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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
The Statutory Ape
Henny Youngman was the British-American stand-up king of one-liners: ‘Take my wife... Please... etc.’ Wilson is the novelistic equivalent, an author who assembles a series of gags into a gig. The Universe Next Door isn’t a story so much as a comedic monologue.
The comedy covers everything from academic science and literature to politics and the cultural conceits of both the Left and Right. It is necessarily of its time. So, much of it is probably opaque to those not of a certain age. The jokes and allusions are so fast and furious though that there’s enough to keep the young interested if not so incensed as their grandparents.
And their grandparents were incensed - by the kinky sex, and the casual drug use, the glorification of various grubby sub-cultures, and the trashing of liberal sentiment. Wilson hated the Right-wing William F. Buckley but he also hated Buckley’s Lefty opponents just as much. He knew the real problem of the day was fervent idealism: “The Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.” So nobody liked Wilson and his nihilistic attitude.
Turns out though that Wilson was fairly prescient. He saw the idealistic terminus ad quem: the inevitability of terrorism and the rise of the anti-idealist leader. And he knew he was watching a revolution in the making. Writing in 1979, he predicted “The Revolution of Lowered Expectations... By 1984 nobody in the country had any higher expectations than a feudal serf.” Economically, he called it exactly right.
He also got some other things correct about what might be called democratic reason: “Sanity had failed to save the world and ... only insanity remained as a viable alternative.” The country elected Furbish Lousewart as its president. Lousewart‘s populist philosophy of “asceticism, medievalism, and despair” formed the revolutionary core. So the desired result was produced: “society is everywhere in conspiracy against intelligence.” Getting even is Lousewart’s (and everyone else’s) motivation. Nihilism has triumphed through the opposition of idealisms, religious as well as political.
Wilson’s one-liners are often as good as Youngman’s: “When you are up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you started out to drain the swamp.” But the problem with one-liners is that they have no intellectual staying power. They get thrown out by the author and then thrown away by the reader. They’re probably the only authentic way to communicate nihilism but until Twitter they had no lasting impact.
It took Trump and Twitter to realise Wilson’s fears. Wilson was two or three generations ahead of his time. The only positive advice he could give then was ignored but has now become obviously relevant with Trump: “Please listen; it’s vital to your future. We are all … living in a novel” the fact that it’s a very bad novel is what should concern us most.
Henny Youngman was the British-American stand-up king of one-liners: ‘Take my wife... Please... etc.’ Wilson is the novelistic equivalent, an author who assembles a series of gags into a gig. The Universe Next Door isn’t a story so much as a comedic monologue.
The comedy covers everything from academic science and literature to politics and the cultural conceits of both the Left and Right. It is necessarily of its time. So, much of it is probably opaque to those not of a certain age. The jokes and allusions are so fast and furious though that there’s enough to keep the young interested if not so incensed as their grandparents.
And their grandparents were incensed - by the kinky sex, and the casual drug use, the glorification of various grubby sub-cultures, and the trashing of liberal sentiment. Wilson hated the Right-wing William F. Buckley but he also hated Buckley’s Lefty opponents just as much. He knew the real problem of the day was fervent idealism: “The Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.” So nobody liked Wilson and his nihilistic attitude.
Turns out though that Wilson was fairly prescient. He saw the idealistic terminus ad quem: the inevitability of terrorism and the rise of the anti-idealist leader. And he knew he was watching a revolution in the making. Writing in 1979, he predicted “The Revolution of Lowered Expectations... By 1984 nobody in the country had any higher expectations than a feudal serf.” Economically, he called it exactly right.
He also got some other things correct about what might be called democratic reason: “Sanity had failed to save the world and ... only insanity remained as a viable alternative.” The country elected Furbish Lousewart as its president. Lousewart‘s populist philosophy of “asceticism, medievalism, and despair” formed the revolutionary core. So the desired result was produced: “society is everywhere in conspiracy against intelligence.” Getting even is Lousewart’s (and everyone else’s) motivation. Nihilism has triumphed through the opposition of idealisms, religious as well as political.
Wilson’s one-liners are often as good as Youngman’s: “When you are up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you started out to drain the swamp.” But the problem with one-liners is that they have no intellectual staying power. They get thrown out by the author and then thrown away by the reader. They’re probably the only authentic way to communicate nihilism but until Twitter they had no lasting impact.
It took Trump and Twitter to realise Wilson’s fears. Wilson was two or three generations ahead of his time. The only positive advice he could give then was ignored but has now become obviously relevant with Trump: “Please listen; it’s vital to your future. We are all … living in a novel” the fact that it’s a very bad novel is what should concern us most.
quirky and kinda fun but nowhere near the quality of his Illuminatus Trilogy
A low Four stars because i really liked it, but im also a big RAW and Illuminatus! Fan. Deduct 1.5 stars if you are not.
This is a wild, hard to follow at times, setup for a great cross-reality quantum
I do not think anyone should read this book without reading the Illuminatus! Trilogy and also the pseudo-non-fiction Prometheus Rising. I heartily recommend both. SC has so many references to both of these books, to the point where you lose plot meaning if you dont have those already read.
I can see why SC is sold/packaged as a trilogy, as opposed to 3 standalone books as originally - this first book isnt much of a fiction book, as it is a setup. Chapters are often just 1-2 pages, and offer just a quantum slice of one reality (or more) from one characters point of view (or more).
Where illuminatus! would change perspective sometimes from sentence to sentence, this book is a bit more reservered in structure and tries to only shift perspective between chapters.
Sometimes.
Sometimes you have pages of 8 conversations happening simultaneously in the same room, across 8 realities, not in the same room. Yeah.
Its wild, can you dig?
Perhaps a bit too much sex in this book, maybe not enough politics or other content. Illuminatus seemed to have the ratios a bit better proportioned. But it often can be skipped if neeeded, however its mostly used to inject a visceral comedy into the flow of the book.
I appreciate a trans character is a main character, and treated rather modern and normal, aside from the RAW zanyness. Very progressive. However, women are more often than not, but not always, sexual aspirations and desires and objects of lust - comes off a bit one dimensional. But RAW is far far away from the outright sexism of say Heinlein.
Its a wild book, and im not quite sure what its all about , but I sure do want to know.
P.S. I love this books version of Ralph Nader, Lousewort, with all the fake quotes from his book "Unsafe wherever you go"
This is a wild, hard to follow at times, setup for a great cross-reality quantum
I do not think anyone should read this book without reading the Illuminatus! Trilogy and also the pseudo-non-fiction Prometheus Rising. I heartily recommend both. SC has so many references to both of these books, to the point where you lose plot meaning if you dont have those already read.
I can see why SC is sold/packaged as a trilogy, as opposed to 3 standalone books as originally - this first book isnt much of a fiction book, as it is a setup. Chapters are often just 1-2 pages, and offer just a quantum slice of one reality (or more) from one characters point of view (or more).
Where illuminatus! would change perspective sometimes from sentence to sentence, this book is a bit more reservered in structure and tries to only shift perspective between chapters.
Sometimes.
Sometimes you have pages of 8 conversations happening simultaneously in the same room, across 8 realities, not in the same room. Yeah.
Its wild, can you dig?
Perhaps a bit too much sex in this book, maybe not enough politics or other content. Illuminatus seemed to have the ratios a bit better proportioned. But it often can be skipped if neeeded, however its mostly used to inject a visceral comedy into the flow of the book.
I appreciate a trans character is a main character, and treated rather modern and normal, aside from the RAW zanyness. Very progressive. However, women are more often than not, but not always, sexual aspirations and desires and objects of lust - comes off a bit one dimensional. But RAW is far far away from the outright sexism of say Heinlein.
Its a wild book, and im not quite sure what its all about , but I sure do want to know.
P.S. I love this books version of Ralph Nader, Lousewort, with all the fake quotes from his book "Unsafe wherever you go"
This is sheer madness. Quantum conspiracies, radical political terrorists, an AI with a rebuilt human penis retrieved from a sex change and put to use in orgasm research, seemingly endless nuclear apocalypse, and so on.
It's fast paced, hilarious, and fun to read, but hard to follow because of the multiple universes, various interweaving narrative threads, and occult body-switching.
Some of the most fun and stimulating writing I've ever read.
It's fast paced, hilarious, and fun to read, but hard to follow because of the multiple universes, various interweaving narrative threads, and occult body-switching.
Some of the most fun and stimulating writing I've ever read.
It's equally frightening, disappointing, and unsurprising that a book written in 1979 satirizes the same political BS still present and thriving in the USA today. In fact, it has some eerie predictive qualities (the government some of the characters work against is ruled by a few rich people who control 99% of the country's wealth; just one of the elite distributing all personal funds above $1 million equally to every citizen would solve most problems; commercial entities have screwed democracy and anything that would do good for the world...sound familiar?). However, any of these critical kernels can only be found in part 1 of the book. The whole book is bizarre, but part 2 just takes the cake. It lacks cohesion, is difficult to follow, didn't really add anything new, and I just didn't care.
A terribly dated 70s book with weird sex and mansplaining written by someone who wanted to seem smart.
The Statutory Ape
Henny Youngman was the British-American stand-up king of one-liners: ‘Take my wife... Please... etc.’ Wilson is the novelistic equivalent, an author who assembles a series of gags into a gig. The Universe Next Door isn’t a story so much as a comedic monologue.
The comedy covers everything from academic science and literature to politics and the cultural conceits of both the Left and Right. It is necessarily of its time. So, much of it is probably opaque to those not of a certain age. The jokes and allusions are so fast and furious though that there’s enough to keep the young interested if not so incensed as their grandparents.
And their grandparents were incensed - by the kinky sex, and the casual drug use, the glorification of various grubby sub-cultures, and the trashing of liberal sentiment. Wilson hated the Right-wing William F. Buckley but he also hated Buckley’s Lefty opponents just as much. He knew the real problem of the day was fervent idealism: “The Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.” So nobody liked Wilson and his nihilistic attitude.
Turns out though that Wilson was fairly prescient. He saw the idealistic terminus ad quem: the inevitability of terrorism and the rise of the anti-idealist leader. And he knew he was watching a revolution in the making. Writing in 1979, he predicted “The Revolution of Lowered Expectations... By 1984 nobody in the country had any higher expectations than a feudal serf.” Economically, he called it exactly right.
He also got some other things correct about what might be called democratic reason: “Sanity had failed to save the world and ... only insanity remained as a viable alternative.” The country elected Furbish Lousewart as its president. Lousewart‘s populist philosophy of “asceticism, medievalism, and despair” formed the revolutionary core. So the desired result was produced: “society is everywhere in conspiracy against intelligence.” Getting even is Lousewart’s (and everyone else’s) motivation. Nihilism has triumphed through the opposition of idealisms, religious as well as political.
Wilson’s one-liners are often as good as Youngman’s: “When you are up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you started out to drain the swamp.” But the problem with one-liners is that they have no intellectual staying power. They get thrown out by the author and then thrown away by the reader. They’re probably the only authentic way to communicate nihilism but until Twitter they had no lasting impact.
It took Trump and Twitter to realise Wilson’s fears. Wilson was two or three generations ahead of his time. The only positive advice he could give then was ignored but has now become obviously relevant with Trump: “Please listen; it’s vital to your future. We are all … living in a novel” the fact that it’s a very bad novel is what should concern us most.
Henny Youngman was the British-American stand-up king of one-liners: ‘Take my wife... Please... etc.’ Wilson is the novelistic equivalent, an author who assembles a series of gags into a gig. The Universe Next Door isn’t a story so much as a comedic monologue.
The comedy covers everything from academic science and literature to politics and the cultural conceits of both the Left and Right. It is necessarily of its time. So, much of it is probably opaque to those not of a certain age. The jokes and allusions are so fast and furious though that there’s enough to keep the young interested if not so incensed as their grandparents.
And their grandparents were incensed - by the kinky sex, and the casual drug use, the glorification of various grubby sub-cultures, and the trashing of liberal sentiment. Wilson hated the Right-wing William F. Buckley but he also hated Buckley’s Lefty opponents just as much. He knew the real problem of the day was fervent idealism: “The Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.” So nobody liked Wilson and his nihilistic attitude.
Turns out though that Wilson was fairly prescient. He saw the idealistic terminus ad quem: the inevitability of terrorism and the rise of the anti-idealist leader. And he knew he was watching a revolution in the making. Writing in 1979, he predicted “The Revolution of Lowered Expectations... By 1984 nobody in the country had any higher expectations than a feudal serf.” Economically, he called it exactly right.
He also got some other things correct about what might be called democratic reason: “Sanity had failed to save the world and ... only insanity remained as a viable alternative.” The country elected Furbish Lousewart as its president. Lousewart‘s populist philosophy of “asceticism, medievalism, and despair” formed the revolutionary core. So the desired result was produced: “society is everywhere in conspiracy against intelligence.” Getting even is Lousewart’s (and everyone else’s) motivation. Nihilism has triumphed through the opposition of idealisms, religious as well as political.
Wilson’s one-liners are often as good as Youngman’s: “When you are up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you started out to drain the swamp.” But the problem with one-liners is that they have no intellectual staying power. They get thrown out by the author and then thrown away by the reader. They’re probably the only authentic way to communicate nihilism but until Twitter they had no lasting impact.
It took Trump and Twitter to realise Wilson’s fears. Wilson was two or three generations ahead of his time. The only positive advice he could give then was ignored but has now become obviously relevant with Trump: “Please listen; it’s vital to your future. We are all … living in a novel” the fact that it’s a very bad novel is what should concern us most.
I loved this when I read it at 27. And 13 years later, I still really enjoyed the first chapter -so many amazing jokes (truths). But I'm really confused what else I liked about this as a 27-year-old. Presumably, I was really into the quantum physics multiple universe angle? My rating is the average of my 5-star review then, and my 2-star review now.