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Neil Gaiman recently did a SALT seminar about what makes stories last. http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/jun/09/how-stories-last/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02
by mmahemoff 11y ago
Neil Gaiman recently did a SALT seminar about what makes stories last.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/jun/09/how-stories-last/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/jun/09/how-stories-last/
TLDL - Long-term warnings about phenomena like volcanoes are important for survival, but once the message spans three generations, it's coming from people you don't know, so there's a certain Darwinian quality to the elements of a story that will survive for centuries. This is one reason diverse cultures end up with similar stories.
- lurcio 11y ago...and yet, might we not also consider that oral traditions could serve to persist knowledge too important to be committed to perishable archives. Even now in the West.
- geon 11y agoI don't know. In the Heinlein novel Orphans of the Sky, the protagonist is taught to recite the Holy Scriptures of Newtonian Physics, but the literal meaning is confused by religious re-interpretation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky
- togeekornot 11y agoThanks for the Neil Gaiman link. The concept of the article is absolutely mind-boggling. Interesting how this only happened in Australia.