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And they would all be less funny and insightful than Douglas Adams.
by dreadlordbone 5y ago
And they would all be less funny and insightful than Douglas Adams.
- jancsika 5y agoThat's just an appeal to authority. You're essentially claiming that the question is unanswerable because Douglas Adams-- a funny and insightful author-- said so. Meanwhile, I'm quite sure Frank Herbert would talk at length about little details of his characters and goings on in the Dune universe. Hell, even Linus understood this-- see the "s is sad" commit[1] from a four-year-old and Linus' relevant rant[2]. It's delightful to me that the world's crankiest operating system maintainer is more willing to entertain trifles than a fiction writer! 1: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=690b0543a813b0ecfc51b0374c0ce6c8275435f0 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... 2: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255 https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255 Edit: clarification
- Veen 5y agoIt's not that the question is unanswerable, but that there are competing conceptions of what fiction is. For some writers, what's in the book is all there is. The characters don't have a life outside of the book. Nothing happens to them after the narrative or before it or outside of it. There is no world beyond what they create. If a detail isn't included in the text, then it doesn't exist. Asking a question like "what mac?" is a sort of category error. It's like asking Edvard Munch what the man depicted in The Scream had for breakfast.