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Comment by canjobear | Hacker News Reader

Apparently one of Frank Herbert's many obscure inspirations was the book "The Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare" by N.I.M. Walter which argues that war is like a civilizational-level collective orgasm.

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Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately hard to find a copy I just found out.

This is the kind of thing I find Archive.org and openlibrary invaluable for.

In this case a quick search didn't reveal it, but Google books has a scanned copy which you can use snippet view on so I wouldn't be surprised if there's a copy somewhere on archive.org

edit: hackernews regular gwern appears to have a digital copy of the book.

I found a digital copy that's probably converted scanned pages, better than nothing.

Considering that Walter appears to have not sold even the first printing of it (which is why copies of it are incredibly scarce - my guess is that most of it was pulped and only a few score copies ever sold, I still don't know how FH got one), I can assure you that you are not going to find anything better than my scan, and also that it's a lot better than nothing. (Someone needs to go through it & GEoD carefully, the influence is a lot greater than Dune critics previously realized.)

Thanks for your work, didn't mean to sound negative. Wasn't aware it's such a rare book.

Oh yeah. I had to wait somewhere between 5 and 10 years before a copy finally surfaced online for <$120. I was terrified as I spent the $28 that the seller was going to realize what a huge pricing mistake they had made and would cancel my order (which happens occasionally), or that I'd get a different book (also happens occasionally...). Still, I scanned it myself just because getting another copy would be so hard.

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