Manual for Civilization Book List from Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs
What information is essential to sustaining civilization? What books would you want to have if we had to start from scratch? What references would we need available to rebuild what we have today? Long Now is collecting 3,500 books based on those questions to form a Manual for Civilization. We’ve asked for suggestions from Long Now members, donors to The Interval at Long Now (where this library will be housed), and a diverse, distinguished group of experts who we’ve invited to help.
Today’s list of additions to the Manual for Civilization comes from a groundbreaking artist whose work suggests a post-apocalyptic future full of fiery marauding mechanical creatures. For 35+ years Mark Pauline has been building and destroying machines as founder and leader of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL).
Two decades before Robot Wars and BattleBots made DIY-built robo-gladiators a television spectacle, Mark Pauline and SRL were creating their own machines out of industrial detritus and staging underground events in San Francisco that were full of flying metal, shooting fire and lots and lots of noise.
Since 01978, SRL has produced more than 50 events around the world with a mission to [re-direct] the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare.
Mark’s book list includes the nearly 3,000-page Machinery’s Handbook plus fiction by Ballard, Burroughs and Pynchon amongst others. His one historical entry, unsurprisingly, is a social history of technology and warfare: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines.
Here are Mark Pauline’s selections for the Manual for Civilization:
Crash by JG Ballard
Concrete Island by JG Ballard
The Wild Boys by William Burroughs
The Ticket that Exploded by William Burroughs
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
Erik Dorn by Ben Hecht
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans
The Damned (La-Bas) by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel
Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life by Richard Sennett
Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror) by Comte de Lautreamont
Ice by Anna Kavan
The Kingdom of Evil: A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare by Ben Hecht
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher- Masoch
Machinery’s Handbook by Erik Oberg and Franklin D. Jones
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines by Manuel De Landa
Thanks so much to Mark for taking the time to give us this great list. If the robo-uprising happens, now we’ll be ready.
You can visit the home of Long Now: The Interval in San Francisco to see all the books we’ve added to the shelves so far. Previously we’ve shared book lists from Neal Stephenson, Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and Brian Eno amongst others. We’ll share more lists as they are added.
This list is an excerpt of the 3,500 book crowd-curated Manual For Civilization library which we are compiling to back up the essential knowledge of civilization. More than 800 titles are already available online at The Internet Archive.
Originally published at blog.longnow.org on May 2, 02014.
