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I actually tend to agree with this review - the record-player analogy for incompleteness is particularly bad. But what you have here is a young man high on his

I actually tend to agree with this review - the record-player analogy for incompleteness is particularly bad. But what you have here is a young man high on his intellectual gifts playing in beautiful abstract worlds, imperfectly, sometimes pointlessly. It's that intellectual playfulness that makes this book special, since books are usually either intellectual or playful but rarely both. Not to change the subject, but Frank Herbert's work has a similarly undeserved reputation for depth, IMHO. The Dune series wants to be about so many interesting, connected things: consciousness, religion, ecology, psychology, politics and speculates about (non-scientific) connections between mind and matter. Herbert had the good taste to not describe every detail about the world, but all of his considerable artifice is a very thin veneer on what is ultimately a juvenile power fantasy. There is really nothing there, philosophically speaking, even though, to my young teenage self, it really felt like there was.

nwah1 8y ago
Can you give an example of fiction in which there is "something there"?
- javajosh 8y ago
  Yes, I can. Actually Herbert himself did have a good (taboo) thought in Dune with his Golden Path idea, that to save humanity it must endure a tyrant for thousands of years. Asimov's Foundation series had a lot to say about the natural ebb and flow of civilization on a long time scale, a very Buddhist view. He also had a lot to say about the nature of general AI, and the relationship to such beings with humans, in his Robot novels (I'm most familiar with the Daniel R Olivaw novels, e.g. Caves of Steel). Of course, when it comes to society, politics, and technology, Neal Stephenson, in both Snowcrash and The Diamond Age, has a lot of great philosophical ideas. Like a good author he shows, and doesn't tell us about his ideas. The character Raven in Snowcrash, for example, expresses the now pretty common understanding that individuals, armed with technology, can challenge states (e.g. bin Laden). There are lots and lots of other authors and ideas.

nwah1 8y ago

Can you give an example of fiction in which there is "something there"?

javajosh 8y ago
Yes, I can. Actually Herbert himself did have a good (taboo) thought in Dune with his Golden Path idea, that to save humanity it must endure a tyrant for thousands of years. Asimov's Foundation series had a lot to say about the natural ebb and flow of civilization on a long time scale, a very Buddhist view. He also had a lot to say about the nature of general AI, and the relationship to such beings with humans, in his Robot novels (I'm most familiar with the Daniel R Olivaw novels, e.g. Caves of Steel). Of course, when it comes to society, politics, and technology, Neal Stephenson, in both Snowcrash and The Diamond Age, has a lot of great philosophical ideas. Like a good author he shows, and doesn't tell us about his ideas. The character Raven in Snowcrash, for example, expresses the now pretty common understanding that individuals, armed with technology, can challenge states (e.g. bin Laden). There are lots and lots of other authors and ideas.