/lit/ - Literature

>>17643318
No bulli
- Once again, higher powers are playing chess with the lives of humans, said Ssyba staring at Izzmahil with a spine-chilling gleam in her cat eyes.
Then Izzmahil stared back at her, remote as a mountain, and she understood the breadth, the sheer vastness of the spirit beyond those black eyes. What he had lived, the places that he had traveled riding on top of hellish entelodonts, might just as well be on another world.
- It must be done like that, cat!
And the alarming tone of the man’s voice raised suspicions in Ssyba.
- What do you mean? she asked.
- The government can't cope with the mysteries and the powers of the rest of the world, replied Izzmahil. Why do you think our societies are huddled together on the edge of these planet-wide deserts, against the foot of the mountains and on river sides?
- Why?
- A lot is left unexplained, replied Izzmahil in a wheeze, and a lot is far more dangerous to men than the iron and bronze of other men. The sacrifices of few are worth the lives of many.
- I’ll take your word for it, shrugged Ssyba, but she started to listen to Izzmahil with distant scrutiny.
- The world out there is so magical you won’t believe, the man continued with less emotion than Ssyba would have liked. You don’t know how it grinds this rock we call our world. It’s strange. If you would believe me, if you stopped being so animal, I would tell you about snakes so large as to blot our beloved river, Na-jid, in a single gulp. There are ruins of an ancient civilization, nothing more than hills and cliffs to your eyes but believe you me, those were buildings at one point. And then there’s the edge, the true edge, of the desert.
- Where’s the edge on a planet-wide desert? asked Ssyba with bemused politeness, having learned herself how the world was actually spherical and not map-like.
- The sky of course, and those powers who have conquered it.

>>17565634
Do you really think someone has nothing better to do that do le epic hacks and vote multiple times?
I personally voted at work and I knew Bakker would come on top because he's good ENOUGH. Well he's my favorite author right now although I can understand why some would get filtered. And his' are not even my favorite works. My top 1 and 2 are BotNS and Dune.

Where do I start with gnosticism and gnostic texts? I got the complete works of Plato so I'm thinking that's a good basic start, but what next?