Books & Songs that Helped

Acknowledgments to Books and Songs

Tom Peters — whose books and lectures (most especially Liberation Management, Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1992) have inspired the social architecture of Yeibichai.

Center for Environmental Structure — I must also acknowledge Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel at the Center for Environmental Structure, whose books — A Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, and The Oregon Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) — inspired the physical architecture of Yeibichai. I used numerous patterns from their work directly (although I did roughly translate English into metric measures without editorial denotation), as noted in the index, as I did my best to follow A Timeless Way of Building in designing the direvnya of Yeibichai.

"Teenage Society," of course, had to change since people on any Backdoor Planet no longer go through the teens per se because age is no longer counted by Earth years; they do, of course, mature through those same seconds of angst, insecurity, and invulnerability; though this period is now called "Four-Fiver," the pattern name changed to "Society for Passage" from childhood to adulthood.

I also expanded Yeibichai's Pattern Language to cover much more than architecture. For instance, the "Adventure Playground," as described by Phoebe in Chapter "Day Minus-29" use concepts pioneered by Rudolf Steiner and recently promulgated by Stephen Talbott and Lowell Monke.

Others — I would also like to acknowledge the following sources of inspiration and words:

Gary Dorsey for The Fullness of Wings and his portrayal of a magnificent project that showed me that corporate America has no monopoly on the vagaries of human cooperation. And to John Langford, whose work as project manager epitomizes the Johnson quotation in the dedication.

A.E. van Vogt, who saw this over 50 years ago. I particularly like the following quotes from Voyage of the Space Beagle:

"The problems which Nexialism confronts are whole problems. Man has divided life and matter into separate compartments of knowledge and being. And, even though he sometimes uses words which indicate his awareness of that wholeness of nature, he continues to behave as if the one, changing universe has many separately functioning parts."

"'What you say a thing is, it is not ... It is much more. It is a compound in the largest sense. A chair is not a chair. It is a structure of inconceivable complexity, chemically, atomically, electronically, etc. Therefore, to think of it simply as a chair is to confine the nervous system to what Korzybski calls an identification. It is the totality of such identification that creates the neurotic, the unsane, and the insane individual.' Anonymous"

Edward de Bono with his invention of lateral thinking and other innovations centered around the human capability of pattern recognition. As de Bono notes, human beings could not survive everyday life without this capability; unfortunately, it also leads us to make the world too simple. What gives us the power to assess instantly also enables us to ignore. In passing, is the Cartesian model, which has dominated Western thought for centuries, an outgrowth of this capability or merely one possible way to use it? I also borrowed from his book Sur/Petition, "going beyond competition" [HarperBusiness, 1992] for the creativity program used in the Rendezvous of Futures and described (with unfair disgust) at the start of Chapter "Day Minus-24."

The Federalist Papers, Numbers 1 and 2, as printed in a Mentor Book by the New American Library, 1961, were edited to become Irwin's diatribe in Chapter "Day Minus-30."

Mohandas K. Gandhi provided the seven deadly sins evoked by JDB in his attack on Dain in Chapter "Day Minus-27." These sins are Politics without principle, Wealth without work, Commerce without morality, Pleasure without conscience, Education without character, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice.

Ray Jackendoff, in his book Patterns in the Mind, Languages and Human Nature, supports (if you allow reverse inference) Lugar's argument about xenophobia and human evolution in his speech to the executives of Le Coeur de la Patrie in Chapter "Day Minus-27."

Peter Senge, in his book The Fifth Discipline, provided Lugar's "lesson" in Chapter "Day Minus-17."

And of course, Bob Dylan for his words from "Tryin' to Get to Heaven," which Phoebe uses as she hits bottom.

Finally, I derived every name in this book (of which they are many), except for major characters, from real names that cropped up in media and books while I was writing. For instance, the quoter of French sayings in the Ganj Dareh meeting/will-be-heard, Mich Eldu Frénoy [Neighborhood Xref=Mawddach] was named after Jules Verne's central character in his recently revealed book Paris in the Twentieth Century: Michel Dufrénoy, who has suffered great disgrace resulting from his receiving a national prize in poetry, rendering him virtually unemployable, "felt alone, alien, and somehow isolated in the void." See how many others you can discover. (I did make a minor deviation in this scheme for the names of houses in Ganj Dareh; there I used names out of one of my favorite science-fiction books.)