I’m 18 chapters into this weird Frank Herbert 70s sci-fi story, but the vocab is filling my notes. After this point-dump, I’ll make regular updates or something (though I’ll probably finish it soon).
Here are a bunch of things I find interesting/need to lookup (things in quotes are words I’d like to learn/know the meaning):
“obeisance”
genetic drift, heart worlds
“pratfall”
Religious Engineering
“impiety”
“simultaneity”
“vacillating”
“superciliousness”
“demagoguery”
War signs
“schlammler”
“froolap”, funny “word”
“lines of regression”, is that a surveying term?
“hanky-pa-tanky”
“votaries”
“black gang syndrome”, da fuck?
“verdure”
“aitch” (H!)
“jumped up mazoo”
“arboreal”
Is 30 million people in a city a lot?
Then there is a couple of notes:
Chapter 10 is great thinking
Opening of Chapter 18, wow; this refers to Herbert’s faux text excerpt from a manual titled, “War, the Un-Possible”.
A lot of this book makes more sense to me knowing it was compiled from a series of short stories. I think they were planned to be tell the story, but the peculiarities of producing setting for someone that may not have read the prior stories come through.
The background setting involves humanity recovering from an interstellar war that was so bad, there are galactic government agencies created to solely prevent another war from happening. I mention it only because the background comes in bursts of one-off sentences and sentiments.
“Genetic drift” and “heart worlds” are two such terms I thought infused the story really well, and I wish they talked more about what that entailed. At the same time, I’m glad I didn’t have to read Herbert’s 70s take on the deeper meaning of those ideas. They suffice to establish the universe humans live in is broken, and even the people trying to piece it back together don’t have a clue. Ahem Dune ahem.
I believe this is an imaginary food item used to test the reactions of an indigenous population… but I feel it has waited around, waiting to enter common vernacular!
I can’t find anything about this term. To me, sounds overtly racist, but I grew up in Gangland, Alabama, so I may be sensitive to the way people talk about the populace… did this mean something specific in the 70s-?
A universe without war involves critical-mass concepts as applied to human beings. Any immediate issue which, might lead to war is always escalated to questions of personal value, to the complications of technological synergism, to questions of an ethico-religious nature, to which areas are open for counteraction and, inevitably, there remain the unknowns, omnipresent and likely of insidious complexity. The human situation as it relates to war can be likened to a multilinear looped feedback system in which nothing is unimportant.
‘War, the Un-possible,’ Chapter IV, I-A Manual
‘To be sure,’ the Abbod said. ‘And this civilization boasts of many techniques for
the human to know himself – reconditioning, sophisticated microsurgical resources,
the enforced application of acultural toning. How could there be anything about
yourself that you still needed to know?’
In art, the episode (formally called the Incredulity of Thomas ) has been frequently depicted since at least the 5th century, with its depiction reflecting a range of theological interpretations.