Journal mcgrew's Journal: .Greatest Geek Books of All Time? 11
Wired ran a story about what they considered the greatest all-time geek books. Apparently they got it completely wrong; I've suspected for years that Wired was run by nerd wannabes. There are only two books on their list I've read, and two more I plan to read, and one I might read, except that a few slashdotters said it sucked (but many loved).
Attention, Wired -- not all of us give two shits about D&D. To have a D&D book as your VERY FIRST CHOICE shows. It shows a lot.
It shows Wired is run by twentysomething nerd wannabes.
Today they had a list of what readers pegged as the best geek books, and IMO the readers got it exactly right. I've read every one, some of them many times. The first book in the list is Heinlien's Stranger in a strange land (I haven't read that one in a quarter of a century, I should see if I still have a copy and read it again). For Wired to not have had this book in their own list was inexcusable. Also inexcusable is 1984's not being on the list, which was #2 in the reader poll.
I was kind of flummoxed, though, by #5, Asimov's I, Robot. Now, I've always been an Asimov fan, and that book was one of my favorites. There's a forty five year old paperback of it on my bookshelf that I just re-read last year. But it's out of print, superseded by The Complete Robot, which contains both I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots (I've lost my copy of that one).
Even stranger was the picture of the book, a still from the movie. Yeah, I have a copy of the movie, too. It was horribly panned by geeks when it came out to the point that I didn't see it until it had been out a few years and I saw it at WalMart for five bucks. And in my view, it was a pretty damned good movie. No, it didn't follow the book(s) at all, having Alfred Lanning* commit suicide and having Susan Calvin as a hottie, rather than a plain jane. But how many movies are faithful to the books they're from? Not many. Look at both versions of True Grit. All the dialog in both movies (almost all of it) comes straight from the book, but they are almost two completely different movies, neither one more faithful than the other but both more faithful than most. (WTF happened to Tom Bombadil in LOTR?)
Being the huge Asimov fan I am (I've probably read 2/3s of his 500+ books) I've seen a few other Asimov titles on the screen, and without exception all were terrible. Nightfall especially. I never thought I'd ever turn off one of my favorite stories in the middle, but gees the acting and directing and screenplay were abysmal. I, Robot and Bicentennial Man were the only two shows that came from Asimov books that I actually liked.
Look how faithful (not) Blade Runner and Dune were. BTW, both those books are on the reader's poll list, shame on Wired for not putting them in the original list.
Nerd wannabes. When I was cheating in math class with my slide rule I never thought I'd see the day that there would ever be such a thing as a nerd wannabe. Back then, anyone seen carrying a book (and I usually had an armload of them), especially if he (it was never a she) was wearing thick glasses, was ostracized, bullied, ignored. At least, unless you beat the shit out of a notorious bully and did outrageous things like invent doofus detectors and science experiments that almost get you expelled.
Weird. Actually, that's the book I'm reading now, WIERD -- Because Normal Isn't Working. Decidedly NOT a nerd book; we're already wierd. But it's fairly entertaining anyway.
The last SF book I read I thought I'd love; Frederick Pohl's latest All the Lives He Led. But I didn't. I only read half, and took it back to the library, really disappointed and bored out of my mind. There was no humor that I saw, very little drama, almost no suspense, and worse it looks like he regressed to his youthful days when he wrote for the pulp SF magazines and was paid by the word, so the more words he crammed in, the more he got paid. It was kind of like The Paxil Diaries on quaaludes, except it was set in an apocalyptic future where the megavolcano at Yellowstone had erupted. And unlike the diaries, with each meaningless chapter a story in itself, his book just droned on and on.
What would you say is the all time greatest nerd book? I'd pick any of the nine the readers picked. Except I'd make it The Complete Robot rather than I, Robot; I, Robot is really half a book, just like Foundation and The Fellowship of the Ring are each 1/3 of a book.
* have you noticed how many good SF flicks this guy is in? Two Star Trek movies (and he played Zefram Cochrane), an Arnold movie (Eraser)... and if you haven't seen Surrogates, you should. It's a great, action SF Bruce Willis movie about robots. Warning -- the linked wiki article contains a lot of factual errors, so don't take too much stock in it.
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Very much disagreed (Score:2)
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Both lists are good, and the first list certainly isn't "nerd wannabe" stuff. The problem is that, like any other people, geeks/nerds/whatever label we're using today have a diverse range of interests. Things that are of vital importance to one person won't matter two bits to another (to pick an example from the readers' list, I adore Asimov but didn't care that much for Dune). I think this just represents the normal, expected impossibility of making a list that pleases everyone... not that the editors don't know up from down.
Yeah, no kidding. I'm a "geek" but reading is one of the most annoying things I have to tolerate.
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You find reading annoying? Wow, it's probably my second favorite pastime. I love learning, and reading is the easiest way to assimilate information. Hell, I read the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 26 volumes cover to cover when I was 12. I'll digest a 150 page book in a couple of hours if it's well written.
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Oh my gosh, yes. It's just "too slow."
I don't know how to word that better. My brain follows logic trees. Trying to stay focused on something I'm reading without wanting to delve more deeply into things mentioned in the readings is just impossible. I can talk with people very well and communicate quickly. Just can't stay focused on one thing, I suppose. :)
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Maybe my age is a factor here -- there was no such thing as D&D when I was in high school, and I never knew enough nerds to have a use for learning it (we were rather scarce back then). I was out of the USAF and in college before I met many fellow nerds, and D&D must not have been very popular in nerd circles before the '90s, because that's the first I'd heard of it, except news reports about teenagers (not nerd teens) being corrupted by it. I started college a year after D&D was first published
Both lists were decent (Score:2)
The first list was spot on apart from the inclusion of the D&D manual, and the two other books nobody's heard of that scream "GEEK WANNABE." Anyone who enjoys reading a D&D manual just for the hell of it almost certainly has Asperger's.
I'm glad someone else out there liked the Bicentennial Man movie. That one is greatly underrated IMO. I, Robot on the other hand, was just OK to me even if you accept that it has little to do with the book, I might have been able to like it if not for all the heavy in
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Most of the people at Wired - no, most journalists who cover geek culture, aren't really geeks, they're gadget freaks or sci-fi fans at most, the geek persona is just a character they play as part of their job, the woman who used to cover the sex section at Wired being a prime example. She was almost self-parodying at the climax of her career around the time of her infamous "virtual rape" article.
I agree whole-heartedly. Like most other things in the "news" or "paper media", there is a very large lack of reality. Apparently there isn't enough broad spectrum reader interest when true geeks (or experts) write on subject matter.
Conversely, you can write very nice, completely single-topic 'geekified' material, but there's no salable market for it. Lose, lose.
The Original DMG is a little odd (Score:2)
of a choice, but I have read it, but probably not in order. It's a game reference book. I read all but two on the editor list (Tufte and Gibson) and all the ones on the reader's list. I liked "Stranger", but for my money, I prefer "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" as my Heinlein pick.
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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a great one, I need to dig that one out, too.
8 for 9 (Score:2)
I was 8 for 9 in both lists. The only ones I haven't read were Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and GÃdel, Escher, Bach.
I started playing AD&D back in 1979, and continued for over a decade. For literature, I was weaned on Asimov, Heinlein, Clark and all the classic SciFi authors. I also read the first hundred or so Doc Savage novels, along with damn near anything else I could get my hands on. Everything from The Hardy Boys to Alan Dean Foster's Flinx and the Commonwealth series. I went thru both
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Well, since "geek" is "someone who eats live animals", including circus performers biting the heads off chickens and 1920s college kids swallowing live goldfish, I'd say Ozzie Ozbourne is a geek, but not a nerd.