RE:The Skills of Xanadu online at Google Books?

[Eric Hunting]

This was great. I hadn't heard of this short story before. Very much
like a conversation between the Industrial Age and the Post-Industrial
Age set in a nondescript science fiction setting that today you could
re-imagine in contemporary contexts concerning nanotechnology. What I
found particularly interesting was the blindness that comes with
hubris and how the inhabitants of Xanadu exploit that in their agenda
of casual conquest. They literary conquer the universe in exactly the
same way they do everything in their culture; effortless but
purposeful play. They're like Taoist engineers. The character Bril
could be any contemporary CEO confronted with some Post-Industrial
colony somewhere, so stuck thinking about the commercial potential of
these strange new technologies and ideas that he never notices their
Trojan Horse potential to obsolesce his entire weltanschauung.

Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com

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> TOPIC: The Skills of Xanadu online at Google Books?
> http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/t/3789a8f1db1e47a2?hl=en
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> == 1 of 2 ==
> Date: Mon, Mar 16 2009 12:15 pm
> From: "Paul D. Fernhout"
>
>
> The short story "The Skills of Xanadu" is one of my favorite short
> stories
> of all time and is directly about open manufacturing.
>
> I just noticed it as available online at Google Books here:
> "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon in "And Now the News".
> http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1
>
> I cannot recommend this story enough.
>
> Can people here read it all at that link? It's about thirty pages.
> (Don't skip just to the end, it would spoil it. :-)
>
> I don't know how many page views that book would have before it
> locks out
> viewing by individuals? I paged through the entire story once, but
> after I
> closed my browser and came back, the book locked me out from any
> more page
> views. So, maybe you should look at it when you have half an hour to
> spare.
>
> Anyway, that story is one of the most inspirational thing about open
> manufacturing (and the internet and nanotech) out there IMHO. And it
> was
> written in the 1950s.
>
> --Paul Fernhout