Re: my 2 cents
[quote=”Sidhecafe”]II believe that true mythic tales are teaching tales…how are we human? what makes us react to new things in different ways? where do we go from here?
Those are the landscapes that speculative fiction travels across.[/quote]
Thats right! Our human need to define ourselves has always seemed to be contingent upon defining what is not human. Shamanism proceeded from the activity of hunting… a way of life where human conceptual worlds intimately overlapped with those of other creatures who are/were not human. The shaman and the hunter through the mundane activity of providing food crossed into those other worlds. With this activity came the problematic notion of taking life in order to live. Ethical thought (at the heart of a lot of ‘serious’, if not most, sci-fi – e.g. Blade Runner- Frankenstein) surely begins at and proceeds from this point.
Since agriculture took over from hunter/gathering in the Neolithic this symbiotic relationship has diminished: We are humans they are animals..or at least we define a whole plethora of beings under an all encompassing other – ‘animal’. I suspect that we’d have dealt with Alien contact better 20,000 years ago, because since we became ‘civilised’ humans have largely lost the ability to communicate with other species…. (more later when I’ve had time to think).
All speculative fiction as righly pointed out by Sidecafe travels into non human landscapes … ‘countries of the mind’. Such storytelling seeks to re-new the primal link to experiences which we once had greater access to, and seem to miss. Hence the continuing popularity of Sci-fi and fantasy.
Whatever
Cheery bye