—“CURT NEEDS TO READ [INSERT NOVELS, ESSAYS HERE].”—
Sci Fi? I read Herbert (Both Dune, and the White Plague – which I bet you haven’t) and Heinlein, and Clarke, and Asimov, and Bova and Ellison, and Bear, Anderson, and Pohl, and NIven, and Lem and Crichton, and Lem, and Forward, and Weber, and Saberhagen, and Steakley, and le Guin and Moorcock, and Lieber, Ballard and del Ray, and Stephenson and Sterling and and Gibson and Dick, and the Anthologies, and subscribed to Galaxy, and Isaac Asimov’s Science FIction, and Creepy, Eerie, Epic, 1984, Heavy Metal Magazines, and everything in the Splatterpunk Movement, saw 2001, silent running, star wars, alien, aliens, blade runner and dune in the theaters on first run. And I played the (and wrote) the first generations of video console games, computer games, and had a Z80, a commodore 64/128, a tandy color computer (still my favorite), a heavy-to-carry compaq portable computer, an IBM PC (Original). I played Wizardry when it came out, the Bard’s Tale, Doom, Quake, Unreal, and Counter-Strike. I didn’t even touch Horror and Mystery, or Military FIction, or Spy novels in that list.
I also read pretty much everything in the top 100 books of literature, the majority of the Great Books Series, (in hardcover), every encyclopedia (Britannica is best), Roget’s thesaurus, multiple dictionaries, history, science, most everything ever written in and on artificial intelligence, software design, programming, and only began to look at philosophy through the philosophy of science (popper and kuhn) which led me to Hayek, and economics, and that combination was ‘the key’ to my understanding ‘what had gone wrong’ in intellectual history during the 20th century. I only read philosophy to falsify it.
My Recommended Reading List contains books and papers I have read. But only a FRACTION of them. Even today I sift through volumes of information (Mostly papers) and the odd book (almost all books in the sciences are as predictable now, as are books of fiction), as well as produce thousands of words of output myself. I process information.
Yeah. I’m THAT GUY with six books under his arm, reading at every possible moment, that thinks every other person is a fucking moron, and barely domesticated (dangerous) animal (zombie, or what we call an NPC now), and that teachers and professors largely fill the function of keeping them in a corral we call the class room, and few are worth the air they breathe. The difference is I was in fights on a regular basis, back when things were ‘what boys do’ – particularly in farm towns. I am, to my knowledge, other than what I learned in art theory, self educated – entirely. School, university, library, bookstore, and the internet are simply nice places to consume information without worrying about the peasantry doing something too stupid.
Unfortunately, the optimum means of protecting yourself from Zombies is to run a business, accumulate capital and revenue streams, and surround yourself with humans. This is the problem for my ‘kin’. They are not allowed to create voluntary disassociation to protect themselves from the zombies. and so unless they can earn enough money to do so they are exposed to the zombies and cannot create safe spaces we call ‘neighborhoods’ and ‘civil society’.