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Which Books Would You Add to the Arctic Doomsday Vault?

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Which Books Would You Add to the Arctic Doomsday Vault?

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Which Books Would You Add to the Arctic Doomsday Vault?

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Published on April 7, 2017

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The Roman de la Rose

There was some exciting news earlier this week from the World Arctic Archive in Norway, and involves keeping a whole bunch of data safe for future generations…

You may already know about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault—referred to by some as the “Arctic Doomsday Vault”—a secure seed bank located in a remote area of Norway, within the Arctic Circle. Since 2008, the Seed Vault has collected nearly a million samples of crop seeds from gene banks around the world, acting as a backup system in the event of a major regional or global catastrophe.

Now, the World Arctic Archive has opened their own nearby vault for storing data, including text, images, and audio-visual content. A small Norwegian company called Piql is offering “a secure and future-proof way of preserving valuable digital data”—by transferring it to a specially-developed photosensitive, multi-layered analog film and storing it deep beneath the arctic permafrost, safe from both EMP and nuclear attacks. According to Piql’s Katrine Loen Thomsen:

We believe that we can save the data using our technology for a whole 1,000 years. It’s digital data preserved, written onto photosensitive film. So we write data as basically big QR codes on films.

Piql is specifically marketing themselves as a way to store important historical and cultural documents—thus far, only the governments of Mexico and Brazil are using the facility for items from their National Archives—but the company is open to any “authority, organization, company, or individual”. So we have to ask… what would you put in there? More specifically—and relevant to our interests—what stories should be preserved? What deserves careful protection against all elements and potential destruction?

Many will say Shakespeare, Rumi, Confucius, and they would be right to. Many may suggest their favorite tales from scribes the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia Butler, and they would also be right. But considering the context of such a project, other questions arise that go beyond simple narratives: which lessons would we like to preserve? Which depictions of humanity? Which testaments to our imagination as a species? Suddenly, the task seems far more urgent, and even more confusing.

So when we ask what books you would prefer to add to the World Arctic Archive, we are wondering what, to your mind, deserves to be remembered in our grand history of literature? Which books would you like other humans to rediscover in the future, after some sort of cataclysm—or what should remain for an alien species to discover long after we’re gone? Tell us what you would choose, and why.

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Jacob Silvia
8 years ago

Wow. Such a question. There’s so many options. For me, it’s a toss up between Catch-22 and Gravity’s Rainbow. Both are excellent novels that are larger than the pages they present; both present somewhat quirky looks at one of the worst events in our modern history; and both show an absurd, yet completely real, look at how the government works (if my past employment by a certain government space agency is any indication).

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8 years ago

My brain starts to short-circuit at the prospect of assembling a catalog of the essential human texts. The obvious first few, the ones that require almost no thought at all, are the works of Shakespeare; the Greek dramatists, poets, scientists, and philosophers; the principle sacred texts (The Analects, Bible, Qu’ran, the Gita, things like that), the scientific writings of the the Renaissance, and from there folks can argue about which novelists, poets, and thinkers are fundamental to teaching our survivors what it means to be human. 

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@drcox
8 years ago

Hmm . . . first what’s on my Handbooks of Resistance list:  Bible, Harry Potter series, The Long Winter, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and then also Surprised By Joy, Tolkien including his letters, works by Lovelace and Montgomery and Benjamin and the rest of Wilder’s works, Brave New World, 1984 and Orwell’s writings about doublespeak, a Doctor Who novel, the Brontës’ works and Austen and Dickens . . . . and Tor.com articles/reviews etc.!

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8 years ago

James Joyce’s Ulysses, for the amount of sheer data. Joyce suggested to his disciple Frank Budgen that you could recreate Dublin from the pages of Ulysses, should it ever disappear from the earth, and that’s not much of an exaggeration. Each of the 18 chapters (episodes) imitates a different style of writing,  so it’s exposing posterity or whoever to different kinds of literature. Each episode is named after one in the Odyssey, the first great work of literature in the Western world. It’s so dense. Finnegan’s Wake is even more dense, but so much so that the entire tome is basically a large collection of wordgames; stream-of-consciousness technique, experimental prose, puns, parodies, and allusions to history (particularly Irish history). The story collapses under the weight of the writing, and it would give a strange impression of how we actually tell each other stories. Joyce also presaged hypertext. In critical editions, extensive footnotes would often be attached to a single word. The sentences in one chapter reference earlier chapters, it’s hard to imagine anyone now attempting this kind of writing without utilizing hypertext. Sorry it’s not science fiction, but I’d start there.

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8 years ago

@2: I have to admit, I think I would leave off the “essential sacred texts”, if not for the fact that so much else refers to them…

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8 years ago

A Canticle for Leibowitz because irony? Seriously Stephen King, chronicler of our time.

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8 years ago

P. G. Wodehouse, because I like to think a sense of humour would survive.

@1: I second this.

@3: By The Long Winter, do you mean the Christopher novel or the Wilder novel? (Or both, for that matter.)

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8 years ago

Certainly some Terry Pratchett novels, Hogfather and Small Gods, maybe Thud too.

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@drcox
8 years ago

@7, Wilder’s; I’ve never read Christopher’s.

Oh, Wodehouse, yes! And E.F. Benson! And A.A.Milne.

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8 years ago

If we preserve Gene Wolfe’s Solar Cycle, would the people of the post-apocalypse world found a new religion based on it? Enquiring minds…

@9: I’ve read Christopher’s but not Wilder’s. The Christopher is a vintage British post-apocalyptic novel about a new ice age, which may or may not be apt in these circumstances. 

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8 years ago

Akhmatova, Archilochus, Aristophanes, Auden, Bai Juyi, Basho, Blake, Boland, Brown (George M.), Brown (Sterling),.Brooks, Catullus, Cavafy, Clifton, Dickinson, Donne, Du Fu, Eliot, Frost, Glück  Heaney, Hikmet, Kunitz, Levertov, Li Bai, Mahon, Mandelstam, Martí, Milosz, Neruda, Pinsky, Pushkin, Raine, Rich, Rumi, Sappho, Shakespeare, Soyinka, Stevens, Szymborska, Thomas (R.S.), Thomas (Dylan), Walcott, Villon…

The Psalms. The Book of Job. Ecclesiastes, parts of Isaiah.

And whatever else needs to be added to balance my Western-and-English-heavy list. Because if you want to know what’s going on, ask the poets.

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Philippa Chapman
8 years ago

The sacred texts of the major religions.  Tolkein, Sir Terry Pratchett’s complete works, ‘how to’ books for subjects like : survival, crop rotation, how to harness solar, wind and wave power, how to plant and harvest crops and save seed for next year; Shakespeare, Fairy tales of all traditions, Aesop’s fables, Anansi the spider god stories, Game of Thrones [with a caveat this isn’t a history!]; guides on confilct resolution, science fiction and other fantasy novels.

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8 years ago

One thing that definitely should not be preserved in it; the works of Ayn Rand and her merry band of sociopathic followers. And also not the works of L Ron Hubbard. I wish we could scrape all of those out of our literary history right now, the damage they have done is incalculable.

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8 years ago

Anthem by Ayn Rand, the Complete works of HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, all of JRR Tolkien’s works and all 300 issues of Cerebus by Dave Sim 

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Flypusher
8 years ago

Any book the Nazis burned should get serious consideration.

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8 years ago

The problem, random22, is that the minute you mention these atrocities, someone is going to mention how great they are, or cry censorship, as if there were anything worth censoring in them. As much as I detest Rand’s pseudophilosophy, what gets to me is how badly written it is. It’s just not worth wading through the muddled thinking that connects one sentence to the next. I actually don’t remember reading Hubbard, although I get the impression that he proves that you can shoehorn just about any damn thing into a religion.

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Kesbooks
8 years ago

I love this project and I’m very interested in the accessibilty…I think there will need to be a team electronic  librarians to explain the collection and help with access.

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8 years ago

I think I would include ” God Loves Laughter” by William Sears.

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8 years ago

Shakespeare, everyone copies, quotes or satirizes Shakespeare so we should have the original. Jules Verne because he got so much right. e.e. cummings, just to piss people off. And the stories of Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter and Roger Zelazny because no one mentioned them yet and they’re my favs

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8 years ago

“Last and First Men” and “Star Maker” by Olaf Stapledon.

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Daydreamer
8 years ago

This might be a little off the wall, but… I’d like to see an archived selection of fanfiction, along with the source works. I think it’d be a good thing to preserve– both the content itself and how the fandom responds to it, reclaims it, and reinterprets it.

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8 years ago

I started thinking about engineering books, textbooks, stuff like The Way Things Work–things someone might need after the collapse of civilization.  Guess I didn’t read the instructions with enough care.

Denise L.
Denise L.
8 years ago

Shakespeare, obviously.  The works of Plato.  The Aenead, the Iliad, the Odyssey, not to mention Beowulf and the Epic of Gilgamesh.  Work by poets like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.  Post-Colonialist writing by authors like Chinua Achebe.

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8 years ago

“A Canticle for Leibowitz” _needs_ to be there. “Earth Abides” as well. 

Everyman’s Library & Modern Library

Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition

Every Norton’s Anthology.

Beowulf

The complete works of JRR Tolkein

These would paint a fairly complete picture of the best we had accomplished. 

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Psiqueue
8 years ago

The ones that popped into my mind – “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Fahrenheit 451” and “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” 

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Teresa
8 years ago

Gormenghast trilogy 

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8 years ago

In terms of fiction, I’d actually go for graphic novels – Sandman, Y the Last Man, a good run of X-Men, etc.  If we’re talking global apocalypse, language might be lost too, and the pictures might help people decipher what the words mean.

 

But more importantly: Einstein’s Relativity.  Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.  Newton’s Pricipia Mathematica.  Watson’s Double Helix. Etc etc etc.  In every different language, and on paper as well as the special film.  If the whole point is to replace what’s lost after a horrific apocalypse, it would be tragic to lose the Lord of the Rings, but it would be worse to have to literally reinvent the wheel (or the cure for scurvy, or the polio vaccine).

 

After all – if the point is simply to protect against a single culture falling to destruction, you don’t need a special vault full of fancy technology – you need a few thousand $100 portable hard drives, each of which is big enough to hold the bulk of every word ever printed, sent to various places around the world.  Only a global catastrophe could make this sort of cultural backup necessary – and in that case, you shouldn’t even assume whomever is left will figure out how to use the fancy films.

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james tipton
8 years ago

A Canticle for Leibowitz; Atlas Shrugged; The Once and Future King; The Book of the  New Sun; Little, Big; Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones;Twain;Goethe; Shakespeare. King James Version; Dylan’s Lyrics. Stop! Stop! I cried. The moving finger writes…

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Scott MacGillivray
8 years ago

The classics both Greek Roman Norse and Asian are a must along with Shakespeare Tolkien and other greats I can think of. I would also add Stranger in a strange land and Note in God’s eye. As they look at humanity with other eyes as well as our own. I. Have recently read another similar book which is I think worthy Hard Duty which is a first contact novel. There are so many books and plays that speak of who and what we are that the choice is staggering to say the least. So I have only added a humble three.

James
James
8 years ago

I’d choose a full run of Sandman because it says a lot about humanity while following around an immortal anthropomorphic representation of the idea of dreams. Plus, “Dream of A Thousand Cats” is one of my favorite things ever.

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8 years ago

Non-fiction: Basic courses in biology, medicine, physics, chemistry, engineering, blacksmithing, animal husbandry, farming, and firearms and other weaponry.

Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote In God’s Eye, to give future readers deja vu.  Thinking about TMIGE is why I included firearms above.  You want whoever discovers your cache of secrets to come out on top.

Along those lines, The Art of War.

The complete Calvin and Hobbes.

The Zombie Survival Guide, just in case that shit turns out to actually happen.

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Dale
8 years ago

Which books?

 

All of them!

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Donlon McGovern
8 years ago

A Canticle for Liebowitz

Farenheit 541

The Sparrow

To Kill a Mockingbird

Catch 22

 

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Kartikeya G.S.
8 years ago

It is interesting how many comments here jump to fiction (understandable, given the readership of this website) or religion. Personally, the first book that should be placed in the archive is a how-to guide that presents a detailed overview of how the materials may be viewed and decoded. The guide may be presented in multiple languages that answer to the major language groups.

After that, would be a summation of our works of knowledge – the sciences (Principia, etc.), history (objectivity/ historiography/ western-centrism is a challenge here), philosophy (in which religious texts may feature).

Then, of course, comes fiction – this may feature all the great works from various cultures (the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, Letters to Penthouse, etc.).

After that, we can go nuts! I mean, simply from the SciFi/ Fantasy section, we can bung in Tolkien, Rowling, GRRM, Asimov, Philip K Dick, Bradbury, Pullman, Gaiman, Moore, the list goes on.

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Karen Heesch
8 years ago

I would pick The Golden Notebook & the Canopus in Argos books by Doris Lessing.  And another vote for A Canticle for Leibowitz.

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