It’s incredibly dated at this point.
BlackKnight writes:
> Was Bucky Fuller, like, the Stephen Hawking of the 70’s?
Stephen Hawking was the Stephen Hawking of the 1970’s. He was already famous by that point, and I clearly remember talking about him with people at a party in the mid-1970’s. Buckminster Fuller’s height of popularity was in the 1960’s, as you can see from the fact that he appeared on the cover of Time in 1964.
Buckminster Fuller’s reputation was somewhat different from Stephen Hawking. The closest equivalent to Fuller I can think of is Marshall McLuhan. They were pretty smart thinkers whose ideas were way out there. While a lot of people thought of them as geniuses, a lot of other people thought that their ideas didn’t really hold together. They thought of them as thinkers who were great salesmen for their philosophies. Their ideas were often hard to tie down though, so it was hard to tell if they really made sense or not.
Stephen Hawking, on the other hand, is clearly a brilliant thinker. (Although, for what it’s worth, he’s not considered quite as great a physicist as you might think. Non-scientists are often given the idea that he’s one of the top ten physicists of all time. Some physicists say though that he’s not even one of the top ten physicists currently alive.) His ideas are clearly tied down though. There’s nothing deeply speculative about them. They may be difficult to understand, and they may turn out to be wrong, just as any other ideas might turn out to be wrong, but they’re well within the mainstream of science. Just as Hawking and McLuhan may get a little too much attention because they were great salesmen for their ideas, Hawking may get a little too much attention because he has a great life story.
Much like this thread, you might say.
Whoops! I saw this and thought, “who resurrected a zombie thread?” :smack:
Sorry. It came up in an irrelevant search, I opened it in a background window, then posted to it later, forgetting it was an old thread.
Where can I read more about this? I was first introduced to Stephen Hawking in middle school when they showed us a documentary (or just a news story?) about him titled, IIRC, “The Smartest Man Alive.”
I thought this thread looked familiar! Looking back at the OP… the book isn’t supposed to be “ha ha” funny. It’s not like Hitchhiker’s at all, really, much as I liked those books. One of the reviews in my edition of the trilogy calls it a shaggy dog joke, and that’s closer to the truth. It’s got a lot of straight-faced parody in creating a fake backstory for the Discordians (and I like the term “magical libertarianism,” FriarTed), abut unlike Hitchhiker’s, it doesn’t have a lot of laugh lines.
That said, it did change my life and these days I re-read sections of it regularly.
I think it’s obligatory that I make an appearance in this thread, don’t you? 
I thought the trilogy was fantastic. Sure the whole frenetic moving about of POV made it hard to follow and the hundred and one plots didn’t improve on this, but I thought it had some fantastic ideas and was a great ride all in all. Sure it’s very dated now, both in terms of the political backdrop and the philosophy it espouses, but I think it tells a good story. I say persevere.
“The Illuminati will have the American people under tighter surveillance than Hitler had the Germans. And the beauty of it is, the majority of the Americans will have been so frightened by Illuminati-backed terrorist incidents that they will beg to be controlled as a masochist begs for the whip.”
Screams “1975,” that.
Personally, I love all the paratextuality and pastiche.
BlackKnight I’m with you. Bored the piss out of me. I guess I shouldn’t be answering because I didn’t read the others - and you are asking if you should. IMO, why waste time when there are plenty of books you *will *probably like?
Thanks, though I should have spelled it “magickal”.
There’s no hardship finishing the illuminatus - they’re easy readers. Have to agree that they must appear very dated nowadays. I read them about 15 years ago and they were slightly stilted then. Now, post internet, when eveyone’s grandma knows about conspiracy theories, secret societies and uses the word apocryphal in daily conversation, they must be of historical interest only.
I was a bit confused about Buckminster Fuller when I read the trilogy, he was used as a touchstone of intellectualism in the books and I’d never heard of him.
THey wrote another book about James Joyce and ALbert Einstein as detectives that I thought was a bit better.
Better one zombie thread here than 5,000 Nazi zombie threads waiting at the bottom of a lake.
The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles are better. I only wish RAW had finished the series before he died.
Especially when one of those Nazis fantasises about eating dog shit with a silver spoon.
Shudders
Sure, you tell me that now …
I finished reading the books not too terribly long after this thread was originally posted. (I hate starting a book and not finishing.) There were a few parts I enjoyed, but largely I didn’t care for them. One thing I liked was the long list of odd band names. Not sure why, exactly, but I got a kick out of some of them, especially the Tolkien-related ones. I can’t say I really regret reading the books, but overall they were pretty “meh”.
Coincidentally, the book I’m currently reading is “Inside Secret Societies”. Odd that this thread would pop up at such a time …
I just finished reading it a couple of days ago and I was going to start a thread on here, but it looks like I won’t have to now.
To me, these books were a chore to finish. I have this mental thing where I can’t leave a series of books unfinished, if I start one book, I have to get through them all. Sometimes that’s great…and sometimes it’s not. This was one of the ‘not’ times.
Maybe if I was born during the counter-culture era, it would mean more to me. But, being a child of the 80’s, this book just zoomed over my head. I love conspiracies and books about them, but this series…gah…it was a mess.
I didn’t relate (or like) any of the characters. I loved the ideas about Atlantis and underground seas, but the flow of the story just put me off too much for me to enjoy it.
Every so often there is a squirrel in the book hanging out in a tree in a park. I was born in 1974 and must be considered a huge fan of the books.
. . . or is it . . .
(I know I’m responding to the zombie but)
This completely misses the point. (Episkopos hat on) Two plus three equals five. The law of fives states that all things happen in patterns of five, or are somehow related to the number five, given enough ingenuity on the part of the observer. That’s the important part. You will find what you look for. If you make a habit of looking for things to be happy about, you will find them. If you make a habit of looking for beauty, you will find it. etc. (episkopos hat off)
I have just given away the secret of several magickal orders and expect to be eaten in the public square by invisible dogs.
he he he He said Zombie Butt.
A lot of us at my college read them and were really into them. (Some more than others, of course.) One of the guys was collecting records (LPs or 45s) by all the bands mentioned in the books. He had attended a talk by RAW in which the latter said that he had collected the band names as a hobby when he was making a living reviewing music, and they were all real.
At one point, my acquaintance had several hundred of these records, and figured he was about half way through. Now I wonder if he ever finished.