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Richard C. Cox

Goodreads Author

Born

in England

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October 2013

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I grew up on a planet as different from this one as you could imagine. It was a place where books were more important than anything else (even our tiny village had a special building full of them called "The Library"), there were no responsibilities whatsoever and as much time for reading as you could wish for.
But then, with no warning, disaster: one evening, when I was a teenager, a spaceship appeared in the sky over our house; a shaft of light slanted down and I was abducted, whisked away, to the planet on which I've been stranded ever since. And it's a waking-nightmare of a world: here you have to work for a living (all day), pay "taxes" and do ghastly things called "laundry", "hoovering" and "shopping"—not just once either, but o ...more

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Are you planning to release any other books? Or is The Everything everything?

Richard C. Cox Apologies, Ebony, for taking so long to answer this—Goodreads have been messing with the site again, and I’ve only just found it (that’s GR for you th…moreApologies, Ebony, for taking so long to answer this—Goodreads have been messing with the site again, and I’ve only just found it (that’s GR for you though: all the things which do badly need fixing, they never touch, while all the stuff that’s fine already is what they change!)

I have thought about some sort of follow-up to the book—it was unusual, though, the way that came together. The idea overall was to try to give the reader a fresh look at our universe—I’ve long thought our own world is so odd, so decidedly peculiar, it almost looks like fiction itself, but how do you get that feeling across? The problem is that we’re looking at it all from the inside, so to speak, from here, and maybe what you’d need would be to somehow see it from the outside, from a completely fresh vantage point, looking back at it from somewhere different. So the idea was to give the reader a couple of hundred pages of that “somewhere different”, then (embedded in it, probably near the end) a glimpse of here. Try to catch the reader’s mind unawares, in other words, sort of spring it on them.

I had that simple idea ages ago, but all the actual stuff that fills the book’s pages—all the weird landscapes, buildings, animals and plants, theories and stories, works of art and all the rest—only accumulated slowly, and in no particular order either, over decades. I don’t think there’s any possible way of repeating that, and in any case the idea from early on was also to try to finish up with something as unclassifiable as possible—an absolute one-off.

Not sure it worked anyway; another reason I’ve been slow to write anything else is the pasting the book has taken from some readers, particularly on Amazon, who clearly had no idea what to make of it! So The Everything, almost certainly, really is everything.(less)

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Hi Richard, does your book 'The Everything' touch on systems thinking theories in various disciplines as well?

Richard C. Cox Sorry for not answering this sooner, I've just found it (although being a mere eleven months late is actually pretty good for me!)

There's a fair amoun…moreSorry for not answering this sooner, I've just found it (although being a mere eleven months late is actually pretty good for me!)

There's a fair amount about theories and theorising in the book, none of it particularly serious though: there are real ones (i.e. theories which are "real" within the context of the book itself); there's also a whole new branch of philosophy, called Structured Nonsense, which has nothing to do with the search for truth and is more about theorising purely for its own sake, as fun (theorising is fun!); and finally, at one point, there's an essay about whether or not theories are an art-form. (less)

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Average rating: 4.0 · 42 ratings · 17 reviews · 1 distinct work • Similar authors

The Everything

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Imagine a guy who, as a young man, builds himself a boat. He looks after it too, replacing damaged and worn-out parts as the years pass. By the time he’s an old man sitting on the dock one day, he suddenly realises that down the years he’s replaced e ...more
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“How long’s it been?” “Four years.” “Four years??!! I haven’t heard anything, smelled anything, felt anything, touched anything, seen anything the whole time. How long?” “Four years.” “Four years!!! Is that F-O-R or F-O-U-R?” “…F-O-U-R ...more
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This is the fifth of Simon Stålenhag’s narrative art books, a combination of paintings and text. The artwork, his landscapes in particular, is brilliant as always. Also as always, this is a large-format hardback in full colour—expensive, but I can’t ...more
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Jóse Salvador Alvarenga, originally from El Salvador, was a survivor alright: in his mid-thirties, tough, a life of hard physical work alternating with four-day drinking binges, he was once set upon by half a dozen men in a bar, stabbed eleven times ...more
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For anyone not familiar with it, Black Mirror is a television series which has been running since 2010, starting life on Channel Four in England, but after the first two series bought by Netflix. Although science fiction, its stories are set only a f ...more
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“...While I rather doubt whether, as has often been claimed, everyone has at least one novel inside them, it is undeniably true of theories...”
― Richard C. Cox

tags: novels, theories

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Richard’s Quotes

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

tags: independent-thought, self-determination, self-expression

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“It is not my intention to make anything comprehensible. I am of the opinion that there are sufficient paintings which one understands after a shorter or longer delay, and that therefore some incomprehensible painting would now be welcome. I am at pains to deliver such, as far as possible.”
― Rene Magritte

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