Started reading that collection of Goethe's scientific studies I bought last week.

"The mind may perceive the seed, so to speak, of a relation which would have a harmony beyond the mind's power to comprehend or experience once the relation is fully developed."

I got sidetracked into a little bibliographic research by a comment on Heinse's Ardinghello which made it sound like something I might enjoy ("I found the former author offensive because he attempted through the fine arts to ennoble and defend sensuality and an abstruse way of thinking"). No full English translations seem readily available, but it's excerpted in a collection of translations of 18th Century German prose which I've ordered from Lorem Ipsum Books in Cambridge (a dollar for the book, four dollars shipping). Should really find some time to work on my German.

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Think I may have read enough of the heady stuff for the moment, may move on to Sydney J. Bounds's The Robot Brains, jacket blurb is promising, anyway:

"BRAINS WITHOUT SOUL

Giant blonde creatures, they were as curvaceous as the bodies of their dwarf men were shriveled.

Captain Christian was the only human who'd ever laid eyes on them. And now he wished he hadn't. They were beauty without heart. Cruel, cold.

And he was their prisoner."