From hell

What Hacker News says

1. DuanemclemoreJun 2024
   I wish I could link to a great portion of the Eco book Foucault's Pendulum here - it's quite relevant to how we go trying to find meaning in things. If you haven't definitely a novel worth a read.

   I'm surprised no one has mentioned From Hell here, which plays with the concept of drawing symbols using lines between landmarks. Alan Moore got a lot of his ideas for that from Iain Sinclair, whose books are well worth a read as well. Specifically, the material Moore references is from Lud Heat iirc.

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2. bexsellaSep 2023
   Not who you were asking, but I'm a big Moore fan as well:

   * From Hell (Some might be put off by the original comic's black and white art, but there was a recent release that colourised them by the original illustrator)

   * Providence

   * Jerusalem

   * V for Vendetta

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3. Anthony-GFeb 2022
   It’s hard to pick a favourite but I figure a decent rule of thumb would be to list books I’ve read at least twice:

   - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

   - The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

   - The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien

   - Watchmen by Alan Moore

   - From Hell by Alan Moore

   - V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

   - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series by Alan Moore

   - Dune by Frank Herbert

   - Immortality by Milan Kundera

   - first 3 books in the The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

   - The Dark Half by Stephen King

   - The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman

   - Coalescent by Stephen Baxter

   - 1984 by George Orwell

   - Animal Farm by George Orwell

   - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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4. astrostlOct 2024
   > a block universe

   I first encountered this theory and the related "eternalism" philosophy via Alan Moore [1] (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Swamp Thing, Batman: The Killing Joke, From Hell, etc.). Watchmen and its non-Moore-affiliated sequel have a lot of riffs on time and determinism.

   Q: Jerusalem deals with the idea of eternalism: everything that has happened is happening right now and forever. Could you explain your views on this?

   A: My conception of an eternity that was immediate and present in every instant – a view which I have since learned is known as ‘Eternalism’ – was once more derived from many sources, but a working definition of the idea should most probably begin with Albert Einstein. Einstein stated that we exist in a universe that has at least four spatial dimensions, three of which are the height, depth and breadth of things as we ordinarily perceive them, and the fourth of which, while also a spatial dimension, is perceived by a human observer as the passage of time. The fact that this fourth dimension cannot be meaningfully disentangled from the other three is what leads Einstein to refer to our continuum as ‘spacetime’.

   This leads logically to the notion of what is called a ‘block universe’, an immense hyper-dimensional solid in which every moment that has ever existed or will ever exist, from the beginning to the end of our universe, is coterminous; a vast snow-globe of being in which nothing moves and nothing changes, forever. Sentient life such as ourselves, embedded in the amber of spacetime, would have to be construed by such a worldview as massively convoluted filaments of perhaps seventy or eighty years in length, winding through this glassy and motionless enormity with a few molecules of slippery and wet genetic material at one end and a handful or so of cremated ashes at the other. It is only the bright bead of our consciousness moving inexorably along the thread of our existence, helplessly from past to future, that provides the mirage of movement and change and transience.

   A good analogy would be the strip of film comprising an old fashioned movie-reel: the strip of film itself is an unchanging and motionless medium, with its opening scenes and its finale present in the same physical object. Only when the beam of a projector – or in this analogy the light of human consciousness – is passed across the strip of film do we see Charlie Chaplin do his funny walk, and save the girl, and foil the villain. Only then do we perceive events, and continuity, and narrative, and character, and meaning, and morality. And when the film is concluded, of course, it can be watched again.

   Similarly, I suspect that when our individual four-dimensional threads of existence eventually reach their far end with our physical demise, there is nowhere for our travelling bead of consciousness to go save back to the beginning, with the same thoughts, words and deeds recurring and reiterated endlessly, always seeming like the first time this has happened except, possibly, for those brief, haunting spells of déjà vu.

   Of course, another good analogy, perhaps more pertinent to Jerusalem itself, would be that of a novel. While it’s being read there is the sense of passing time and characters at many stages of their lives, yet when the book is closed it is a solid block in which events that may be centuries apart in terms of narrative are pressed together with just millimetres separating them, distances no greater than the thickness of a page. As to why I decided to unpack this scientific vision of eternity in a deprived slum neighbourhood, it occurred to me that through this reading of human existence, every place, no matter how mean, is transformed to the eternal, heavenly city. Hence the title.

   1: https://alanmooreworld.blogspot.com/2019/11/moore-on-jerusal...

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5. karaterobotNov 2023
   I first learned about this while researching references in From Hell by Alan Moore. Hinton wrote an article called "What is the Fourth Dimension?" which plays a part in the story.
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6. goto11Nov 2019
   Well this is Alan Moore, the author of such comics as From Hell and Watchmen, so I don't think you can fairly accuse him of looking down on comics as being for kids.

   And why do you think he should care about musicals more than his own medium of choice?

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