5 ms·

Disclaimer: I haven't read the book. I think it's also the era it came from. When it was created, it's ideas were not that wide spread and we didn't have the i

by novok 7y ago

Disclaimer: I haven't read the book. I think it's also the era it came from. When it was created, it's ideas were not that wide spread and we didn't have the internet, so it was more profound. It's kind of like the matrix and bullet time. If you never saw the matrix and was born after it was made, bullet time might look like a cliche, even though it invented it. When I first saw it, I thought it was fucking bad ass because there was never anything like it. Also there a books out there that are good for beginners, but if your are more well versed in a field, you wouldn't find it that compelling. The beginners books although, are often necessary to get past emotional barriers to an issue.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Your point of watershed books and ideas, particularly ones which more-or-less created the world which came after them, seeming trite in retrospect, can't be emphasized enough. There are landmark moments (Einstein, Darwin, Newton, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the invention of blue jeans) which ... are largely just obvious in retrospect, but because they've defined the very frames through which we understand the world. I'm not quite going to claim that ZAMM was all that, though I would argue that it was part of a revolution that could probably be scoped to include the period from the start of WWII to the first oil shocks of the 1970s, that created a world markedly different from that which came before. Put another way, 1938 is probably closer to 1857 than it is to 2019, culturally, socially, intellectually, and philosophically, despite both spans being 81 years. A dictionary definition of the word "pollution" in the 1930s would still have listed the original meaning -- referencing masturbation and of spilling seed on the ground (no, really: https://www.etymonline.com/word/pollution https://www.etymonline.com/word/pollution). The sense of "contamination of the environment" wasn't common until the mid-1950s. Today that's the principle association. Books like Silent Spring had a tremendous impact, and it's hard to see them now as they were when published (1962). ZAMM happened to hit and shape the Zeitgeist of the 1970s in ways that are hard to appreciate now.

by novok 7y ago

dredmorbius 7y ago

Your point of watershed books and ideas, particularly ones which more-or-less created the world which came after them, seeming trite in retrospect, can't be emphasized enough. There are landmark moments (Einstein, Darwin, Newton, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the invention of blue jeans) which ... are largely just obvious in retrospect, but because they've defined the very frames through which we understand the world. I'm not quite going to claim that ZAMM was all that, though I would argue that it was part of a revolution that could probably be scoped to include the period from the start of WWII to the first oil shocks of the 1970s, that created a world markedly different from that which came before. Put another way, 1938 is probably closer to 1857 than it is to 2019, culturally, socially, intellectually, and philosophically, despite both spans being 81 years. A dictionary definition of the word "pollution" in the 1930s would still have listed the original meaning -- referencing masturbation and of spilling seed on the ground (no, really: https://www.etymonline.com/word/pollution https://www.etymonline.com/word/pollution). The sense of "contamination of the environment" wasn't common until the mid-1950s. Today that's the principle association. Books like Silent Spring had a tremendous impact, and it's hard to see them now as they were when published (1962). ZAMM happened to hit and shape the Zeitgeist of the 1970s in ways that are hard to appreciate now.