What does it say about your physical presence when the proximity triggered urinal goes off while you’re standing still before it with liquid still gushing forth?
“Of all of my students, Appollonius, you are the most exasperating! I’ve been teaching students in Rhodes for decades now and never before have I seen something to rival the sheer magnitude of crap that you are offering. You make up these ‘stories’, and I’m being generous with the term, with no thought! Seriously, what are you thinking of?”
“It’s the way that things are should be.” Came the mumbled reply.
“No, ok, let’s take a look at this first scroll”, the teacher unrolled the papyrus to the offending passage. “For no reason whatsoever, you marry these two characters. Nowhere is this referenced again. No reason is given for it. She cheats on him constantly and he just seems to exist. There’s no explanation or rhyme or reason.”
“It sets up conflict.”
“It sets up NOTHING! Failing to explain why we should even care about these characters, much less why they are the way they are makes no sense. I have spent years trying to inculcate proper respect for storytelling and basics of narrative design and yet you bring me this dreck. Ok, here’s another example. This other main character, he has sex with anything. As anything. Despite his power and awe inspiring visage, he has to seduce women as a duck? As a golden shower? As a bull? Just logically, this makes no sense.”
“He can do anything he wants”
“He CAN but you have failed to set up why he SHOULD. He is one of the most unrelatable characters you have created! You start off well with him, setting up a classic father conflict-though the eating children thing is nonsensical too-but then you jump the shark! He fucks anything that moves and everyone loves him but he’s sneaking around and tricking people into sleeping with him. Where’s the logic there?”
“It’s because his wife gets mad”
“His sister/wife gets mad? So what? What can she do? Why are they married? Why do we care? Do you see my problems here? There are so many unanswered questions that you could drive a chariot through the plot holes. I mean, look at the continuity skips. At one point, you have the Sun driven by one character, later on, there is a minor character that has the power himself. That’s just a basic continuity flaw! You know better than this.”
“I needed the new character for the story. I wanted to show the perils of overreaching.”
“The only thing overreaching is your belief in your abilities! Ok, look here-you have a whole story that says stealing girls from their home and raping them is ok, provided that you make them eat some of your food. What kind of message are you sending to kids these days? Pro-rape? What would your mother think? Why would you ever want to tell a story like that?”
“To explain the seasons”, the student mumbled.
“What explanation is needed beyond axial tilt of the Earth in its revolution around the Sun? Seriously. Get these scrolls out of my sight, I don’t want to hear any more of these fantasies. Focus on your drama and comedies-leave these ‘myths’ for drunken shepherds.”
His shoulders slumped, Appollonius walked out into the courtyard as the teacher turned to his wife.
“The absolute worst part is that he has the other students caught up in his fantasies. Some of the boys are making art using his stories and I even saw a girl weaving one into a tapestry. If this keeps up, what stupid things will people think the Greeks believe?”
My take on a personal conversation exploring the potential that maybe our history and beliefs are the ultimate fan fiction. Think of the cultural debris future generations might think we believed. Or maybe Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter.
Ask anyone who reads science fiction who the greats are and the name “Isaac Asimov” better be one of the first on the tips of their tongue. If it’s not, they are fools and charlatans and deserve nothing but contempt or the back of your hand. The man is one of the most prolific authors I’ve come across. I cut my teeth on the Norby books he wrote with his wife, I wasted after-school hours on his planet and solar system books, but in the end there is a single magnum opus. Foundation by Asimov is not only one of the great classic sci-fi books, it’s the most influential book I’ve ever read.
I’m one of the few people I know who got into sociology not to study a specific topic, but because of a particular orientation towards the world. I always wanted to know things, to apply scientific rigor to asking questions of the world around me. For the longest time, this led to me wanting to grow up and be a biologist. I needed to be able to develop rules that explain and capture the world as it is and that seemed the way to do it.
It was in this mindset that I first came across Foundation. For those of you who have not yet, but hope to read it in the future, you might not want to read the next few sentences. You have been warned. Seriously, there are spoilers here. Hari Seldon is a mathematician who, in applying math to history and society, determines that the Galactic Empire is dying. What is worse is the 30,000 years of barbarism that will follow its fall. While he cannot forestall the Empire’s destruction, what he can do is shorten the following time of darkness. By sending a small colony of scientists to live alone on the edge of the Galaxy, he can save humanity 29,000 years of war and strife. The book follows the initial founding of the Foundation and it’s first 100 years of survival from crisis to crisis.
This book provides a view of human society that is exactly what I wanted. It postulated that history, societal change, and populations themselves could be understood by virtue of mathematical rules and models. People and populations could be statistically predicted. A particular custom had a 85% chance of fixation in a given environment. A particular world had a 97% chance of being conquered by a neighbor. Religious institutions fell to secular institutions at a given likelihood in known situations. This was music to my ears, this was my holy grail. And I thought it was all fiction; at least until I took my first class in university.
Through a weird set of circumstances (tons of AP credit, lingering belief in early morning wake-ups, need for a social science credit, and our particular residential system), I ended up in Demography at 8AM. This class opened with a lecture about understanding population size and dynamics in terms of just fertility, mortality and migration. And just like that, my collegiate search for a calling was over. Here it was, the thing I had read about, given up as just a pipe dream, and it was real.
From that moment, I was hooked. Everything else was just the prologue. I was a demographer from the day I met Hari Seldon.
This post is an entry to a series on “A Book That Changed my Life” for the Creative Collective.
