The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem (1965)

Earlier this month, my partners asked me to blog under his Glaxay RTS website: to promote gay-themed compute/web-based game, which is still under-development but I can promise you there are particularly handsome men.

My first posted was about The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem (1965), which we were reading for the Amsterdam SciFi bookclub. Given the target Galaxy RTS audience is LGBTQ, I was trying to pull out the gay themes, which was hard as this book was written under strict censorship i.e. of 1960s cold-war Poland. Still, I had a little fun with my blog post and used a bit of imagination :

Are Trurl and Klapaucius a bit gay?  

https://www.galaxyrts.com/2019/08/the-cyberiad.html

I did enjoy that Klapaucius knew exactly where to tickle Trurl (so maybe they were gay) but to be frank none of the characters in the novel had significant "romantic love interests", yes there is the femfatalatron but that wast just pure fantasy ;)

When we discussed this at book club, other people also picked up that The Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy, which written in 1974 came just after The Cyberiad. and seems to have been lightly skimmed many of the best ideas. Still, while the sparkling prose in The Cyberiad out classes Hitchiker's, the advantages Hitchiker's has is that there is a stronger storyline and narrative arch. Ultimately as a collection of futuristic SciFi fables, most of us agreed that The Cyberiad is fantastic writing but not the sort of book you want to read cover to cover

Loosely conflating EU membership with KKK membership?

My brother recently shared a spectator post arguing for hard brexit at some ( / any ) cost: 

This, incidentally, is one principled argument for a hard brexit, even if at some economic cost

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/01/a-principled-argument-for-a-hard-brexit  

well Rory Sutherland is a top Advertising Executive a bit of a celebrity with his very popular TED talk defending the sub-standard engineering for the UK side of the channel tunnel i.e. very crudely who cares if the train is slow through kent if we have pretty girls serving a good bottle of Pomerol?

So his concluding paragraph i.e. loosely conflating Ku Klux Klan and EU membership seems rather dangerous and a bit shameful to me

The reason I do not belong to the Ku Klux Klan is not economic. It isn’t because I resent paying the membership dues or the cost of bedsheets and firelighters. No, I haven’t joined because I do not identify with its aims and objectives. If that is reason enough not to join the Klan, it’s a perfectly sound reason to leave the EU.

Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK.

although the headline of this peace does acknowledge that the "brexit dividend" is basically a "brexit lie" i.e. leaving the EU will make the country significantly poorer in the short to medium term.

Interestingly this has been a recurring theme in the Spectator: which although is very anti-EU, is nervous about this fundamental deception of the British people in the brexit campaign i.e. regarding the brexit dividend and 350 million/week for the NHS.