Comments by "Theodore Shulman" (@ColonelFredPuntridge) on "Jared Henderson" channel.

  1. Don’t overlook Lem’s novel FIASCO. It’s about first contact-with a planet whose inhabitants are so hostile to each other that the protagonists cannot get any reliable info about any of them.
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  2. FIASCO is another great novel by Stanislaw Lem.
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  3.  @mariag.8242  My sentiments exactly. I never understood why he appealed so much to so many readers.
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  4. Yup, that's a nice summary. Also: Ursula LeGuin is fundamentally good, a good person, while Heinlein is an arrogant prick and not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.
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  5.  @DrEmerson84  That would surprise me very much, if it were true! Have you read him? Lem, I mean. His tone remains consistent, not shifting like you'd expect from a committee with different writers working on different bits of a book. His characters, too - except for natural growth-of-character, they don't change suddenly or abruptly or without reason. And his central themes are often subversive, about institutional failure and absurd misfortunes, not what you'd expect from a Stalinist committee which is blunt-edged heroes dedicated to a central authority. Also, his work is not formulaic as committee-written communist stuff often was. There are almost never trumpets of triumph, and on the relatively few occasions when things turn out well, it almost always turns out to be because of some lucky circumstance, not because of the protagonists' ingenuity.
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  6. The two most important philosophy books of the Twentieth Century being Being and Time by Heidegger and Being and Nothingness by Sartre, it's obvious that the first really important philosophy book of the Twenty-First Century will be called Nothingness and Time.
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  7. Robert Heinlein has been described as "the Norman Mailer of sci-fi."
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  8. For philosophical sci-fi, you can’t beat FLATLAND.
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  9. Perelandra is so great, so beautiful. It actually motivated me to start learning Paradise Lost, which is the most majestic and creepy poem I’ve ever seen
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  10. FLATLAND by Edwin Abbott.
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  11.  @commentarytalk1446  Heinlein made me sick when I read him 40 years ago. I suppose I might like him better now, but I don't think it's likely.
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  12.  @commentarytalk1446  I tried to get into Heinlein several times with weeks apart. I read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Stranger in a Strange Land. And something with this annoying character Lazarus Long, who is immortal but doesn't like being immortal, finds it burdensome. (The idea was good - a lot of Heinlein's ideas are good - but the realization was insufferable - as a lot of his realizations seem to be.) Some years later, when I first learned The Ring of the Nibelung, I realized who it was that Wotan reminded me of so much: Lazarus Long. And it wasn't just because you need to live several lifetimes to get through the Ring cycle, although you do need several lifetimes to understand all the ideas in it. So I tried to write a spoof about a character named Lazarus Longwinded, but I got bored and gave up. This was back in the 1980s, when the original British radio-broadcasts "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" were first airing in USA. I was hanging out with a lot of MIT students, smoking lots of weed, and teaching symbolic logic and Recursive Function Theory to high school students in the Greater Boston Area.
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  13. Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik by Gottlob Frege
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  14. CELESTIAL MATTERS by Richard Garfinkle
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  15. Imagine if Crime and Punishment were rewritten as a short, fast-moving comedy-and-caper-story about a poor, streetwise, recklessly-heroic French kid who inherits a huge amount of money, and, a gang of con-men posing as priests, raising money from naive wealthy Catholics by telling them that the Pope has been abducted by Freemasons and replaced by a false Pope controlled by the Freemasons' Lodge, and they (the con-men posing as priests) need the money to bribe his captors and rescue him. Imagine if this book were short enough to read in one or two days (depending on what else you have on your plate to do during the day). Sound good? That book is Andre Gide's Les Caves du Vatican which is sold in English translation as The Vatican Cellars and also under the title Lafcadio's Adventures. (Andre Gide later won a Nobel prize, for a different work.)
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  16.  @ElonMuskrat-my8jy But a great writer, even so.
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  17.  @DrEmerson84  Maybe start with THE STAR DIARIES? (I particularly like "The Seventh Voyage".) or TALES OF PIRX THE PILOT? or FIASCO, if you prefer a novel.
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  18. The Earthsea trilogy is exceptionally good. CITY OF ILLUSIONS also.
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