the collapse of the feudal-system and their genetic make-up was not necessarily from Egypt or India, but most were European.

[elf25s]

Reading a book about Gypsies; it turns out, they pretty much sprang up in Europe at the 15th-century.  They're considered refugees from the collapse of the feudal-system and their genetic make-up was not necessarily from Egypt or India, but most were European.

actually they are descendants of groups that ghenghis khan  displaced when he started his empire a lot of them initially came from central asia and their lines got pretty diluted by the time they reached europe around late 13th century

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

And they mixed with local European populations off and on throughout the centuries.

[Zematus737]

actually they are descendants of groups that ghenghis khan  displaced when he started his empire a lot of them initially came from central asia and their lines got pretty diluted by the time they reached europe around late 13th century

I have read that the Khans were actually descended from Scythian lords who were the originators of the feudal system.  It was the Persians who borrowed this to form satrapies.  And that the Persians themselves were considered to have homogenized to these systems being that they were neighbors and RELATIVES of the Scythian royal Aryan bloodlines.  See Beckwith's, The Scythian Empire.

[Prospernia]

actually they are descendants of groups that ghenghis khan  displaced when he started his empire a lot of them initially came from central asia and their lines got pretty diluted by the time they reached europe around late 13th century

More likely, a group was, and another was from India, etc.  People in Medieval-times tended to lump groups together; if you were an outsider, no matter where you were from, you're a Gypsy.  Like, if you were sick, you were a Leper, regardless if you actually had leporsy or not.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

More likely, a group was, and another was from India, etc.  People in Medieval-times tended to lump groups together; if you were an outsider, no matter where you were from, you're a Gypsy.

Actually, the people made a fairly homogeneous cultural group as they spread around Europe, keeping similar customs even among the ones who migrated all the way to Ireland and Wales as well as keeping their own language.

[Prospernia]

Actually, the people made a fairly homogeneous cultural group as they spread around Europe, keeping similar customs even among the ones who migrated all the way to Ireland and Wales as well as keeping their own language.

Given the intense-persecutions in the 16th and 17th, centuries, that group may have been the only ones that survived.

[Top Sergeant]

Mortar Gunner on the Eastern Front

I am enjoying the view from a that of a Private rather than a General, politician or historian.

[ISD]

Still iterating through the first humble bundle of epubs, from Thunder Rift to Endgame, I'm now wrapping up Stackpole's Twilight of the Clans pt. 2 "Grave Covenant" which might be the one with smallest amount of 'Mech action so far :thinking:

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

It and Prince of Havoc were both pretty bad in that regard.

[S2pidiT]

Read Jaguar's Leap from the new BT bundle, and now back to the old with Threads of Ambition.

[Triptych]

I've been on a PKD binge these past few months:

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick (1977) I finally managed to snag a new print edition of this book, and it's typical PKD at his best and worst: a tremendous goldmine of ideas, yet almost undone by opaque writing. It's set in the near future when America lost the drug war. Bob Arctor is a narc whos tasked with finding the supplier of a new drug called Substance D, a powerful opiate that can split the mind in half and destroy it. Arctor is an unreliable narrator because he becomes addicted to the drug, and he ends up becoming two people: one being a leader of a small group of junkies whos paranoid about police being out to get him, and another being a narc who spies on his other self.

The book is partly autobiographical since PKD opened his house to a group of junkies and stopped writing for a few years after his first divorce when his wife left him. The writing is also dense and stilted, and I had to reread a number of passages in order to fully grasp what was going on. Nevertheless, its a mindbender of a novel, and was even made into a movie starring Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr. Rating 8/10

The Penultimate Truth by Philip K Dick. I think my bookstore has me figured out. They know I buy a PKD book all the time, so they always stock another one that I havent read yet, and so I end up buying it. Damn them!

This one is a post apocalyptic tale about a group of people whove been living underground in a fallout community shelter for over a decade, building robots to send out onto the surface to keep fighting WW3, but... things might not be what they seem. If this sounds like the plot for a ton of Hollywood movies and TV shows like Fallout and Silo, thats because it is... only PKD did it first!

The first chapter, in which someone is dictating words to an AI computer thats eerily reminiscent of ChatGPT blew my mind away. To think that PKD thought this up back in the early 1960s is just mind-boggling. Sadly though, it kinda goes downhill after that. In the end, its not his best book and the stodgy writing once again makes it a tough slog, but I think its still worth anyones time purely because of the awesome ideas he thought of well before everyone else copied them into cliches. Rating 7/10

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick- The one time I read this was when I was 12, and had discovered my uncle's stash of sci-fi books at grandma's house. I was a huge fan of Bladerunner, and I expected the book to be the same thing. Boy I was wrong.

Reading it again after all these years, I think I can understand it better now. The movie only touches on the events happening in the book, and makes it sort of like a noir detective thriller. But the book itself is far, far more. There's just so many things happening. Yes, the protagonist is a bounty hunter who hunts androids, but thats where the similarities with the movies end.

PKD's world building is phenomenal. There's empathy devices that can change someone's mood at the touch of a button, there's a new age religion called Mercerism that one can experience a Jesus-like messiah via virtual reality, and most of all, real animals have become status symbols, because almost all species went extinct due to a nuclear war, so almost everyone's pet has been supplanted with fake ones: hence the book's title.

It's all about what is real and what is fake. The protagonist kills fake things, but things are not like what they seem anymore. If you havent read it yet, and are a sci-fi fan, youve got to read it. Trust me, its that good. Rating 9/10

[Zematus737]

I've been on a PKD binge these past few months:

The book store will never carry his Exegesis, while some of his lesser known works like the tripple stigmata of palmer eldritch or Valis will be harder to come by.  Try your county library and save a buck.  When my family grew more accustomed to using the request features and how accessible the online library sites are, it becomes very easy to get a book from a neighboring stock brought in.  To say nothing of the amount of money you save if your children are also devouring books.

As much as I loved PKD as a teenager and in my early 20's, he did a lot of harm to the Science Fiction community with an elitist type mindset for American authors in creating a group mind that should or shouldn't approve who is acknowledged or not by "the best" in the genre.  And that goes a long way for a person who is just plainly an author and story weaver.  He's a product of his time with space flight and "martian canals" being discovered and the heavy psychotropic scene exploding.  In the end, he was never honest with the vision he was given and this caused as much consternation in him personally that he became a facsimile of many of his protagonists.  He was very much like HG Wells.

I'm stuck myself on Warhammer fiction, wishing that the library here had them in stock.  Halfway through the Horus Heresy series and impressed by the level of quality fiction found in these books.  Certainly a step up from where the fiction in this universe started.

Books I myself killed lately: Secret Societies: A Discussion of their character and claims, by Edward Beecher; The Atonement of Fire, by David Annandale; Perturabo: Hammer of Olympia, by Guy Haley; Ghost of Nuceria, by Ian St. Martin; Utopia, by St. Thomas More; Aesop's Fables (was reading two fables to my children 3-4 days a week); Chronicles of the Future Paul A Dienach; Valedor, by Guy Haley; All That Remains, James Swallow; Aurelian, Aaron Dembski-Bowden (one of my favorite 40k authors, right behind Dan Abnett); Dark Vengeance Collection, by CZ Dunn (if you want a flavor of what I felt 40k was before it became great); Valdor: Birth of the Imperium, by Chris Wraight (not a bad place to start for foundational background for the Horus Heresy series); Blades of the Traitor, Various. 

Working on The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer and Pope Francis' 2013 apostolic exhortation evangelii gaudium.  Talk about two contrasting works!  Oh boy.  I'm finding it impossible to read them together.

[Prospernia]

I live in the same neighborhood PKD lived in; his condo is a block away.  The post-office he used is still here but the Trader-Joe's is a Mexican-market now. (I used to go to that TJs with my grandma when I was a kid).

[Triptych]

The book store will never carry his Exegesis, while some of his lesser known works like the tripple stigmata of palmer eldritch or Valis will be harder to come by.  Try your county library and save a buck.  When my family grew more accustomed to using the request features and how accessible the online library sites are, it becomes very easy to get a book from a neighboring stock brought in.  To say nothing of the amount of money you save if your children are also devouring books.

I live full time overseas as an expat, and books are an easy, minimal expense.

As much as I loved PKD as a teenager and in my early 20's, he did a lot of harm to the Science Fiction community with an elitist type mindset for American authors in creating a group mind that should or shouldn't approve who is acknowledged or not by "the best" in the genre.  And that goes a long way for a person who is just plainly an author and story weaver.  He's a product of his time with space flight and "martian canals" being discovered and the heavy psychotropic scene exploding.  In the end, he was never honest with the vision he was given and this caused as much consternation in him personally that he became a facsimile of many of his protagonists.  He was very much like HG Wells.

I disagree. PKD wasnt a planned futurist like Wells was. The former had mental issues (no doubt exacerbated by his drug taking), and he wrote about his fears and paranoia. Its somewhat coincidental that his anxieties with technology, and the stuff he wrote about them has actually come true, much like George Orwell and his warnings of an all-powerful surveillance state in 1984 also became real.

[Zematus737]

A excerpt from his Exegesis: 'My novels, for example. They are said by readers to depict the same world again and again, a recognizable world. Where is that world? In my head? Is it what I see in my own life and inadvertently transfer into my novels and to the reader? At least I’m consistent, since it is all one novel. I have my own special world. I guess they are in my head, in which case they are a good clue to my identity and to what is happening inside me: they are brain prints. This brings me to my frightening premise. I seem to be living in my own novels more and more. I can’t figure out why. Am I losing touch with reality?'

These are his own words.  As for being a futurist, the book is not so much about apprehension of the future as it is about struggling to interpret an abnormal experience that revealed to him the health condition of his daughter through a vision.  Like HG Wells, Dick was also militantly atheist and mocked religion in many of his works.  In this, and in my opinion, they are the same.  Except that it is worse for Dick, as he had an authentic experience that he did his best to say was a localized unconscious self inflection of presentiment or inspiration.  Rather than just accept the gift for what it was, he did his utter most to write what is possibly his largest labor, to disavow that it could have been received from a higher, separate, intellect.  As separate as God can be from the work of His hands is another matter for discussion entirely.  Carl Jung (if you read his Red Book, the translations of which have made an enormous impact on the world) made the same mistakes and attributed inspiration to a universal shared unconsciousness.  It was a cheap move and it was very sad to see how he misinterpreted almost every "dream" he had experienced.  Just as sad that he (Jung) did not have the guts to admit he was experimenting himself with psychedelics to achieve these altered states.

[Triptych]

Claiming that both Wells and PKD are the same because they're both atheists (PKD was more of an agnostic) is just silly, and I'll leave it at that.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Religious discussions are one of the fastest ways to get moderators swarming on a thread.  So let's not.

[Zematus737]

Religious discussions are one of the fastest ways to get moderators swarming on a thread.  So let's not.

Wilco.  I wouldn't want to derail a thread that has been a pleasure to keep up with. 

Anyone can continue the discussion on just how much literature has had on the post industrial/printing press world with me in private if they so wish.  PKD was a talented writer but philosophers and sophists, from Spinoza to Dawkins, have had so much of an impact on the hard sciences that you could really have a long discussion about --and turn the argument around to say that-- how it has actually stunted ethical technological advancement. This is why you see works being conceived around this time with works like Mary Shelly's, Frankenstein and Thea von Harbour's, Metropolis are given birth.  Ideas arising from dire portents also, you could say. 

But I concur.  As interesting as it is, and beyond the simplistic, ..because they were atheist! argument, this is not the place for it.

[Liam's Ghost]

Just finished reading "A City on Mars" by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Subtitle: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?"

Great for if you want to take your most idealistic dreams of near-term space settlement and throw a huge bucket of cold water on them. (also if you want an overview of the real challenges currently facing space settlement)