A Week Of Compulsive Sci-Fi Book Hoarding at Thrift Stores and Library Sales = Giant Haul 

I'm holding it ransom for your copy of Paxwax

@@Bookpilled You want the Paxwax?

@@MediaDeathCult You know what he wants. . .

Hey, looks like I'm a 1%'er!

Thanks, glad you found me.

Man you guys don't even know, the late 80s-early 90's were grand times for bibliophiles

Stranger in a Strange Land was actually pretty funny. And the audiobook was really well done.

It drives me nuts. There's like ten total properties.

@@Bookpilled It's so weird because the law of averages says there should be so much more lol It's so disappointing and perplexing!

Nice find

Yeah I will definitely get to Neuromancer before I get to Stranger in a Strange Land. Foster's adaptation of "The Thing" is my number one holy grail thrift store dream find.

I think Gibson was hyped so much mainly because he seemed to signal a new direction in SF based on imaginative thinking about how the nascent internet/web could impact human culture/society and headspace. He was a good writer nevertheless but, of course, not exactly a prophet... Everything written about the future inevitably starts to feel odd, misguided and eventually quaint. Look at H.G. Wells' "The Shape of Things to Come" for example.

That book will be the first Heinlein book that I love

@@Bookpilled Dangler in a Strange Ham

Yep, I'm a sci-fi fan and there's a lot of sci-fi books I haven't read.

You might enjoy it more if you set aside your political prejudices and just read it as a (science) fiction novel. Must admit though, the cultist bits were a bit difficult...

@@douglasherron7534 look, this isn't about teams. I disagree with the worldview that Heinlein is portraying in Stranger. Beyond that I don't find much to enjoy in the book. I found every character insufferable. BUT my opinion doesn't affect your enjoyment. If you like it, fucking good for you

@@rateatwhichtimeflys Who's talking "teams", other than you? And why should my opinion - which is not entirely positive about the book - impact you to the degree that you have to start swearing?

@@douglasherron7534 lol. I know you didn't say anything about teams. I just meant that I didn't enjoy the book just because Heinlein was a libertarian. I didn't enjoy the book because of the worldview it portrays (which is ostensibly libertarian since it was a conscious libertarian project). And you're the one telling me to put aside my political beliefs. Science fiction has always been political btw

@@rateatwhichtimeflys Lol. I'm sorry mate, but I'm not American so most of what you just wrote went right over my head...! If you don't mind let me try and explain a bit more. Your first post seemed to suggest you were reading the book because it was written based on a particular world view, which did not align with your own, and therefore you had kind of predetermined that you wouldn't like it... right, or wrong? Not being American (or knowing anything about the author's political views) I just read it as a book. What I got out of it, prima facie, was that Heinlein must have done a serious amount of LSD and was probably into Free Love as it comes over as a huge hippy trip (with some cultist / Roman Catholicism thrown in for good measure). For example, the martians remind me of Dylan, a stoned rabbit with a guitar, from the UK children's TV programme called "The Magic Roundabout", while the higher levels of consciousness/ mind-bending abilities of the main character sound like the "expanded mind' of someone on an LSD bender.... However, thinking about it on a deeper level, and conscious of the title, it could also be an examination of how superficial most of our knowledge and interactions with others are. How well do we really know the people around us? Could life be better if we just got to know people on a deeper level? Does everyone who looks like us really understand or believe what we do? Or, potentially expanding it even further, is it not better to judge a person by their character/ actions as opposed to what they look like? But, like I said, I just read the book as a book - and some of it is freekin' weird!! A similar case could be made for Starship Troopers. I know it was banned in the US for years because it was supposedly "militaristic" but, again, just reading it as a book I didn't get that. Sure, I understand that one of the messages - and the only one people seem to pick up on - is Heinlein suggests that only people willing to serve should be eligible to vote. My question is, do people understand why he might have said that? Personally, I don't think they do. My understanding is the following: (1) Q: What is the purpose of a society? A: To allow people to collaborate effectively so they can be successful both individually and as a society. (2) Who is more likely to care about society at large (as opposed to themselves as individuals)? Is it the people willing to put their lives in danger for the good of that society or those who would rather stay at home to look after themselves? A: I'll leave that one up to you... Also, several of the military operations he describes are complete disasters. So, if you want to, you could actually read it as an anti-war novel - not militaristic. I guess what I'm saying is you can look at things in different ways depending on how you approach them. Even if I don't think I will like or agree with an author I'm willing to at least approach them with an open mind. Sometimes I learn things. At the end of the day, I read books for pleasure / interest nothing else. Have a good one! P.S. Most fiction has impossible people doing impossible things - that's why it's fiction (a bit like 99.9% of everything coming out of Hollywood, even the "based on true events" stuff)...