Re: virus: Re: virus-digest V1 #109
Dave Pape (davepape@dial.pipex.com)
Tue, 17 Dec 1996 01:07:12 GMT
At 12:04 16/12/96 -0600, you wrote:
>On Mon, 16 Dec 1996, Dave Pape wrote:
>
>> At 01:17 16/12/96 -0600, you wrote:
>> >On Mon, 16 Dec 1996, Dave Pape wrote:
>> >
>> >> >I have observed that the most effective science fantasy builds at
least 2
>> >> >or 3 of the 10 key delusions [the Chosen One Meme is one!], that
>> >> >Karl Menninger listed in his book "The Mind", into the plot. Doing this
>> >> >explicitly has improved my own fiction.
>> >>
>> >> What are the others? Don't worry, I don't write sci-fi, your royalties
>> >> are safe.
>> >
>> >Nonexistent royalties need not be protected.
>> >
>> >I'll find that over winter break [it helps if the book isn't 250 miles
away!]
>> >
>> >One of my longer storylines uses the following concepts on the protagonist:
>> > 1) "Messiah complex"
>> > 2) "Mysterious Father"
>> > 3) "No one understands"
>>
>> Hey, as an exercise, could you/we/I follow these complexes down to their
>> biological roots? Work out why it'd be evolutionarily adaptive to have a
>> brain which thought its host was the most important thing in the world?
>> (obvious)... Why we should be in awe of dad? (ensures efficient conditioning
>> by immediate genetic forebears)... etc?
>
>You'd probably be better at that exercise than I. The results would be
>interesting.
Okay. Well, I've done the first two. The third... well, I've got big
hang-ups about there being so much cultural information around nowadays,
what with all the mpdalities in which it can be recorded, that there's loads
of alleys down which a human brain can go, and so there's a mass of
opportunity for people to be different to each other, and hence not to have
that much to talk about, and hence to feel that they aren't understood by
people they're with...
Now sling me the other 7! Or fight with me about my interpretation of the
first 3.
There is no such thing as anything.
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