minor:
host: c-71-58-49-72.hsd1.pa.comcast.net
username: Escha Ton
revision: 1
summary: =Notes for Limbo= Novel by Bernard Wolfe. Page numbers based on first edition, 1952. Random House. PALCI’ed from Rutgers ==Notes From . . .

Notes for Limbo

Novel by Bernard Wolfe. Page numbers based on first edition, 1952. Random House. PALCI’ed from Rutgers

Notes From iPhone

• psychedelic / ecstatic sex pp. 35-36
• collectivity as an outside to history of 41
• war as rhetorical operation p141
• transhumanism 141-142
• discussion of extropianism in ch. 14
• manichean heresy p. 177
• war machine, p210
• marx’s assertion that workers shouldn’t fight workers suggests Marxism as a means of transcending infantile aggresion, p213
• assassination clause as pledge to openness. Relation to web2.0? P299

Themes

• Individual vs. Society
• Freudian & Post-Freudian theories of civil unrest
• The role of disability and prothesis in cybernetics
• What would a non-Aristotelian society look like?

Plot

Dr. Martine, living on an island in the Indian Ocean for the last 18 years, leaves to find out what has become of the rest of the world following a visit from a group of cyborgs. He finds a society obsessed with disability and pacifism that ultimately crumbles into another world war.

Big on ideas, short on plot, the novel consists of long, uninterrupted rants, by various characters, about the nature of a given topic that Wolfe finds intersting. This is not a problem within the book, as, for the most part, it’s a breezy and interesting read that manages to remain free from preachiness.