I was listening to NPR yesterday or the day before when they reviewed Dan Brown's old book Angels and Demons which (IIRC) he actually published before The Da Vinci Code and which actually sucked then (nobody bought it) and continues to suck now -- but now it's going to suck as a completely media-made best-seller-cum-movie "sequel" to TDVC.

This is the book about The Illuminati, that shadowy collection of Scientist Antichrists that wages a secret war against the Church (and what church is there but the Catholic Church -- no self-respecting secret society goes around murdering Baptists or Born Again Preachers).

As I listened to a description of the "real" illuminati -- a Bavarian philosophy club during the Enlightenment, basically, more or less contemporary with the American Revolution and the writings of Jefferson and Paine -- I felt a pang of identification. Such a good idea, such a lousy country and political system to have a good idea. It was doomed, not by reason but by politics in a Europe already in the first stages (although they did not yet know it) of the 230 year stretch that would see the end of Monarchy in the world (or just about).

Such a cool name, too!

I want to join.

rgb

I'm starting to wonder...am I the only one who has absolutely zero desire to read any of Dan Brown's books?

Ron Howard was on Bill Maher's show a couple weeks ago talking about the movie. Ron said something about how Dan Brown is so original. Um, no.

All things considered, Ron Howard was entertaining, but Gore Vidal really stole the show! What a fascinating man!

Sorry that I went off on a tangent there, rgb...

You were saying...about the Illuminati? :-)

Charity wrote: "I'm starting to wonder...am I the only one who has absolutely zero desire to read any of Dan Brown's books?

Ron Howard was on Bill Maher's show a couple weeks ago talking about the movie. Ron sai..."

They suck, for sure. But I read them anyway. I read TDVC because EVERYBODY was reading it and hey, intriguing idea and could have been good. I read Angels and Demons to see if DB sucked as much as TDVC seemed to suggest. It did.

This is really just more evidence of the idioting of America. It's also a sign that a lot of people are fed up with the Church -- note that DB's sympathies are all with the rebels, the secret societies. He pushes a kind of modern gnosticism in contrast with Catholicism, and that resonates with mystical Christians, ones who are actually somewhat atheistic (where I consider "theism" to be equivalent to "scripture bound"). The Quakers, for example, are pretty much atheistic but religious because they reject the perfect truth of the Christian theistic scripture.

So DB is a phenomenon, and reading his bad books is a way to gain a certain amount of insight into our culture. For better or worse.

And I was saying "I -- am -- an Illuminatus! I have power over the Universe! Mwahahahahaha!"

Something like that.

rgb

and what church is there but the Catholic Church -- no self-respecting secret society goes around murdering Baptists or Born Again Preachers

A good point, and one that seems to be so ingrained into the culture that it takes a little stepping back from things like this to realize it. I suppose it's an attractive meme for things like this because it's a much larger and more monolithic organization than any other brand of Christianity.

On the other hand, it's also a sign of just how deep Catholicism has seeped into parts of American culture. Kind of a sad legacy for a country that grew from a bunch of religious malcontents.

I actually really love the DaVinci Code movie. X) Haven't read the book though.

Tom Hanks is great in the movie. The book just isn't terribly well written, and Angels and Demons is poorly written. Also, even allowing some fictional latitude, it is a bit hard to suspend your disbelief reading it, because its facts are so poor. It abuses history and so on pretty badly.

rgb

I noted something, the girl Sophie, basically admits to being an atheist, and then the point of the story is she's the living descendant of Jesus. *subliminal message time!*

Even if a book truly sucks, I take great pains to try and read it all the way through. The DaVinci Code was one of the few I stopped reading and had to fight the desire to keep from throwing against a wall (the vampire crap known as Twilight being the only other one I can remember feeling the same way about from the past ten years). But hey, if that's the Illuminati, I'm in.* ;)

*Can we kill sparkly vampires?

lololol

*Can we kill sparkly vampires?

Yes, please!

Please add Stephenie Meyer to the list of authors that hold zero allure for me.

I really think that Flannery O'Connor hit the nail on the head:

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

Isn't there a direct correlation between the NYT bestsellers list and how poorly written a novel is? Seriously - Pynchon and Powers have new books coming out this year and they won't even crack the top 10. It's amazing how few people actually read these days and then you see what they are reading...and...it makes me....sad.

Back on topic - I heard the review of the movie on NPR yesterday and it got hosed. TDVC was the final nail in the coffin for me in my understanding of the level of ignorance and stupidity in this country.

I forced myself to read all of TDVC, and was mad at myself for it so much that I stopped reading fiction (for the most part since). I was reading Dave Eggars's first book, andstopped mid-book. But then, that's prob. coz it was a load of pretentious crap. Though I still think he's a creative writer, and is doing much to advance American lit., whatever it's worth anymore.

A&D was stupid, sort of like a beta TDVC. I stopped after the first few chapters. If I had read it first, I never would have bothered with TDVC. I immediately stopped dating the girl who had recommended both to me, but mainly because we couldn't have an honest dialog about how stupid the books were. (That's not the whole story, but it's a big part!)

I'm mostly done with fiction anymore these days. Real life is far too fascinating, and so fucking unbelievable most of the time. I can't get enough of it.

On that note, can anyone recommend fiction that doesn't suck? I'm open for it.

(I can't recall the last work of fiction I didn't put down half-way through,save RGB's Book of Lileth, and a book called Vellum, which I thoroughly enjoyed, though many seem to hate.)

re: Illuminati, I've always loved this piece - and other work of Giger.

thanks for that laugh, Charity!

Jake wrote: "On that note, can anyone recommend fiction that doesn't suck? I'm open for it."

Sure, there are enormous quantities of it. I love to read, and read a novel and a half yesterday (at the expense of some sleep). The problem is, you'll have to give me some boundaries. There is some awesome nonfiction out there, and I've cited a number of tiles in various posts:

The Lucifer Principle
Guns Germs and Steel
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
Information Theory Inference and Learning Algorithms
Misquoting Jesus

Fiction is more complicated, as there one has to contend with genrification. Are there any genres you personally dislike or like? I personally read a lot of SF, a lot of fantasy, some "mainstream literature/fiction" although I tend to be pretty cynical here as I dislike anecdotal ramblings in favor of stories with actual plot, and plot has been out of favor in world literature (most unfortunately) for a very long time now. One reason TDVC is so popular (IMO) is because it actually HAS a plot, and even a juvenile and unbelievable plot told in mediocre language is better than all sorts of flowery anecdotal prose with no beginning, no middle, no end, no protagonist or antagonist, no dramatic tension, no point. TDVC is at the very least a mystery, a suspense novel, and has some "surprises" that it reveals at a telling pace. Compare that to any number of books that are far better "literature" but that bore one to tears because they simply describe the ongoing soap opera of life.

rgb

Hey Jake,

Fiction wise I can recommend anything by the Scottish writer Banks. If you’re not familiar with him he alternates sf (which he writes as Iain M Banks) with non sf (which he writes as Iain Banks). I got into him via his sf but having exhausted that I started on his non sf. Both types are brilliant, he has a great grasp of character, motive and plot, and he writes with such intelligence. The Crow Road (non sf) for example is brilliant.

Another fiction writer I’ve read recently is Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies for instance is a lovely read, he has advanced American lit.

Thanks for the recommendations. I'll check into those.

Jake,

One book that I would recommend is The Cider House Rules by John Irving which is a pretty incredible look at illegal abortion operations in the early 20th century. John Irving's grandfather was actually an OB/GYN (during the time frame that the book is set in) and Irving used his grandfather's published works as a reference for writing the book, so there are several parts that are, shall we say, detailed. Irving's grandfather once observed that "as long as there are unwanted pregnancies, women will attempt to rid themselves of them."

It is a really fascinating glimpse into the past (and potential future, should Roe v. Wade be overturned) of abortions and orphanages. In light of the Tiller tragedy, I thought you might be interested. If not, please disregard.

If you like SF, try:

Dragon's Egg
Starquake

by Robert Forward. Forward is an astrophysicist and these are truly amazing, plotful SF novels.

(Almost) anything by David Brin, but in particular:

Sundiver
Startide Rising
The Uplift War
Brightness Reef
Infinity Shore
Heaven's Reach

(The uplift saga). You're probably familiar with Brin only from The Postman which was made into a not-terrible Kevin Costner movie, but his other novels are terrific.

Everything written by Roger Zelazny, but in particular:

Lord of Light
Creatures of Light and Darkness
This Immortal

and the entire collection of Amber novels, starting with:

Nine Princes in Amber

although you can buy the entire collection (some dozen shortish novels) in a single cover now, and I'd strongly recommend it that way.

Nearly anything by Larry Niven, with or without Jerry Pournelle. In particular:

The Integral Trees
Ringworld (and its two or three successors)

He has books of short stories, a series that begins with:

The Mote in God's Eye (with Pournelle)

and much more. Nearly anything is worth a read -- even his essays (e.g. "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" are worth a read, as the blackest of black humor -- it is about the misfortunes of Lois should Superman ever actually have sex with her, something about the uncontrollable spasm of orgasm and "gutting her like a trout" in addition to blowing the top of her head off).

In more contemporary work, Neal Stephenson is arguable one of the most brilliant of contemporary authors. I strongly recommend:

Cryptonomicon

and the three (long) books of The Baroque Cycle:

Quicksilver
The Confusion
The System of the World

These three books are an absolutely brilliant fictionalization of the Enlightenment. Prominently featured characters include Newton, Hooke, Liebnitz (a lot of the book focuses on the controversy of who invented the calculus), Christopher Wren, the various Kings and Queens of England, France, and elsewhere in Europe, in addition to a fine cast of scoundrels led by the ever-lovable Half-Cocked Jack, self-proclaimed king of the gypsies, a man who in his youth made a living hanging on the legs of men being hung in the days before the drop (death was usually slow, by strangulation) and who lost half of his cock during an accident associated with treatment for syphilis, and who later was "miraculously" cured of the disease by catching malaria while he was a galley slave of a pirate vessel -- well, you get the idea. Intrigue, violence, philosophy, physics, computing, and more all tied up in plot-rich entanglements and multiple threads of discourse.

That's probably enough for now -- let me know if/when you finish these and I'll come up with a few dozen more, the best of the best.

rgb

I remember some of these recommendations from earlier posts, esp. the Brin works. I have a couple of those on my to-read list. I think this will give me a helluva head start. Thanks much!

I'm pretty much a SF novice, but two books that I absolutely adore in the genre are The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the Triffids, both by John Wyndham. Incredible reads, very literary, and written with a very blurry line between sf and horror.

Chris wrote: "Isn't there a direct correlation between the NYT bestsellers list and how poorly written a novel is? Seriously - Pynchon and Powers have new books coming out this year and they won't even crack th..."

Once in a very long while, a really good book makes the bestseller list. Atonement is a great book.

Stephen wrote: "Hey Jake,

Fiction wise I can recommend anything by the Scottish writer Banks. If you’re not familiar with him he alternates sf (which he writes as Iain M Banks) with non sf (which he writes as I..."

Another English writer who does both SF and non-SF is JG Ballard, who just died.

Try the Drowned World, one of the first books to deal with global warming and the ice caps melting.

As for his non-SF, try Crash or Rushing to Paradise, which really rips into pompous PC liberals.

One more fiction rec...Blindness by José Saramago. Completely harrowing read!

Charity wrote: "I'm pretty much a SF novice, but two books that I absolutely adore in the genre are The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the Triffids, both by John Wyndham. Incredible reads, very literary, and writt..."

I love Wyndham, and these are two of his best, I agree.

A few more:

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. It is scary how prescient this novel was -- sometimes it seems like we're playing it out line by line. I also like Go and Catch a Falling Star by Brunner -- this is very Wyndham like (where Wyndham is very H. G. Wells-like) which is what brought this Brunner to mind.

Footfall by Niven and Pournelle. Great, great story, one of the best aliens-invade-earth stories ever.

Some people love Heinlein, some hate him, but if you've never read:

Stranger in a Strange Land
Methuselah's Children
Time Enough for Love
(and really, all of them) you probably should, just like you should read Asimov's

Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
(and optionally finish it off with the second trilogy).

One of the best current writers is Lois McMaster Bujold, especially the Vorsigian Saga -- I'm reading my way through the whole thing right now.

If you want an author who is completely different and possibly slightly mad, try first Norman Spinrad, then Harlan Ellison. These two were basically brilliant non-mainstream SF authors of the 70's (and maybe even 80's). In particular:

The Iron Dream is one of the best works of sustained black humor ever written. It is supposedly a science fiction novel written by Adolph Hitler and may be out of print. Bug Jack Barron is one of my all time favorite novels. The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde is a fabulous collection of outre short stories. Songs from the Stars is a good read.

Harlan Ellison is best known for his collections of short stories, and for the big collections of truly wierd tales he put together in the 70's. I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream, Dangerous Visions, Dangerous Visions 2. They made a movie out of one of his post-apocaplyptic novelletes -- A Boy and His Dog (although they named it something different). Think Thunderdome on steriods, long before Thunderdome or Mad Max were conceived of. The last line of the short story is still with me, maybe thirty years since I last read it. "She asked me if I knew what love is. Sure, I know. A boy loves his dog." Again, black humor at its most brilliant, and (you will see) the direct ancestor of the story told in e.g. Fallout 3, complete to the underground shelter cities of inbred survivors.

I adore J.G. Ballard, who wrote an (autobiographical) short story called something like Lunga Station that became one of the best movies never to win an academy award (it deserved to sweep them) -- [movie: Empire of the Sun] (introducing Christian Bale in one of the most brilliantly acted child roles ever).

Another forgotten classic is Michael Moorecock's Behold the Man -- a kind of nerdy guy with a mild martyr complex and a bit of psychological training is tapped to test out a time machine, goes back to find out the truth about Jesus, and ends up becoming Jesus, deliberately bringing about his own crucifixion because he more or less has to, as soon as he realizes his own part in the script. No miracles -- pure SF, and amazingly well done.

Another Brunner favorite is The Traveller in Black, a book that presents the modern scientific universe where rational thought works as being the survivor in a champion-challenger multiverse creation process where raw, random, naked chaos causes irrational universes to bubble up, filled with magic, wickedness, strangeness, but with a traveller in black who has been equally inevitably cast up in the infinite chaotic multiverse to bring order to it by means of granting exactly what people he meets wish for, even if it appears to unleash even more chaos if he is asked for magical gifts or the like. Great, great book.

There are a few others I should probably mention -- well, more than just a few, many more actually, but that seems like a good second installment.

rgb

rgb --

Great list, added a few I should have thought, especially J.G Ballard.

I would add the The Stone that Never Came Down to the Brunner list -- I read it as a teenager, and it really gave me something to think about.

Behold the Man - I remember that vividly now that you remind me ...

You should be contributing to the list we started here: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1503...

RGB pretty much has it. I disagree with a few of his recommendations, but only a few. Lois McMaster Bujold is, for my money, the best thing happening in SF right now.

On Niven, I would warn that I consider Ringworld a pretty poor novel. It's well worth reading for the big ideas, but the plot and characters aren't really there. The Integral Trees is good, but my favorite novel by him (alone) would be A World Out of Time. The Niven/Pournelle collaborations are pretty universally worth reading, and The Mote in God's Eye is probably the best one. I will note that their Footfall is probably the best 'alien invasion of the Earth' stories done, if you have any interest in that genre. (Whoops, didn't notice RGB's prior recommendation at first.)

I also recommend James P. Hogan, or at least his earlier works, he's gotten shrill and curmudgeonly since. The really good ones:
Inherit the Stars
The Two Faces Of Tomorrow
The Proteus Operation
Code of the Lifemaker

For a lesser-known past master, I heartily recommend H. Beam Piper:
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen
Little Fuzzy

Rindis wrote: "RGB pretty much has it. I disagree with a few of his recommendations, but only a few. Lois McMaster Bujold is, for my money, the best thing happening in SF right now.

On Niven, I would warn that I..."

Great minds do think alike (re footfall:).

Still free-associating:

Cordwainer Smith: Norstralia

Niven (satire/insider SF): The Flying Sorcerors (really old, maybe out of print).

James Gunn: The Joy Makers. This one is really, really amazing. The premise is that civilization adopts as law the premise that happiness is the greatest good, period. It becomes literally against the law to be unhappy. Scientology-like counselors monitor the lives of everybody (including each other) and pretty much intervene as needed to ensure that nobody gets very unhappy. Time passes, and this latter job is mostly taken over by sentient computers, who create virtual realities for people where their wishes are instantly fulfilled and nobody can ever become even momentarily frustrated. Anyone observed being unhappy is seized and placed in an artificial womb, neurally wired, and enters The Matrix (only of course this book was written long, long before the movie) -- where life is a perfectly scripted story with you as hero (where even the challenges and "danger" are there only to make you still more satisfied with your successes). The human race looks like it is on the sure road to extinction, because the only way unhappiness is certain to be impossible is to be dead, and not even reproduction of the species has a higher legal or ethical weight in the ubercomputers overseeing everything. Wonderfully ambiguous ending, a novel (really four serial novelettes) far, far ahead of its time.

Philip K. Dick -- where to start? So many brilliant books.

The Zap Gun
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (movie was called Blade Runner for no reason I can think of).
Ubik -- a true classic of science fiction, anticipates some of the themes of e.g. Neuromancer (Gibson) or Johnny Mnemonic, dead humans preserved in a kind of AI.

Alan Dean Foster writes a lot of glop, but I really enjoyed Icerigger and its sequel (whose name I cannot recall).

Piers Anthony ditto, but Macroscope is again a book ahead of its time.

I completely forgot Philip Jose Farmer:
Lord Tyger -- the best version of Tarzan ever written, including ERB's:-)
To Your Scattered Bodies Go (plus the next five or six books in the Riverworld series)
Maker of Universes (and the rest of the World of Tiers series -- you'll never view the "evidence" for an old Universe quite the same way after reading this series:-)
The Other Log of Phileas Fogg
Dayworld

Yes, Farmer is eclipsed only by Asimov (who wrote faster than I read) in prolixity.

Speaking of Asimov, The Gods Themselves is a great little multiple universes thing, where entropy and energy can (under the right circumstances) flow between spacetime continua in the form of slowly equalizing the coupling constants. So one can make the nuclear force a bit stronger in one plenum at the expense of making it a bit weaker in another, locally, which eventually does things like destabilize suns and cause them to go nova if it is overused (to create usable free energy on either end, as nuclei shift around to accommodate the new stable isotopes and current flows as it does so).

Again, enough for the moment. Eventually I'll have to actually go upstairs and look at my shelves to remember names, but so far I'm doing OK. I'm sure I'm missing whole authors, let alone a bunch of great one-hit wonders. I did a really long list of books on the SF group I belong to some time ago, before this group proved more fun. And then there is fantasy. And mystery (where it is more about authors -- the entire Cadfael series, for example). And suspense. And "literature", although I'm a bit picky about that as a lot of supposed literature is crap IMO, not enough plot, no message at all, just existential ramblings, pointless, boring. There are thousands of books, tens of thousands of books, worth reading, and most of them well worth REreading.

rgb

Don't get me started on P.K. Dick and P.J Farmer...

Which reminds of Kilgore Trout, which reminds of Kurt Vonnegut, which reminds of more books for the other list....

Yeah, forgot all about Slaughterhouse Five and Welcome to the Monkey House and Sirens of Titan. Good point. And yeah, I should have added Venus on a Half Shell, shouldn't I? It just seemed so incestuous.

rgb

rgb --

What is your theory on the tremendous drop off in the quality of sci-fi?

There are still good authors, but nothing like 40+ years ago

Gaaa! I wrote an 8000 character reply, it did the damnable "won't save" even as the character count was well under 8000, then the interface dropped it altogether. I just can't write it again, so this is the reader's digest version:

* Pulps gone (changes economics, fan base)

* TV (destruction of literacy, devaluation of books as a means of entertainment)

* Advent of scientific literacy (strongly constrains modern e.g. FTL SF -- much more difficult to write credible science in SF.

* Authors must be much smarter, and must rely much more on suspension of disbelief -- result is a narrower pool of authors, where a Ph.D. in physics doesn't hurt (but Ph.D.'s have a lot to do besides write SF and deal with the erratic and demanding world of publishing).

* Ultimately, I disagree with this statement anyway. I don't think the quality of SF has really dropped off. There was, perhaps, a bit of a "cultural hole" that matched up to the post-Viet Nam cultural hole in music and film that plagued the 80's in particular, but there is some really excellent SF that easily equals the work of the masters from the last 25 years -- Bujold, Brin, Gibson, Stephenson, and many more write damn good stuff. Stuff that is easily the equal of Asimov's or Heinlein's pulp fluff. The Uplift saga is as good as it gets. So is Vorkosigian. And they have to write for a farm more -- and less -- technically sophisticated audience, one raised on Discover and NGC and Fallout 3 and Star Wars and Stargate.

A bit of a "space opera gap" has emerged, and hard-core SF has to stand on its own as a genre because the "fandom" sustained by the pulps has given way to SF as mainstream literature OR as adventure stories for the masses. Finally, although there have never been more would-be authors, it has (as a theorem) never been more difficult to be published. And this is about to become even more uncertain as the entire publishing industry is about to be turned upside down and everybody in books knows it. In a decade, the book as we know it may have all but vanished, gone the way of the 8-track tape.

rgb

I agree with R.C. there has been a tremendous drop off in the quality of sci-fi.

These days the fantasy / magic genre is swamping ‘hard core’ sf, there are still hard science sf writers around but they are swamped amongst the other stuff – and bookshops make no distinction between them.

To some extent I blame TV, comics and film with all the heroes having ‘super powers’ of some sort, which fits in with our sound-byte, wishful thinking, escapism culture.

It starts with childhood too, in the past we had Swallows and Amazons, today we have Harry Potter! Nuf said! My first book was an sf story for kids, no magic, no fantasy, just real kids in real situations set in the future. Any kids that have read it loved it. Solving plot lines with a wave of a wand is lazy.

"Solving plot lines with a wave of a wand is lazy. "

Then the plot just has to be all the more complicated.

Well... it depends on your meaning of 'quality'. It sounds like Stephen is thinking more in terms of 'hard' SF = 'quality', something with which I heartily disagree.

A lot of the drop-off of the 'harder' aspects of SF have to deal with the fact that the audience has moved on to worrying more about the story than the background. Which is also to say the audience has gotten broader.

Don't get me wrong, I like authors who can spin the intricacies of real-world physics into the warp and woof of their creations. But, I am first concerned that they can tell a good story. The physics can't save a poorly plotted story, but a well crafted one will leave you not worrying about the physics.

So, the number of people who can write good hard SF has always been limited, and with the broadening of the market and the dilution of fan culture (which is as much a result of forces completely outside the fanbase as anything else), it has gone from center stage to a small subgenre. It's hardly a unique circumstance, sadly.

Some good SF with a 'hard' undercurrent that you're probably not aware of: Freefall (it helps that the author is an engineer...).

Rindis wrote: "Well... it depends on your meaning of 'quality'. It sounds like Stephen is thinking more in terms of 'hard' SF = 'quality', something with which I heartily disagree.

A lot of the drop-off of the '..."

Yeah, what you said.

rgb

rgb wrote: "Charity wrote: "I'm starting to wonder...am I the only one who has absolutely zero desire to read any of Dan Brown's books?

Ron Howard was on Bill Maher's show a couple weeks ago talking about th..."

Hi rgb. Gotta quibble with you here. I went to a Quaker school and was more or less raised Quaker and to say they are atheistic is just wrong. They might be theistic and anti-trinitarian, but most are definitely not atheists.

Personally, I get a big kick out of the the Dan Brown paranoia and attention paid to him. The Catholic Church getting its knickers in an uproar over a piece of inconsequential fiction is very, very funny.

Eric_W wrote: "rgb wrote: "Charity wrote: "I'm starting to wonder...am I the only one who has absolutely zero desire to read any of Dan Brown's books?

Ron Howard was on Bill Maher's show a couple weeks ago talk..."

I looked into Quakerism pretty heavily a short while ago, and it actually so broadly defined that there are atheistic, (although arguably deist) meeting halls, or chapters, or whatever. Then there are many -- perhaps the bulk -- who are Christian, but not "theists" in that they consider the Bible to be a flawed record and their own connection with God at least as valid. Then there are probably quite a few who are theists.

The Catholic Church is a piece of fiction, so it should get its knickers in a knot. One day the world will wake up and realize it.

rgb

Sorry, I’ve been on holiday or would have responded earlier.

To clarify the reason for my dislike of fantasy it is that as soon as something becomes unbelievable then I lose interest in the story. You don’t need to be an engineer to write a good book, as long as the people are real then one can empathise with them.

rgb wrote: "This is the book about The Illuminati, that shadowy collection of Scientist Antichrists that wages a secret war against the Church (and what church is there but the Catholic Church -- no self-respecting secret society goes around murdering Baptists or Born Again Preachers). "

Don't you think its ironic how the Christian churches of America have developed a string of shotty research, misleading data, and wholesale imagination in order to "combat" the teaching of evolution in the American school system and yet, when one author does the same thing taking a stance against the Church and its bloody history, church members are held aghast?

I haven't read Angels and Demons, so I can't fully understand the implications Dan Brown asserts when he creates the Illuminati to be the overall antagonist of his fiction. But I would just like to say that if "the "real" illuminati -- a Bavarian philosophy club during the Enlightenment, basically, more or less contemporary with the American Revolution and the writings of Jefferson and Paine" is a true statement, then isn't it sad that Dan Brown now has to use his "imagination" against a non-religious, secular initiative. I feel that's very sad for an author to essentially make the claim that while the Catholic church has performed extraordinary acts of inhumanity, that the remedy, secular progression will lead to a society of evil scientists who are no better than the religious fanatics they aim to replace. It's a gross insult to all the Enlightenment figures, the bravest of the American founding fathers, and anyone who has fought for innate human rights that weren't explicity mentioned in any one of the holy books. This, of course is all heresay, since I haven't done adequate research on Dan Brown's works but if anyone else feels that what I've said is correct or incorrect, please let me know.

Nicolas wrote: "rgb wrote: "This is the book about The Illuminati, that shadowy collection of Scientist Antichrists that wages a secret war against the Church (and what church is there but the Catholic Church -- n..."

No arguments from me. Not only a shame, but the writing sucks as well. For both books, really, and I've read both of them. Interestingly, he wrote Angels and Demons before he wrote The Da Vinci Code, and nobody bought it, because it sucked. It required the "notoriety" gained by writing a novel where Jesus got married and had offspring to piggyback it to where anybody read it at all.

But heck, there are still the Rosicrucians to pick on. The Mormons. The Medici. We can now look forward to a steady stream of bad novels with identical themes, I think.

rgb