Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

A good first (fiction) Robert Anton Wilson book to read. Funny yet mind-bending. ISBN:0440500702

Whole book online?

an excerpt I'd quoted before...

• including... Since a great deal of primate behavior was considered just awful, most of the domesticated primates spent most of their time trying to conceal what they were doing. Some of the primates got caught by other primates. All of the primates lived in dread of getting caught. Those who got caught were called no-good shits. This metaphor was deep in primate psychology because primates mark their territories with excretions, and sometimes they threw excretions at each other when disputing over territories. (Blame)

Getting Even was the basis of many Primate semantic (General Semantics) confusions, such as "expropriating the expropriators", "an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty", "they did it to me so I can do it to them", and in general, the emotional mathematics of "one plus one equals zero". The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two, and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc. They did not understand causality at all. The few primates who did understand causality slightly called it Karma. They said all sorts of foolish things about it. They didn't even know enough mathematics to describe quantum probability waves. They said, in crude hominid metaphor, and bad karma let to "bad vibes". (zero-sum game)

The tribal stage endured 100,000 years, as it had before. Then, suddenly, when environmental conditions were right, genetic programs reasserted themselves. The hive instinct reappeared in the primates. Cities appeared, sin and guilt were reinvented, technoloogy advanced. Nuclear energy was rediscovered, and misused again. The tribal age endured 12,000,000 years the next time. Then, suddenly, when environmental conditions were right... The six-legged Terran majority knew little and cared less about all this Primate actiivty. They had solved all their social problems three billion years earlier, and saw no need to change. They followed their own DNA cycles, just as monotonously as the primates followed primate cycles.

The twelve people in HOME-High Orbital Mini-Earth-were construction engineers, six male and six female. They had originally been sent there to build, with materials shipped from Lunar Mining, HOME II, a space village for 10,000 occupants. This program had been canceled as "non-ec" by President Lousewart and the twelve colonists restricted to "ec" research, mostly astronomical, which President Lousewart turned over to his astrologers for a mystical interpretation.
HOME was located in the area called Libration Point 5, where the gravitational fields of Luna and Terra were equally balanced. This null-gravity area had been mathematically discovered by the astronomer Lagrange and was therefore sometimes called the Lagrange Area. The name for the space town, HOME, had been coined by psychologist Timothy Leary in 1977.
A friend of Leary's named Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote overly complicated novels, had suggested a team song for the colonists, "HOME on Lagrange." To popularize this idea, he had written letters about it to many space research groups and included it in a novel called The Trick Top Hat. Still, by 1984, the song hadn't caught on with the twelve colonists. They were not at home on Lagrange because “they feared that the whole project would soon be classified as "non-ec" and they would be dragged back to the womb-planet.

“This ah is a very delicate matter," Babbit began at once. "We give it an Urgent rating but at the same time we do not wish to alarm the public you understand the whole investigation must be carried on with kid gloves as they say The President Himself has instructed me to make it clear to you, to make it absolutely clear, that no leaks will be tolerated no leaks whatsoever or a very big ax will fall on the whole Bureau a very big ax have I made myself clear?"
"Yes sir absolutely sir."
"Good. Now, have you noticed a certain ah a certain decline in American science and technology in recent years a withering away of talent and originality so to speak?"
"Well sir law is my background you know sir I wouldn't know a test tube from a bevatron sir…"
"The decline has been accelerating and is becoming critical in some respects, critical."
"Yes sir but so what sir a lot of science is classified as non-ec and not very popular with the Administration."
Babbit's eyes were scanning Ubu without warmth. "You think it is possible to draw a hard line a sharp boundary between “ec science and non-ec science?"
"Well of course sir President Lousewart himself is always saying…"
"I'm not talking about Administration rhetoric Mr. Ubu I am talking about reality. Could you draw such a line and say this is ec research and this is non-ec?"
"Well sir I don't get involved in politics I investigate and find out the facts and that's my job sir administrative decisions are not our business at the Bureau.”
“There is no difference between ec and non-ec science," Babbit said with icy deliberation. "I will never say that in public as long as I am part of the Administration you understand the President has a right to expect loyalty from Members of the Team of course but I tell you in private ec and non-ec are terms in theology in metaphysics in value judgment, they have nothing to do with science. It's all as absurd as saying some research is chocolate and some is vanilla and the chocolate is better than the vanilla.”
....
“But sir isn't that what President Lousewart stands for? Tightening our belts, the simple rugged life of our pioneer ancestors, lowered expectations…"
You damned fool we're not talking about political speeches we're talking about the realities of survival."
....
“One hundred thirty-two?" Ubu repeated.
"Those are the figures that came out of the Beast," Babbit said evenly. "One hundred thirty-two of the top scientific minds who've left government since the ec programs were implemented are not working for private industry, teaching at universities, or anywhere else to be found.”

Many regarded him as a saint, but Pope Stephen always tried to discourage that view. He ended every conversation with "I am a sinner, also" (Mind the Hole), which became a habit with Stephenites: Father Starhawk, for instance, ended all his conversations that way, and also used it for the tag line of all his theological articles and his private correspondence.... Pope Stephen's whole philosophy was derived from a single sentence in Aquinas: Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: integritas, consonantia, claritas. Which may be rendered: Three things are required for beauty: wholeness, harmony, radiance.