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Author Topic:   10 Books To Save Humanity!!
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 5 of 100 (562334)
05-27-2010 9:47 PM
Reply to: Message 3 by Straggler
05-27-2010 8:22 PM


Re: My Own (Initial) List
I don't think you've thought this through.
Thwy can write their own novels and plays and poetry if they survive. They will have their own William Shakespeare.
The important thing is to make sure that they do in fact survive. So no art, just science.
I'm too lazy to think of a Top Ten right now, but the single most important thing I'd communicate to them would be the Germ Theory Of Disease. A lot of science is fun but useless. Who really needs Newton of Darwin or Einstein? And if they do, they can figure it out for themselves. But the fact that one should wash one's hands before performing surgery or delivering a baby would save untold millions of lives.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 3 by Straggler, posted 05-27-2010 8:22 PM Straggler has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 7 by Coyote, posted 05-27-2010 10:02 PM Dr Adequate has replied
 Message 14 by Straggler, posted 05-28-2010 7:16 AM Dr Adequate has replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 8 of 100 (562338)
05-27-2010 10:10 PM
Reply to: Message 7 by Coyote
05-27-2010 10:02 PM


Re: My Own (Initial) List
Perhaps Time Enough for Love, in the colonizing novelette?
A book the redeeming features of which only make it more infuriating.
Don't get me started, I just read Glory Road. Any book in which Heinlein mentions either sex or politics is crap. With the possible exception of Stranger In A Strange Land, the virtues of which just about manage to outweigh its deficits.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Replies to this message:
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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 11 of 100 (562342)
05-27-2010 10:35 PM
Reply to: Message 9 by subbie
05-27-2010 10:17 PM


Heinlein Diversion
Surely you can't include Starship Troopers in that blanket condemnation!
No, that's a good one.
Letme restate my position. Every book he wrote where some character bangs on for paragraph after paragraph about what Heinlein thinks about sex or politics or for that matter religion as an Author Avatar is crap.
Books like Starship Troopers or Stranger In A Strange Land or Job are OK-ish because although they may be expressions of Heinlein's philosophy they don't have the same old perennial infuriating Author Avatar in there constantly preaching at us as to what we should think. Time Enough For Love is the very worst thing that he ever wrote, or if he ever wrote anything worse I am grateful not to have read it ... oh, wait ... he did write a novel that was even worse than that, but I've forgotten the title. Oh ... two novels worse than that. One of them was called Friday. I can't remember what the absolute worst one was called.
It is infuriating to me that someone with his gifts as a storyteller should so have squandered his talent. If I could do what he could do, I'd have done something else.
My very favorite of his books is Double Star, that's just wonderful escapist science fiction. He should have written more like that and rammed his worldview up his ass where it belongs.
Anyway, back to the topic.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 50 of 100 (562630)
05-31-2010 3:38 PM
Reply to: Message 14 by Straggler
05-28-2010 7:16 AM


Re: My Own (Initial) List
Of course. But are you saying we haven't created anything worth saving?
Lots of things. But necessities come before luxuries, and ten books is a small limit.
I think you are missing the point (as much as there is one to this thread). They have engineers, medics, builders, electricians, nutritionists, agriculturalists etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. The colonizers are not neanderthals. They are all practically skilled and educated in their colonizing speciality to modern standards.
Well, if they're allowed to produce a compendium of their knowledge en route, then that would give us a little more latitude.
---
A history of the world would be useful. A good one. (If you open up the average history of the world halfway through, it'll be about something that happened in the Western world in the eighteenth century or later. This is a bad history of the world.)
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 55 of 100 (562711)
05-31-2010 11:56 PM
Reply to: Message 54 by ZenMonkey
05-31-2010 11:09 PM


Re: Much Closer
I felt compelled to include the Principia because not only are Newton's insights well beyond what 99.999% of us even can ever hope to experience, but how he put it together and presented it is a thing of beauty in itself. You can learn classical mechanics and physics from any old decently written textbook, but to see Newton's mind at work is staggering.
You speak as though you've read it.
I haven't read it, I admit, but I am told that he concealed his use of calculus to reach his results, by re-explaining the results he'd gotten through calculus in terms of Euclidian geometry. If this is true, then we are not seeing "Newton's insights" nor "Newton's mind at work".
I could have been misinformed --- as I say, I haven't read it.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 54 by ZenMonkey, posted 05-31-2010 11:09 PM ZenMonkey has replied

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 56 of 100 (562713)
06-01-2010 12:04 AM
Reply to: Message 51 by Straggler
05-31-2010 3:49 PM


Re: My Own (Initial) List
Let's, for the sake of argument, assume that everything that needs to be documented has been documented.
OK.
What aspects of non-vital human intellectual achievement are worthy of being saved at the expense of all else?
Ah, well, that's a different question.
One thing I would suggest that I don't think has been suggested yet is some book lavishly illustrated with photographs showing our achievements in the fine arts, the decorative arts, and architecture. They can't take the Taj Mahal with them, but they can go with photographs of it.
Also, how about musical scores? Is there any (non-practical) work of man that exceeds the Goldberg Variations? Let's send 'em off with the works of Bach.
---
P.S: Are we assuming that the colonists are going to be using English as a common language? Our answers would be rather different if they were all Chinese.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 58 of 100 (562716)
06-01-2010 12:27 AM
Reply to: Message 49 by Straggler
05-31-2010 3:19 PM


Re: Much Closer
My original intent was to try and establish what people considered to be the crowning intellectual achievements of the human race.
But perhaps that too is not your question, or we would include the Origin of Species, the Principia, Einstein's papers, Archimedes' On The Method, and so forth, as being among the most brilliant of human achievements.
It's not clear what we're trying to do here.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 65 of 100 (562794)
06-01-2010 8:01 PM
Reply to: Message 62 by Straggler
06-01-2010 12:46 PM


Re: Thanks for the laughs
Well you know what they say about atheists..........
What does eating babies have to do with the topic?
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 67 of 100 (562827)
06-02-2010 3:19 AM
Reply to: Message 66 by ZenMonkey
06-02-2010 12:46 AM


Re: My Own (Initial) List
I am now wondering how Dr A would enjoy reading Newton directly.
It's not clear how much I'd enjoy it, because I wouldn't do so in the first place.
The foundational documents of science are, in a sense, the least interesting, precisely because they are foundational. Darwin knew so much less about evolution than we do; Newton knew so much less about the calculus than we do. The reason that they are important in the history of science is that they took the seminal first step. Bully for them; but we want to know the latest thinking, not the first crude approach to the concept.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 83 of 100 (670996)
08-21-2012 1:22 PM


Bump
Bumpity-bump.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(2)
Message 88 of 100 (671170)
08-22-2012 6:40 PM
Reply to: Message 87 by Son Goku
08-22-2012 11:42 AM


Re: Gibbon
've read and been told by a few people that Dafydd ap Gwilym, a Welsh poet, was one of the best Medieval poets, but none of his poems work in translation (based on the strict Welsh bardic meter).
Either that or the Welsh are just bluffing. You'll never know, will you?

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 93 of 100 (671752)
08-30-2012 4:00 AM
Reply to: Message 89 by ringo
08-29-2012 3:38 PM


Fiction
Their list seems peculiarly weighted towards pre-twentieth century. Also even when they get the right authors, they get the wrong books.
Some of my favorite novels, in no particular order:
The Masters, C.P. Snow
Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Moominpapa at Sea, Tove Jansen
Sweet Dreams, Michael Frayn
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein
The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula LeGuin
Archer's Goon, Diana Wynn Jones
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Count Belisarius, Robert Graves
... OK, that's ten, so I'll stop, I'm sure I could easily think of ten more I like just as well. Let's see ... That Hideous Strength, Pale Fire, Northanger Abbey, The Great Gatsby, Lest Darkness Fall (yes, I know it's silly, I just like it) Catch-22, Pavane, A Landing on the Sun (yes, I really like Michael Frayn at his best, can I have The Tin Men as well?) I Never Promised You a Rosegarden (I always start crying at the definition of an equilateral triangle. Like clockwork.) The Once and Future King.
I could do that again, but I guess the point of the thread is to be selective, and already that's twenty just in the fiction section, so what am I doing?

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 100 of 100 (673243)
09-17-2012 12:13 PM
Reply to: Message 93 by Dr Adequate
08-30-2012 4:00 AM


Re: Fiction
Some notes:
The Masters. I think this is the world's most under-rated novel ... no-one seems to care about C.P. Snow any more, but you can stand this book right next to the best of Jane Austen without it suffering from the comparison.
His other books (that I've read) are not so good, though there's something to be said for The Search and The Affair, but on this one he was batting right at the top of his form.
Moominpapa at Sea? Really? Yes, really. A fine psychological novel about Moomins. Jansen really did understand what made people tick, and if she chose to put that depth of insight into children's books about Moomins, then that's how she rolled.
The Age of Innocence. It is interesting that Wharton wrote this, essentially, as satire. You were meant to think how stupidly her characters were behaving. But she was far too good a novelist to achieve what she was trying to do. Her hero is a sympathetic character, and she can't stop you from feeling that this is the case.
Because, after all, all (straight) novels are about characters constrained and conditioned by their environment and culture. That's actually where the plot comes from. It is hard for me, being human myself, to say: "But how stupid to be constrained and conditioned by that culture", when after all I am in the same position with respect to my own society. It may work as a satire on the society she's writing about, but it can never succeed as a satire on any of the people who inhabit it.
Archer's Goon. Another book for children. I just like Diana Wynn Jones, and there is no actual rule saying that I have to grow up.
Pale Fire. There is something about Nabakov that makes one want to use words like "virtuoso". This is one of the cleverest things ever written. Don't read the poem if you don't want to, I never have.

This message is a reply to:
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