[ExI] Fwd: story

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Subject: Re: [ExI] Fwd: story

 

>>…My notion is that the best fantasy is vaguely based on reality in a sense.  That might apply to SciFi as well.spike

>…The hardest thing in scifi is to make up an alien culture.  Understandably.  You can see human parallels in all of them.  I am not sure it is even possible to totally get out of the human ways of seeing things, but the best writers do a credible job…

Consider for a moment the way men and women interact with each other, and the dopamine surges that are available from that (do pardon my heterosexual view here, it’s only view I know well enough to write about.)  If one were an AI, or even a pre-pubescent child, there would be a dimension there completely mysterious, unfathomable.  The child does not understand why an attractive man and an attractive woman behave the way they do toward each other upon meeting, the things they say and do.

I have the notion that we could extrapolate this to an alien civilization.  The interactions would be sufficiently mysterious and foreign to us that we cannot really write a story about them unless we anthropomorphize the alien intelligence.

>…Notice how plays and musical and movies often take off from earlier works, making sequels, rewriting them and so on.  How many works are, in fact, thinly disguised versions of Romeo and Juliet?  bill w

 

Ja, special case BilW: Romeo and Juliet is a work of literature filled with all the universal themes that never change.  All you sophisticated hipsters here, all you future-minded transhumanists and post human this and that, turn the dial over to the local AM radio country station and listen to the words of the songs.  Go ahead, don’t be afraid, it will not harm you; sneak off in your car so your friends won’t find out.  You can actually understand what those songs are saying, the words, the thoughts, the feelings.  

 

Those songs haven’t changed much since we were children and our grandparents were children.  They hit on all the old familiar human themes, and it still works.  Better yet, don’t bother with AM radio, just Google randomly on some country singer who knows how to do it, such as Randy Travis:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTvbKVcxWEg <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTvbKVcxWEg&list=RDoTvbKVcxWEg#t=0> &list=RDoTvbKVcxWEg#t=0

 

There you go, if Romeo had sung this to Juliet, and she would have melted all over the floor in a sticky puddle of sugary dopamines.  Even if we are aware of how our brains work, sweet and gooey still works just as well (may it ever be so.)  Come on, you smart people, it doesn’t matter if this isn’t your genre, it still works, does it not?

 

spike

 

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